Jan 22, 2020
Tannenbaum: At Brex, pretty early on, I was kind of familiar with
the banking landscape from when I had been in investment banking.
The group that I had been in actually served regional banks, so I
did a lot of regional bank mergers and acquisitions. Then, at SoFi,
I had built a lot of relationships with regional banks. I think
that when you start in fintech, there's always this belief that
you're competing with big banks. That was a lot of the marketing
positioning of my former employer, SoFi, but at Brex I saw this
opportunity to partner with banks because I was familiar with the
card landscape. At least in the commercial card space, outside of
the Big Four banks--Wells, Citi, Bank of America, Chase--there are
very few financial institutions that actually issue corporate
cards.
I decided that even though we were a small company, subscale, no
one had heard of us, and we had a stupid name like Brex (which
actually wasn't as stupid as our first one), banks might want to
partner with us because they themselves were fighting their own
battles with the Big Four issuers, as well as American Express. So
we partnered with a number of banks very early on in a way that
most people would think was not possible and was unusual.
Ultimately in financial services, brands, particularly with regard
to trust and stability, are super important.
Today, what's exciting is that technology is changing so many
industries and creating lots of opportunities, as well as
disruption and uncertainty. Finance is a kind of universal
language. At Brex, we need to be known for the brand of our risk
management because ultimately we're asking both customers and other
businesses to trust us with their money--to buy loans from us, to
buy deposits from us, to partner with us and give us access to
payments networks. To do this, we really need to be known as a
high-quality risk management brand.