Companies Worldwide Race to Empower Teams to Spend Securely — and Scalably

When it needed a corporate card and spend management platform, Archa built one itself.

Before building its platform, Archa was a consumer business. The change of focus started when Oliver Kidd, founder and CEO of Archa, tried to get the company a corporate card program with an 5,000 Australian-dollar limit from a bank where it had millions of dollars sitting in a bank account.

“The bank kind of like laughed me out the door, and I just was so confused about why that was and what the problem was,” Kidd told PYMNTS.

The bank said it would need guarantees from all the company’s directors over this line of credit, they’d need to take a term deposit out of the company’s cash account to secure against a loan and they’d need to see all the company’s financials for multiple years — to name just a few of the requirements.

Not only was Kidd being asked for these things at a bank where his company was a loyal customer, but Archa didn’t need credit.

That spawned an idea. Kidd realized that in Australia and in other countries where corporate card and spend management platforms are popping up, banks have misunderstood why customers apply for corporate credit card programs. Only a small percentage of these customers have a need for credit.

“The primary reason why people are after these products is so that they can empower their teams to spend in a secure and scalable way,” Kidd said. “That was really missing in the Australian market, so almost a month later, we announced to our investors and our team and everyone that we were going to pivot into this space.”

See also: Decentralized Workforces Require Specialized Spend Management Solutions

Building the Product They Needed

Archa then set about building the kind of product it had needed, incorporating features like the capacity to issue multiple cards, review transactions on a card-by-card basis on a platform, instantly see what’s going on and dynamically set limits for different users.

Archa’s beta program informally started at the beginning of 2021, and the company has been refining different parts of its product since then.

The solution has resonated with both investors and customers. On April 19, Archa announced it had raised AU$4 million in funding and secured an AU$20 million debt facility to scale its corporate card program.

“Which is really exciting because I think, particularly on the debt side, it’s probably the most fundamental milestone the company has achieved to date in terms of validating itself in the market,” Kidd said. “It really is an important growth signal, I think, from our side, in the sense that we can now really scale, really ramp up in a much more effective and efficient funding platform.”

As Archa prepares to launch the more formal release of its product, the company has hundreds of customers on the beta program. It expects to publicly launch the product in the next couple of weeks.

The product has also been well received by companies of all sizes, Kidd said. While they expected the beta program to include businesses with three to five employees, Archa found that some large, nationally recognized companies had joined the platform.

“The most common thing we hear is they can’t believe how easy it is to get on this platform and issue cards to their team — and that they’ve been trying to do something similar with their existing corporate bank and have gotten nowhere,” Kidd said.

Related: Belt-Tightening Businesses Taking Closer Look at Spend Management

Betting That the Problem Exists Globally

In one recent addition, on April 7, Archa announced that it had launched Xero bank feed integration, which automatically syncs purchases made with Archa cards into a business’ Xero accounting software. Two-thirds to three-quarters of Archa’s customers are Xero customers, Kidd said.

“I understand this is the first mobile-only integration with Xero, so you can connect just through your mobile, you don’t have to log in through the desktop platform into Xero,” Kidd said.

While Archa is currently active only in Australia, the company expects to be operating in more than one market by the end of the year.

“We think it’s a big opportunity,” Kidd said. “I would be very comfortable betting that this is a problem that exists globally for major banks — that they just don’t really serve this market.”