EXCLUSIVE: “Ahigherorder” – Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, Cape in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Startups like Cape are what the past 15 years of transformation have been for. Founder & CEO Ryan Edwards-Pritchard isn’t just problem-solving – he’s reaching nirvana!

If you run a business, you’ll know that the flow of money in and out is quite complex and nuanced. Companies have all types of transactions – both online and offline. They may be subscriptions, corporate travel, bills, invoicing, payroll, with each going through a very different journey. This leaves the business with a bloated and convoluted stack of transactions, combined with a lack of interoperability.

Cape is looking to collapse all these down into one simple platform, which, over time, will manage all those different types of transactions across a business. That’s the North Star. But let’s start with receipts. Receipts are a particular pain point for many businesses – employees have to remember to get them and keep them, while finance teams have to chase and process them. Which is why we’re on a mission to build ‘complete expense nirvana’ through saving time on financial admin tasks and stopping wasteful purchases from ever taking place.

It’s all about smarter spending to help companies reach the next stage of growth. Cape offers clients an expense management platform, smart business cards and an app that captures all that information. The platform gives finance teams total control over the company’s coffers and the ability to responsibly distribute funds to team members who need to be empowered to do their job, while removing the granularity of having to monitor each individual transaction. It does this by decentralising authorising of which purchases comply – or not– to the company’s expense policy.

What happens is a member of the finance team joins Cape, creates budgets and then invites employees to access those budgets, through the app and by using virtual cards. The finance team gets sent real-time alerts about spending, while employees get real-time alerts to upload their receipts. The finance department can create sub-ledgers for different teams, with recurrent and one-off budgets, or merchant-category-specific budgets. They can even block certain merchants, for example hospitality, to stop employees using the cards in the pub!

Cape has recently launched an integration with Codat into Xero, with other Cloud accounting providers, such as NetSuite, to be supported at a later date. Ultimately, we want to help business owners rest better at night, knowing their funds are taking them as far as possible, whilst facilitating a movement towards stronger workplaces, where employees are empowered to go do their best work and don’t feel undermined. We believe so passionately in helping customers build stronger businesses that we even coined an acronym to reflect our company values. SAVE stands for ‘Simpler is smarter, Actions need ownership, Visible for all, and Empathy over ego’, and that’s baked into our platform. So, we’re not just about helping businesses from an efficiency and operations point of view, but also about helping them build a better culture.

Based in Sydney, we’re currently set up to serve modern and mid-sized businesses i n Australia, where open banking regulation came into force in July 2020.

“It’s not just about helping businesses from an efficiency and operations point of view, but also about helping them build a better culture”

Why here?

Well, having led Europe’s largest digital marketplace in funding options adopt open banking in 2017/18, it struck me how similar the two regions’ regulatory environments were. But, at the time, there were no SME-specific digital banks, such as Tide, or innovative spend management platforms, like Pleo, in Australia. So, I moved here during the pandemic – when every business became remote overnight – with the idea of starting one.

Cape’s tools were suddenly a must-have for business owners, who urgently needed to distribute funds to teams. Working with partners such as know-your-customer and fraud prevention platform FrankieOne and Consumer Data Right (CDR)-accredited open banking service Basiq, our finance automation platform is focussed particularly on scaling companies. Similar to Payhawk in Europe or Ramp in North America, we make revenue via interchange income by taking a tiny amount per transaction (Cape is a principal member of Mastercard, so we can offer customers free FX at no cost to us).

In addition to our platform, we offer customers an American Express-equivalent corporate charge card and there will be a subscription fee when Cape is publicly launched in 2023.

Until then, we’ll be releasing different features in beta to get us where we want to be with the help of our ‘Cape Shapers’ – early adopters who provide valuable feedback. From a geographic perspective, our goal is to become the number one spend management platform for the APAC region.Will we partner with big banks in the future? Quite possibly.

Our team has a lot of experience working in SME-focussed fintechs that have successfully collaborated with incumbent banks. Allowing others to leverage and distribute Cape’s software ultimately gets us a step closer to achieving ‘complete expense nirvana’ for all businesses

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue 25, Page 150