Market and trends

4 min read · Chapter 6 of 10

Who holds the power

Power follows the license, the interchange table and the ledger, and a spend fintech holds none of them.

Card networks reprice everyone twice a year without negotiation and pay incentives to issuers.
Sponsor banks hold the most day-to-day power: onboarding, prohibited industries, KYB depth, reserves, revenue share at renewal, termination. A regulator's order can force them to drop partners.
Bank issuers and the closed-loop issuer set rebates and credit, and now own spend software. My own inference: one bank, which bought a card network in 2025, could in principle move commercial volume onto it.
Issuer processors decide what happens in an outage and may hold the interchange contract.
Program managers own the customer, the data and the credit model, and carry the losses. Rewards squeeze them: at one platform they now pass half of interchange.
Funders set covenants that cap how fast a charge-card book can grow.
Accounting and HR platforms own the CFO's workflow and the employee list, charge for API access, and are launching cards: one offered 2% cash back in July 2026, underwritten on the customer's ledger data.
CFOs trade rebate against settlement terms. Large buyers get rebates near the interchange ceiling (135 basis points in one state contract, see procure to pay); mid-size buyers don't.
Employees have few rights as cardholders and strong ones as claimants, and can route around any program with a personal card.
Merchants pay interchange, and once the card settlement is final may refuse or surcharge commercial cards.

The last two years were a buying spree: an HR software company bought a spend startup (2024), the largest closed-loop issuer bought expense software (2025), and a large card bank bought a spend fintech (2026). My guess is that whoever owns the ledger, the bank account or the employee list is taking the customer, and standalone spend platforms are the ones being bought. Against it: private spend fintechs still raise money at high valuations, by their own account.

Tailwinds and headwinds

These are the forces I'd expect everyone in spend management to watch over the next couple of years, and each one helps some players and hurts others. Banks with deposits end up on the winning side of most of them, while the independent card platforms ride the biggest tailwind and face most of the headwinds.

Tailwinds:

What's changing	Who gains	Who loses
Spend platforms are growing far faster than bank card programs, Ramp says by about 170% in a year, and now sell to large companies too.	Ramp, BILL; the sponsor banks and processors behind fintech programs (Sutton, Celtic, The Bancorp, Marqeta); Visa	Bank issuers' mid-market books (U.S. Bank, JPMorgan Chase); SAP Concur and Emburse at the small end of enterprise
Banks and card companies are buying spend software to win card volume, and Capital One closed its purchase of Brex in April 2026.	Capital One, American Express; HR suites that bought in (Paylocity, Rippling)	Card platforms without a bank, which fund their cards at a higher cost; sponsor banks that lose a program when a bank buys its fintech
More business spending is moving onto cards, away from checks and employees' own cards, and Mastercard's commercial volume grew about a tenth in 2025.	Visa, Mastercard, every issuer, processors paid per transaction	Check and ACH reimbursement; expense tools built on out-of-pocket claims, such as Expensify
Business travel keeps getting pricier, so travel spend on company cards grows even though GBTA expects trips to rise only about 1% in 2026.	American Express, Navan, SAP Concur, bank travel card programs	Travel buyers, whose card bills grow without more trips
AI tools and AI agents are starting to buy on company cards, and Visa's rules make the cardholder responsible for an agent's purchases.	Platforms that issue a locked virtual card per agent (Ramp, Brex, Marqeta, Highnote); Visa and Mastercard	Expense tools built around an employee and a receipt; companies, which carry their agents' mistakes

Headwinds:

What's changing	Who gains	Who loses
Platforms give back about half their card income as rewards and give the software away, so the margin left is thin.	Buyers, large ones most; American Express, which keeps the whole merchant fee	Card-first platforms on monthly terms (BILL, Ramp, Float); sponsor banks, squeezed on revenue share
Merchants may soon refuse or surcharge commercial cards under the pending Visa and Mastercard settlement, with repricing no earlier than October 2027.	Merchants, especially business suppliers; ACH and bill-pay rails; American Express, which as I read it sits outside the settlement	Visa and Mastercard commercial volume; issuers and platforms whose rewards depend on supplier spend (BILL, bank purchasing-card programs); companies that pay the surcharges
Accounting and HR software now charge for API access and launch their own cards, as Intuit did in July 2026.	Intuit, Xero, WebBank, Mastercard; Paylocity, Rippling	Spend platforms selling to QuickBooks and Xero customers (Ramp, Brex, Float, BILL); anyone paying for integrations
Higher rates and small-business losses raise the cost of carrying card balances, and the Fed raised rates again in September 2026.	Issuers funded by deposits (Capital One, now with Brex; American Express)	Platforms funded by credit facilities (Ramp, BILL, Float); startups whose limits get cut
Visa now pays its lowest purchasing and corporate card rate only on validated line-item data, which cuts interchange on that spend by about a third.	Suppliers and their acquirers	Issuers and platforms with purchasing-card and bill-pay volume (U.S. Bank, JPMorgan Chase, BILL, Marqeta); large buyers' rebates

The one thing I'd watch is how many large-company card contracts a spend fintech wins over the next two years, because that's where the fastest-growing platforms meet the banks that now own software of their own.