Sophisticated e-commerce has arrived SaaS breaks into corporate cards ▪ Companies currently using conventional corporate credit cards are incentivised to spend more based on the reward programmes offered by the transaction processer. This is counterintuitive to reducing expenses and is why we see competitors to the established card providers emerging ▪ New-era corporate cards are packaging SaaS offerings as rewards instead of traditional point-based programmes.

Companies such as Ramp (US) and Brex (US) have been integrating their payment processing system with user-facing expense management software. This eliminates the software cost for the business and gives the finance department a cleaner view of company expenses ▪ Another area of interest is expense management, with players such as Bill.com (US) purchasing complementary platform DivvyPay (US) to incorporate budgeting systems for their users as well. This trend of building or acquiring systems opens possibilities of newer expense and financial based integrated systems in the space ▪ Few industries experienced a tailwind as strong as e-commerce did during COVID-19 pandemic, as nearly everyone turned to online shopping for all their discretionary and non-discretionary shopping needs ▪ The sharp increase in traffic through e-commerce portals has highlighted shortcomings on the numerous platforms, including workflow bottlenecks, complex features, and incompatibility with other platforms – especially when transacting cross-border ▪ Examples of platforms designed to address these issues and further refine the e-commerce experience include Zonos (APIs for accurate cross-border cost calculations) and Constructor (AI-enabled platform for data-driven product search and discovery)