Making money easier for underbanked businesses

Just as fintechs are disrupting the retail banking space, a growing number of fintechs are making business banking easier for small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Starling bank has estimated that the average small business spends nearly a fifth of their time doing financial admin tasks. The burden of this financial admin is often disproportionately felt by smaller and micro-businesses who don’t  have finance teams.

Archa is a corporate card and expense management platform that makes managing money easier for businesses of all sizes. Across the business banking lifecycle, Archa offers a more accessible, affordable and user-friendly solution for underbanked businesses.

Set up business banking a few clicks

Typically, setting up a business bank account is an involved and manual process that relies on paperwork and in-person branch visits. Coupled with lengthy issuance times, access to business banking and ongoing admin often become a barrier to growth.

Basiq helps power Archa’s onboarding process with real-time access to account and transaction data which means Archa can verify accounts and bring customers on board in a few clicks:

“We are primarily focused on building a corporate card solution that allows customers to get access quickly. So no more going out to the bank, bringing down directors, getting directors identified and bringing in trust deeds and bank statements. That’s a really painful process. Basiq helps us get people on board on the same day without ever having met them though an entirely digital underwriting and identification process.”

Oliver Kidd, Founder and CEO @Archa

Rebundling business banking

Aside from setup, traditional business banking solutions also don’t include expense management. As a result, businesses end up with ongoing overhead and more admin, having to pay for a corporate card, hire a bookkeeper and pay a monthly subscription for an expense management platform – all separately.

By rebundling expense management with corporate card issuing, Archa is able to significantly reduce costs and complexity so business can invest more in their growth. Part of Archa’s expense management solution is the ability to provide employees with instant access to cards with set controls around where and when those cards are used. This gives financial controllers such as business owners and CFOs an extra layer of control that make expense tracking, reporting and compliance easier.

Going forward, Archa will also be able to leverage comprehensive and accurate account and transaction data via the Basiq platform to understand affordability from a client’s perspective in creating a more customer-centric experience throughout the business banking lifecycle.

“We see corporate cards and expense management as a single, unified product that solves the admin problem businesses are facing. Automated and ongoing access to banking data will allow us to continue making the lives of financial teams and CFOs easier whilst empowering teams to do their jobs more effectively.”  

Oliver Kidd, Founder and CEO @ Archa

Archa has recently gone live on Apple Pay, to learn more about Archa, head to their website.

To learn more about how Basiq can be used to speed up onboarding with real-time account verification, head to our website.