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Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

news.ycombinator.com

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Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

#1

Post by hdubugras »

Hi HN,

Henrique here from Brex. We just launched a corporate card specially tailored for life sciences companies (https://brex.com/industry/life-sciences), and every time we launch something new we get a lot of questions about how we chose to prioritize this feature or product, so I thought it’d be interesting to share here with the HN community. While I’ve previously posted about launching our initial tech startup card (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418813), the decision to launch Life Sciences was much different in that we already had two existing products in the market with their own long list of improvements we wanted to make to them.

Here’s my blog post going into much more detail (couldn’t fit it here): https://brex.com/blog/how-we-chose-our-third-vertical.

Would love to get your thoughts and feel free to ask any questions you might have.

Re: Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

#2

Post by alphagrep12345 »

May not be the right post to ask, but here I go.

I am a credit card geek and am very interested in this space. I have some questions

1. Your rewards are insane. How do you even manage to give 7x on rideshare?

2. Most millennials and Gen Z spend a lot on rideshare, Airbnbs, online subscriptions and restaurants. Many personal credit cards provide rewards only on restaurants, but not on any of the other categories. It's a huge untapped market. Do you see entering personal credit card space in near future?

Re: Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

#5

Post by conception »

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #2

May not be the right post to ask, but here I go. I am a credit card geek and am very interested in this space. I have some questions 1. Your rewards are insane. How do you even manage to give 7x on rideshare? 2. Most millennials and Gen Z spend a lot on rideshare, Airbnbs, online subscriptions and restaurants. Many personal credit cards provide rewards only on restaurants, but not on any of the other categories. It's…

Most travel cards give rewards on those things.

Re: Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

#6

Post by hdubugras »

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #2

May not be the right post to ask, but here I go. I am a credit card geek and am very interested in this space. I have some questions 1. Your rewards are insane. How do you even manage to give 7x on rideshare? 2. Most millennials and Gen Z spend a lot on rideshare, Airbnbs, online subscriptions and restaurants. Many personal credit cards provide rewards only on restaurants, but not on any of the other categories. It's…

Great question!

1.) 7x on rideshare is a lot but if you think about the portfolio of spend for a company, most of it is not on rideshare. Since our offering is superior, people usually put all of their spend on Brex, which helps us make up for the amount of money we're giving away on ride share. We also get back discounts from vendors. In general though, we believe in providing the most value to customers, so we're ok with giving away more rewards than the other corporate cards out there.

2.) The personal credit card space is interesting, but our mission for now is to accelerate entrepreneurs, which means we're focusing on building the best possible financial products for businesses. The market for this is huge, so we still have a long ways to go

Re: Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

#7

Post by hdubugras »

ValentineC wrote: post #3

Another credit card geek here, and also a conference organiser. How are you detecting conference ticket purchases?

We leverage merchant level data that's provided by the networks as an input into our auto categorization system, which uses Google Places API and some simple machine learning. We then overlay randomly sampled manual inspections to ensure quality

Re: Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

#8

Post by hdubugras »

neilsense wrote: post #4

It would be easier to take Brex more seriously if they implemented basic security practices like 2-factor for login. Especially as virtual cards and transactions are shown without any kind of additional checks after a basic username/password login flow.

Thanks for the feedback and totally understand where you're coming from. We're working on adding these security measures in the near term. We care a lot about security too - one of the reasons we started Brex and made virtual cards a feature is that it is a much more secure payments tool. We started on the acquiring side where fraud is a huge issue and we're looking forward to adding more security features shortly.

Re: Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

#10

Post by hdubugras »

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #9

I looked at your careers page to get an idea of internal teams and I didn't find any fraud related teams. How do you handle credit card fraud? Do you outsource it?

We handle fraud in-house through a joint effort of a variety of teams (customer experience, operations, engineering, etc.) and even have a webpage dedicated to it https://brex.com/fraud/ :)
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