Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies

[hdubugras]

Hi HN,

Henrique here from Brex. We just launched a corporate card specially tailored for life sciences companies (https://brex.com/industry/life-sciences), and every time we launch something new we get a lot of questions about how we chose to prioritize this feature or product, so I thought it’d be interesting to share here with the HN community. While I’ve previously posted about launching our initial tech startup card (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418813), the decision to launch Life Sciences was much different in that we already had two existing products in the market with their own long list of improvements we wanted to make to them.

Here’s my blog post going into much more detail (couldn’t fit it here): https://brex.com/blog/how-we-chose-our-third-vertical.

Would love to get your thoughts and feel free to ask any questions you might have.

[neilsense]

It would be easier to take Brex more seriously if they implemented basic security practices like 2-factor for login.

Especially as virtual cards and transactions are shown without any kind of additional checks after a basic username/password login flow.

[hdubugras]

Thanks for the feedback and totally understand where you're coming from. We're working on adding these security measures in the near term. We care a lot about security too - one of the reasons we started Brex and made virtual cards a feature is that it is a much more secure payments tool. We started on the acquiring side where fraud is a huge issue and we're looking forward to adding more security features shortly.

[alphagrep12345]

May not be the right post to ask, but here I go.

I am a credit card geek and am very interested in this space. I have some questions

1. Your rewards are insane. How do you even manage to give 7x on rideshare?

2. Most millennials and Gen Z spend a lot on rideshare, Airbnbs, online subscriptions and restaurants. Many personal credit cards provide rewards only on restaurants, but not on any of the other categories. It's a huge untapped market. Do you see entering personal credit card space in near future?

[hdubugras]

Great question!

1.) 7x on rideshare is a lot but if you think about the portfolio of spend for a company, most of it is not on rideshare. Since our offering is superior, people usually put all of their spend on Brex, which helps us make up for the amount of money we're giving away on ride share. We also get back discounts from vendors. In general though, we believe in providing the most value to customers, so we're ok with giving away more rewards than the other corporate cards out there.

2.) The personal credit card space is interesting, but our mission for now is to accelerate entrepreneurs, which means we're focusing on building the best possible financial products for businesses. The market for this is huge, so we still have a long ways to go

[conception]

Most travel cards give rewards on those things.

[jfarlow]

Small biotech cofounder here - curious how you think about lab supplies and interactions with other of your customers. One thing that is curious is that you have a list of your life-science customers, but that's also a list of clients/suppliers for other of your clients. Is there any (potential) interaction in that regard between your clients? That seems to be one of the 'perks' in the generic tech industry - trading services between horizontal players. That might be a useful strategy here too. Even more than I want Uber rides, I want DNA, RNA, and other biotech services & products (that might be provided by these other clients).

Also curious about your interaction with CLSA - they're a pretty cool group that, as you mention, serves as a node or hub in the community. What does your interaction with them look like? To some extent they already provide some portal into the larger lab suppliers. It's not on the payment side, but more on the buying power itself.

Helping comply with government-approved accounting would also be a very nice feature for those of us that make use of SBIR-type grants. Though I suspect that that would mostly be true for much smaller biotech startups.

[hdubugras]

Thanks for the questions! To your first point, there's definitely some potential interaction between our customers. We're not quite sure what that will look like right now, but we do have our eyes on that in the future. We offer discounts on goods and services through our rewards portal so there's always the possibility of getting customers involved with that.

We're actually partnered with CLSA! You can read more about that here (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/brex-launches-first-corporate...) and if you're a CLSA member you'll start to see some communication about our partnership in the coming days/weeks.

Helping you comply with SBIR-type grants is definitely something we're researching. We actually already have some expense management tools (such as our receipt capture/handling) that make it easier to comply and will continue to work to make them better.

[ValentineC]

Another credit card geek here, and also a conference organiser.

How are you detecting conference ticket purchases?

[hdubugras]

We leverage merchant level data that's provided by the networks as an input into our auto categorization system, which uses Google Places API and some simple machine learning. We then overlay randomly sampled manual inspections to ensure quality

[alphagrep12345]

I looked at your careers page to get an idea of internal teams and I didn't find any fraud related teams. How do you handle credit card fraud? Do you outsource it?

[hdubugras]

We handle fraud in-house through a joint effort of a variety of teams (customer experience, operations, engineering, etc.) and even have a webpage dedicated to it https://brex.com/fraud/ :)

[boltzmannbrain]

Biotech-AI founder here. Already using Brex and love it!

On the new life sciences support,

1. How do you know which companies? Do we need to explicitly sign-up/transfer to a life sciences program?

2. Are the life sciences rewards in addition to or replacing the standard Brex rewards [1]?

Also a feature request while you're here: Easy payment a la Chase QuickPay.

[1] https://brex.com/startups/

[johnmax]

Hey, we are a startup in Germany. When are you going to come to Germany/Europe?

[grepper]

Henrique - this is super cool. Really fascinating and inspiring to follow your success.

Unrelated to today's announcement, but curious if you could share a bit about your origins in "making a new credit card from scratch" at all: forming a relationship with a bank, card network, etc.

How difficult was it to even enter the space at all - any top takeaways or learnings? Non-obvious struggles you may have had to overcome?