Penta, the German fintech startup that offers a digital bank account targeting SMEs, has launched multi-card support to make it easier to manage company expenses.Dubbed ‘Team Access,& the new feature — which affords similar functionality to the likes of Pleo, Spendesk, and Soldo — lets business owners issue multiple MasterCards to employees who need to make purchases on a company behalf.Each card is linked to a business& Penta account but can have custom rules and permissions per card/employee, in terms of how much money can be spent and where.
More broadly, the feature is designed to cut down the time and cost of expense management for SMEs.&As business owners know, it can take weeks of daunting paperwork to get another debit card from a legacy bank.
The alternative solution for a business owner is to apply for a business credit card which has a predefined credit limit.
Most early stage businesses aren&t credit-worthy, and therefore can&t get a second card,& explains the company.To help with expense management, Penta already lets you categorise transactions and export them to various accounting software.
On the public roadmap is &automated accounting,& which will offer the ability to sync your account to third-party accounting tools.Meanwhile, Team Access is being rolled out in two stages.
As of today, users will be able to issue team debit MasterCards and give account access to founders/Managing Directors.
In the &coming weeks,& the option to issue Penta cards and give account access to all employees will be added.The two-stage roll out is likely related to Penta recent scaling issues that saw it initially struggle to open new accounts in a timely manner due to high demand.
The fintech startup runs on top of Banking-as-a-Platform solarisBank (rather than holding a banking license of its own), and I understand the bottleneck, which has now been cleared, was related to solarisBank account verification processes.