INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Penta, the German fintech startup that offers a digital bank account targeting SMEs, has launched multi-card support to make it easier to
manage company expenses.Dubbed ‘Team Access,’ the new feature — which affords similar functionality to the likes of Pleo, Spendesk,
and Soldo — lets business owners issue multiple MasterCards to employees who need to make purchases on a company’s behalf.Each card is
linked to a business’ Penta account but can have custom rules and permissions per card/employee, in terms of how much money can be spent
More broadly, the feature is designed to cut down the time and cost of expense management for SMEs.“As business owners know, it can take
weeks of daunting paperwork to get another debit card from a legacy bank
The alternative solution for a business owner is to apply for a business credit card which has a predefined credit limit
Most early stage businesses aren’t credit-worthy, and therefore can’t get a second card,” explains the company.To help with expense
management, Penta already lets you categorise transactions and export them to various accounting software
On the public roadmap is “automated accounting,” which will offer the ability to sync your account to third-party accounting
tools.Meanwhile, Team Access is being rolled out in two stages
As of today, users will be able to issue team debit MasterCards and give account access to founders/Managing Directors
In the “coming weeks,” the option to issue Penta cards and give account access to all employees will be added.The two-stage roll out is
likely related to Penta’s recent scaling issues that saw it initially struggle to open new accounts in a timely manner due to high demand
The fintech startup runs on top of Banking-as-a-Platform solarisBank (rather than holding a banking license of its own), and I understand
the bottleneck, which has now been cleared, was related to solarisBank’s account verification processes.
