What billions in spend taught us about building a modern bill pay solution.

At Brex, we are privileged to have an inside look at how the world's most modern and innovative companies spend money. Our 30,000+ customers use Brex corporate cards and business accounts to spend tens of billions of dollars a year across 120 countries.

Our data shows that companies typically have three major spending categories:

1. Operational expenses like vendor payments and supplies
2. Travel and entertainment
3. Payroll

Our customers use Brex to facilitate much of this spend, and this unprecedented level of insight into how leading global companies use and manage their money allows us to build products and workflows that maximize efficiency and make every dollar count.

This post will unpack how we turn these insights into action and build products that solve real payment challenges our customers face every day.

Learning from those who know best — our customers

Understanding a customer's existing workflow and need is where any good product building begins. One thing every customer spends a lot of time and resources on is paying bills. “Send money” is one of the most popular flows for customers using a Brex business account, and when we dug deeper, customers confirmed that they were essentially transferring money to pay vendors.

Startup founders specifically told us that paying bills was ”the least fun part” of their jobs because it was tedious and time-consuming. They often asked us to help automate filling in vendor details, payment details, and approvals. These were the foundational asks that led us to build the first version of bill pay automation into the Brex platform.

As we did, we realized these aren’t just startup problems — they’re systemic issues affecting businesses of all sizes. Consider this: 81% of companies still rely on paper checks and manual invoicing to pay vendors, which is probably why 55% of all US invoices are being paid late. With the B2B payments market expected to reach $124T globally by 2028, any inefficiencies will become more costly and create more risk.

Poor payment efficiency creates ripple effects deep into a business. When you consistently miss payment deadlines, you face late fees and risk damaging critical vendor relationships. You also risk disrupted supply chains, strained working capital, and delayed month-end closings that impact financial reporting.

Manual data entry is one of the top culprits. A recent invoicing study found that 57% of invoice data is entered manually and suggests it’s much higher (86%) for small and medium-sized businesses. But with so many digital tools out there, why is so much of the work still manual?

The issue isn't a lack of digital tools — it's that existing payment solutions weren't built for how modern businesses actually work.

Building more efficient payments

Today's companies operate in real time and need to move faster. They scale ad spend based on up-to-the-minute performance, adjust inventory levels instantly based on demand signals, and manage vendors and subscriptions across dozens of digital services.

Most payment tools, however, were designed for traditional businesses with predictable monthly expenses and steady revenue cycles. To bridge this gap, companies cobble together multiple solutions: bank accounts, corporate cards, accounts payable (AP) systems, and ERPs. But when these solutions don't work together, teams are forced to manually enter data across systems, wait days for payment approvals, and spend hours reconciling payments. And these workflows get even more complicated when you operate globally.

After helping thousands of companies modernize their financial operations, we saw a clear opportunity: businesses needed a fundamentally different approach to payments. That's why we built and continue to evolve Brex bill pay to transform how fast-moving companies handle B2B payments.

Now, we're reimagining what global bill payments can be: not just another financial task, but a strategic lever for managing your company's cash flow and growth across borders and a way to get more from every dollar. Here's how we're bringing that vision to life.

The 4 pillars driving a modern bill pay solution

The first version of Brex bill pay automation was simple but powerful: users could drop in an invoice and let AI capture the details effortlessly. From there, they could auto-route the invoice through custom approvals, pay the bill, and sync the transaction to their accounting or ERP software, all in just a few clicks. It gave organizations an efficient way to handle payments without the complexity — and cost — of standalone solutions.

As more startups and growth companies adopted Brex bill pay, we uncovered deeper accounts payable challenges affecting businesses of all sizes. For instance, paying global vendors in USD is incredibly costly, so we built new local-currency payment options that directly improve the bottom line. We also built PO-to-invoice matching to reduce the surprise invoices and double payments that make it difficult to measure working capital and budget effectively.

So we’re continuing to innovate Brex bill pay using four key pillars:

• Comprehensive spend management, to unify all of your data and manage spend in one place
• Payments everywhere, to support global operations and tax compliance
• Relentless flexibility, to optimize your payments and cash flow
• End-to-end automation, to accelerate the entire AP process

Comprehensive spend management

Our customers can pay and track global vendor spending across cards, bank transfers, wires, and checks, in one platform. This total spend management approach helps customers make every dollar count by mapping each invoice and bill to a budget structure that mirrors their operations. Comprehensive visibility empowers finance teams to track budgets in real time, see patterns in their operational expenditures, forecast cash flow more accurately, and make smarter decisions about working capital.

Payments everywhere

Brex spent years building our own financial infrastructure directly into Mastercard — making Brex the sole full-stack fintech in the US that doesn’t use a processing intermediary. It’s allowed us to make deep investments in global money movement, which enables us to offer Brex cards in more currencies and countries than any competing product. We brought that same local operability and multi-currency support to bill pay so you can pay global vendors in their local currency — from a local bank account — and eliminate foreign exchange markups.

Relentless flexibility

With Brex, payment flexibility is a differentiator. Send wires, ACH, or checks from your Brex business account and external bank accounts, or instantly create virtual cards in 30+ currencies, set spend limits, and track every payment in real time. Paying by card strengthens cash flow management because you can earn rewards, extend payment terms, and improve working capital.

End-to-end automation

We’re innovating Brex bill pay to automate the entire AP process, from receiving to paying to reconciling invoices. We evolved our invoice scanning from traditional OCR technology with 80% accuracy to advanced LLM-powered technology that delivers 97% accuracy and blazing-fast line itemization. We also built 2-way matching to import POs from ERPs like NetSuite and QuickBooks Online and automatically match them to incoming invoices. AI-powered rules even automate general ledger coding as the bill is drafted to save additional accounting hours.

The Brex team shipped more than 20 bill pay features in the past quarter using these pillars. A few of these:

• Local payments: Send wires in local currency to 50+ countries from a Brex business account with no hidden fees, and fund wires from local bank accounts in Brex-supported countries.
• Vendor management: Create new vendors, request vendor tax details, and intake vendor payment information via our secure portal, or easily import and link existing vendors from your integrated ERP.
• Enhanced workflows: Update the payment date of a scheduled bill, auto-approve recurring bills, and access an improved UI for the new bill pay create form.

Next up: Transforming procure-to-pay for modern businesses

With $4B in annual processed volume and a QoQ growth of 55%, AP automation on Brex is just getting started. Our engineers, product managers, and designers continuously collect customer feedback and work with co-design partners to solve your emerging use cases.

Our bill pay product is progressing toward a procure-to-pay solution, and some of our early users are already reaping the benefits: “Brex's unified spend management is our version of procure-to-pay 2.0,” said Sean Soper, Head of Accounting and Financial Operations at web3 developer platform Alchemy. “It's a very modern way of running virtual cards, p-cards, bills, invoices — everything in aggregate within a centralized platform.”

It's all part of our vision to simplify, accelerate, and automate the routine yet essential financial workflows and make every dollar count for your business.

How can Brex help improve your business payments? Email your wish list directly to vtaneja@brex.com.