Jeppe Rindom CEO and Co-Founder of Pleo

Please welcome Pierre Hend capac inique in Lysandring. Didn't make it. . Handing it over to Hr strategy to go through the above en air ing sulphur Anyways, while it goes to presentation most, hopefully, my name is Jeppe. I'm the CEO and co-founder of PlayO. There we go. So PlayO is basically the first company card to come with an artificial assistant. Today I'm not going to talk too much about PlayO. It's not going to be my main pitch. It's going to talk a little bit about the environment we operate in, business spending, and the pain that we've seen in this and why we've decided to fix it. This is Nico. This is my co-founder. I met him in a company called TradeShift a few years back. We were building financial products together. He was the tech lead in our financial products team. I was also the CFO as the company grew from about 5, 10 employees and all the way up to about 100 employees across several markets. And trying to be the CFO and not being schooled as a CFO, I learned a lot of things. I basically learned that most things you need to run a business today is just a few clicks away. Basically, everything is in front of you. Your travel, your hardware, your software, subscriptions, what have you. It's very available. I also learned that those transactions are becoming more and more complex. Now it's no longer one-off transactions. It's also subscriptions renewing. It's your card being stored on platforms for repeat purchasing. And those kind of more complex transactions are penetrating the overall number of transactions. I learned that employees of today act really like consumers. They like to go and buy the stuff they need. If they travel, they want to buy the ticket themselves. If they need an icon, the designer, I want to buy it right away. So the purchasing demand from those employees have been much more spread out in the organization. In our company, we felt a lot of pain with this whole new way of spending. Employees that were super frustrated because we couldn't give them a card, everyone. They felt a little bit mistrusted when they had to pay out of pocket. And they really, really hated the expense reporting, as we all know them. In finance, we also had a lot of complexity. Because I looked in the bank every month, and I would see up to 50% of the transactions where I basically had no clue where they were coming from, because our cards were being shared. So who topped up the Skype subscription this month? I would write 12 emails. Everyone would log into the inbox, scan through it, find the receipt, and one down, and then go on to the next one who had a LinkedIn subscription renewing this month. It was really, really adding a lot of complexity. And for managers, it was also difficult, because a marketing manager would say, where am I on my budget? And I would say, well, I can tell you in six to eight weeks, because we first need to process the transactions, and then I can show you where you are on your budget. And when we reached a state of 50, 80 employees, we looked around and we said, OK, there's got to be some kind of tool or system to deal with all this. And I went to the bank. And I really realized that a company credit card has not changed at all for the past 25, maybe in 30 years. It still took like six, eight weeks to get a card. It was paperwork back and forth that we needed to sign. It was kind of a carte blanche. So if you gave away a card, they could do pretty much everything with the card. And it involved a lot of trust to give 100 people a company credit card. So we didn't do that. Only about five people had a card. And it was completely disconnected to the financial processes. So they would get even a paper statement, and they would stack up the receipts, and we still needed to sort of book them manually. So it didn't really work out for us. And I kind of double clicked on that whole industry. And I realized that that has been an extremely profitable business for banks over the past many, many years. Both consumer and business cards, they earn tons of money on the interest. They earn up to 4% on the cross-border transaction, cross-currency transactions, and a lot on the interchange. But that whole thing is actually about to change, because a payment in itself, a card payment, is becoming much more of a commodity. I'm not sure if you're familiar with what EU did. They basically overnight sliced what's called the interchange. So no longer can you charge 1.5% in interchange. Now you can only charge 0.2%. And from the other side, we have all these FinTech disruptors, like Revolut in the UK, that came overnight and saying, well, we do not charge 4% or 5% on the FX. Actually, we do it on the interbank rate. So somewhat the banks were sort of squeezed in between FinTech and regulation in the whole card issuing industry. And we saw that they were not really participating in the transition. I mean, I think most banks realize that it's eventually going to be a commodity to facilitate a payment. But there's still going to be value around it. They're still going to be providing a super great user experience around the payment moment. Or there's still going to be ways of deriving value on what you purchased, the data of the transaction. And we really saw that the banks were extremely passive around that whole transition. We also learned another thing in our company. And that's how you drive responsibility into your spending culture as a business. As our company consolidated over a couple of years, more people came on board, more capital was raised. We saw, I saw, that similar types of costs were growing. So before, a hotel room would be on average $180 a night. And then as the company grew, suddenly it was $275. And no one had bad intentions, but it was just how it was. I said, how can we control this? Is there a way to do that? And I said, OK, I'm going to do an expense policy, because that's how you do things like that. And we ran on Yammer back then. And I said, well, guys, from now on, we can spend a max of $250 for one hotel night. And I waited. I waited four months, and I ran through the numbers again. And I averaged it out. Well, it went to $295 a night. And I was like, what happened? And I realized that the sales guys that went to New York all the time, they would come to me and say, well, we need to spend $350, $400. We cannot get a room for $250 in New York. And I was like, well, you need to go, so do it. And when people went to Poland for a meeting, they could have gotten a room for $100, but they were looking around and saying, what can I get for $250? And we realized that expense policies are just extremely difficult to form, because they need to work in each and every situation. So we didn't really think that worked. So I did something different. I went to Yammer, and I said, OK, I'm just going to form an open question. I'm going to say to everyone, well, listen, we'd actually like to manage our costs a little bit better. Can you help us do that? And I dedicated this specific thread to post whenever you think you've done a good spending deed. And then they started. One guy said, I actually took the bus to the airport today instead of a taxi. Another one said, well, I canceled two subscriptions that we didn't use. And another one said, I used my private bonus points going to a meeting. And in like two, three weeks, we had 140 posts similar to that. And I was kind of like, huh, that makes a lot of sense. And I realized that driving responsible spending cultures is less about policies. It's less about control. It's much more about having the spend data in real time, making people aware about it in real time, and recognizing what is good and what is bad spending behavior. And then a couple of years passed by. And we took all that, and we decided to basically come up with Pleo. So Pleo is trying to address exactly those situations. It's basically a virtual or a plastic payment card out of the box. So we onboard companies in minutes, as opposed to several weeks. You can set up your organization. You can invite your employees, and they would have a virtual card right there in front of them on that same day. You can even set the limits and restrictions as you want, so you're comfortable in the first place to give away the cards. We make everyone aware when a purchase is done. So you get a notification on your phone whenever a purchase is done. So we linked the problem that now we know who is responsible for which transaction in the moment that it happens. So we take out all this black box complexity that the CFO has. And then we're sort of in the early stage of trying to apply AI into this whole thing so that you as a user really only need to spend. And then we try to take care of the rest. So basically, we're setting things up so we can detect what seems to be normal spending behavior, what seems to be extraordinary spending behavior, and what even seems like fraud. And we're applying sort of new parameters to this thing that banks are not using yet, like what's the proximity between you, or at least your phone, and the place where you buy something? If the proximity is far apart, it's a signal that there may be fraud involved. How has your spending behavior been in the past? How has your company's spending behavior been in the past? And then we try to figure out, could this be fraud, or could this at least be out of the ordinary so we'll expose it a bit more? Everyone hates to deal with receipts, so we try to do that for you. If you buy a flight online, we get data from that transaction. We scan through your inbox. If you permit us to do so, we find the itinerary of the receipt. We match the two things. We categorize it as travel you're done. So for all your online purchases, there's a good chance we'll find it in your inbox, match it, and you're done. If it's in a cafe around the corner, we notify you on your phone. You touch the notification, you scan the receipt, you're done. Tax is also something we work with. Obviously, you need to provide a category for accounting purposes. Sometimes you also need to provide a project number or a customer name. We also try to find the patterns around that, your geoposition, the time of day, look through your calendar and see, can we guess which client you're with today? Can we at least suggest it for you, and you can amend it if we're not correct. And we make all the transactions available in a nice little dashboard so you or a manager can see what's going on. And then we've connected everything to the accounting system so that your bookkeeper or your finance department is happy and they just need to book it. We're currently in beta. We just launched or published our beta in TechCrunch this morning. We focused on Denmark and the UK as our first markets. We have about 500 companies that have signed up for being early testers that we are sort of now onboarding in batches representing more than 10,000 employees. So this is PlayO. Basically, our ambition is to bring trust back to the employees. It's allowing them to focus on their expertise. And it's taking a lot of complexity out of finance. Thank you for listening. Whao.