“There’s a complete disconnect between the banking system and the way in which expenses and company spending really operates.”
Darren Upson is the VP of Small Business, Europe, at Soldo, the financial services firm that offers a unified spend management platform featuring prepaid Mastercard cards to automate the expense management process from payment to reconciliation. Prior to serving as a VP at Soldo, the University of Hertfordshire alum worked at Xero and Deltek.
More than 60,000 businesses use Soldo to manage company spending, while empowering employees to be more responsible in their spending and take advantage of effortless reporting.
In this episode of Velocitize Talks, Upson discusses the business expense cycle, spend management solutions, and the promise of never having to do another expense report again.
Kiss expense reports goodbye (0:47)
Meals. Travel. Entertainment. Parking. And so on. Imagine automating the tedious expense and reimbursement process and never having to go through wrinkled up, food-stained receipts again.
We created the Soldo solution to handle the process of making payments…so getting rid of all that manual administration, getting rid of all hassle and getting rid of bits of paper with cellotape and receipts and all that good stuff that everyone enjoys [in] their monthly expense report.
I’ve got a corporate card and I’m not afraid to use it (1:50)
Soldo’s prepaid business cards allow a company to set specific spending limits while managing the cards from a payment control dashboard. You’ll also be able to track employee and contractor spending habits while viewing transactions in real time. In short, there’s no risk of overspending.
If you think about the way that company credit cards operate, you give a card to people, it’s like giving a loaded gun to employees because they can go and spend money wherever they want to spend it.
Payback time (4:49)
Soldo’s multi-user expense account automates the expense reporting process, which gets rid of manually submitting forms and receipts, which can be easily managed with the mobile app.
Every month most employees are paying for things on behalf of the business, reclaiming those expenses, and suffering the pain [of] getting that money paid back to them. We believe that’s fundamentally wrong for employees to have to subsidize a business.
Financial management for the masses (7:08)
In the UK, businesses reimburse over £8.8 billion worth of expenses each year. Soldo essentially streamlines a business’s entire expense cycle from payment to reconciliation.
We’re trying to talk to people that don’t even realize that they’ve got a problem at this moment in time. We’re trying to highlight the business problems and inefficiencies associated with the way in which expenses have been done historically.
FinTech and WordPress (8:01)
Thirty percent of websites today use WordPress and Soldo is one of them. The company leverages the WordPress platform to manage its content and payment solutions website.
We have two WordPress instances, one for our website and one for the blog. That’s all going to be amalgamated into the new website which is going to launch in a few week’s time.
To learn more about Soldo and Darren Upson, visit their website. You can follow them on Twitter at @Soldo.
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