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Cape simplifies how Australian businesses cut wasteful spending using open banking technology
With companies bracing for a global recession, Sydney-based expense management platform Cape has launched its analytics product layer ‘Fractal’ – a real-time reporting and insights dashboard based on industry benchmarks, open banking data, and corporate card spend.
Fractal helps finance teams make faster, more informed decisions with up-to-the-minute data and full visibility into company finances from Cape’s easy-to-use customer interface, Axle.
“When we started building Cape two years ago, we had a simple focus that our software and corporate cards would help businesses save time and money. Building on this thesis, we’re doubling down to help CFOs, C-suite Execs and finance teams make faster financial decisions with real-time reporting by visualizing every business expense,” says Founder & CEO Ryan Edwards-Pritchard.
The timing of this feature release comes as the chatter about economic turmoil gains traction by the day. Business owners face headwinds with increased interest rates and a tight labor market, making automated expense management critical for reducing wasteful spending.
“Given the rising cost of capital and the current economic climate, the idea of being more efficient with your spending and time has gone from being a nice to have to a real necessity. Our focus with Fractal is to provide visibility into spending patterns across categories, allowing you to dig deep into rising spend so you can cut costs before it’s too late,” says Ryan Edwards-Pritchard.
Profit margins are razor-thin for certain businesses, meaning better expense management is becoming mission-critical. Expenses are also getting increasingly complicated and disparate, with more corporate cardholders, more SaaS subscriptions, and business travel making a resurgence.
“We want finance teams to see spending as it happens, allowing them to break free from waiting on monthly statements or manual spreadsheets. With Cape, they can find, browse and download real-time transactions from any employee, department or merchant – on any device.”
Whilst all customers have access to Fractal’s dashboard described above, the real gold is reserved for Cape’s ‘Scale’ customers with access to a personalized monthly spending insights report.
Cape finds new ways for customers to save by surfacing actionable insights using open banking data enabled by the API platform Basiq; such as duplicate subscriptions, spend categorisation graphs, and hidden savings on foreign exchange. It reviews every transaction, compares it with industry benchmarks and informs your finance team of wasteful spending or savings opportunities.
“It’s like having a second finance team dedicated to combing through your expenses,” Ryan Edwards-Pritchard commented.
Cape now has hundreds of businesses using its expense platform and corporate cards – including Web3 Unicorn ImmutableX, fintech CarClarity, rent-to-buy property platform OwnHome, and industry-leading business term loan lender, Lumi.
Lumi joined Cape after outgrowing its shared business account with a big bank. They were looking for a more sophisticated expense management solution to seamlessly issue cards with built-in spend controls to their 100+ strong workforce.
“Our finance team didn’t have the bandwidth to monitor every transaction every single day, which meant we consolidated cards to only a few critical team members and had to rely on everyone else to use their own funds to make business purchases,” said the Founder and CEO Yanir Yakutiel.
“But by centralizing, automating and streamlining spend management, Cape immediately saved material time for our finance team. Whilst helping us save money by allowing Cape’s platform to reinforce our expense policy with the distributed corporate cards, which block purchases that aren’t within a pre-approved spending limit or merchant.”
“What’s more, the transparency baked into the UI is great. It really helps reinforce a prudent expense culture with all employees accessing a centralized insights dashboard that ranks spending behavior against peers.”
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