Finance teams should seize this opportunity to strengthen financial resilience and enhance their risk management capabilities.

As leaders, CFOS must proactively assess their exposure and risk in light of recent events. Companies must prioritize their banking setups and develop robust operational safeguards to ensure the continuity of critical functions, such as payroll and mission-critical spending.

As a team with decades of hard-fought payment experience, we understand the criticality of the upcoming weeks for mid-market and start-up companies and the small and regional banks that play a pivotal role in driving innovation in the US.

It remains to be seen how the banking crisis, coupled with other significant events such as the war in Ukraine and the ongoing economic downturn, will impact the long-term prospects of these entities.

Mesh is committed to supporting its customers in the face of shifting dynamics. Whether by helping companies link new bank accounts to Mesh or assisting them to manage their spend and cashflow forecasts, Mesh will support companies in navigating this crisis. 

Mesh is here to support finance teams

Mesh is bank-agnostic, making it simple to connect to new or multiple corporate bank accounts quickly and easily. With updated bank linking flows, Mesh makes it easy for its customers to connect their alternative banks and accounts to the Mesh platform. Even if customers have opened new accounts in the past week, they can conveniently link them to Mesh from their payments dashboard.

Mesh’s support and customer activation teams work around the clock in all time zones to assist customers and onboard new ones. We are committed to helping all companies manage this challenging situation for the long haul.

Mesh will always be a customer-first and customer-obsessed company. Some spend management platforms are rigid and only review terms quarterly; others change their fee or ‘fire’ customers overnight without any notification. Mesh is not one of those. Mesh is working hard for all businesses that need a long-term partner to support their financial operations, and we review each business case by case. 

If you are a Mesh customer, contact support@meshpayments.com with any questions. If you’re not currently a Mesh customer but also have questions for us, you can reach out immediately by filling out a simple form.

The post Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Collapse and The Implications for Finance Teams appeared first on Mesh.

And as companies operationalize distributed and remote workforce models, holistic and real-time visibility over company spend is reaching a tipping point. The CFO office will never go back to pre-pandemic business as usual and we’re committed to building the CFO tech stack for the new, new normal.

Today, I am excited to share an important milestone with our customers, partners, employees and the rest of the fintech community. Mesh Payments has raised $60 million in a new equity funding round, bringing our total funding to $123 million. The funding helps us accelerate our growth, and pursue our mission of helping bring automation to finance teams so they can better manage their spend, cut costs, and ensure the success of their companies.

But this milestone doesn’t come in isolation; we aren’t running our business in a vacuum. The world changed yet again. With inflationary pressure, lower access to capital, and other factors weighing on the global economic outlook, most businesses are currently strategizing ways to lower their costs and extend their run rate.

The current economic landscape reminds me in many ways of the ongoing drought impacting many countries around the globe. Rivers are hitting historic lows and that has brought with it all kinds of challenges for ships looking to navigate these waterways. The business environment is like that too.

Strong Business Fundamentals

Many startup companies across the world are facing a funding crunch. Boom times led to a raft of higher valuations and easy access to capital. That world is gone, and many startups are dealing with a hangover of overly inflated valuations.

It has always been a top priority for me as a CEO and for the rest of our senior management team to lead Mesh with a responsible hand that not only protects our investors and employees, but enables us to provide the top-tier level of service to our customers that is the core of our business.

Driven by Product Demand

In our conversations with our investors, one point that came up over and over again, is the positive feedback they were hearing from our customers about how Mesh helps them cut costs and control their spending. This, more than any other metric, is what I see as our single greatest value.

At the end of the day, whether you’re looking at fintech or any other market, a company’s success depends on the experience, value, and relationship it builds with its customers. Our funding allows us to continue our investments in customer support and customer success, along with our intense focus on innovation and user experience.

Our finance automation platform continues to evolve and that evolution is driven by the feedback and close relationship we have with our customers. Our investors understand that we are providing real value to our users that goes above and beyond surface level benefits to address critical and strategic needs for our 1000+customers.

Optimizing Every Dollar

The current economic landscape didn’t create the need for businesses to cut costs and optimize their spending – that need has always been there. The current landscape merely brought the need to cut costs into immediate and sharp relief.

For any business to thrive – not just exist or grow – but to truly thrive and set itself apart from competitors, it must optimize every dollar it spends – every resource it consumes. Our funding round is a validation of the strength of our product, the value it provides to businesses and the hardworking team at Mesh.

Announcing an important milestone like this makes me feel lucky, and I feel especially privileged to share it with so many incredible people at Mesh and with the community of CFOs and finance teams we are building products for every day.

The post New Funding to Build our Automation Platform for Finance Teams appeared first on Mesh.

Digital transformation was accelerated at many companies because they had to figure out how to operate remotely on the fly. For most, that meant an increased reliance on SaaS (software as a service) solutions to help their employees work.

Now that most of the kinks have been ironed out, it’s hard for some to imagine ever fully returning to a traditional in-office setting or doing away with SaaS subscriptions for everything from communication to project management to customer relationship management. In fact, many of the changes that were implemented over the last two years are likely to stick around long-term.

With that in mind, here are my predictions for this year’s trending topics in finance and SaaS.

Automation

Automation is essential to saving businesses time, money, and effort. It can encompass everything from the digitization of repetitive tasks and data entry to AI-powered virtual assistants conducting customer service.

According to Gartner, the market for technology that enables hyper-automation will reach nearly $600 billion this year — so it’s definitely top of mind for many businesses.

In addition to freeing up employees for less repetitive, higher value work, automation can also improve the customer experience by cutting down on wait times for communication and assistance. By streamlining business processes, companies of any size are able to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and drive business growth.

Especially in the finance department, automation has massively cut down on the time required for data input, expense reports, and reconciliation. This frees up accounting staff for more valuable work like analyzing, forecasting, and strategic planning.

Collaboration

Despite the business world being more remote than ever, finance teams are moving towards greater collaboration within their organizations. 

Finance experts are starting to be included in bigger picture business planning — as they should be. With the right technological infrastructure, finance teams can gather insights that are critical to strategic decision-making for the rest of the company.

In order to get an accurate reading of the company as a whole, the finance team needs to collaborate with the marketing team on their budget, as well as the CRO on the top line. The more integrated the finance team is with everyone else, the more accurate projections will be and the more cost efficient the company can be as a whole.

Optimization

For most of us, the pandemic was a lesson in learning what we can and cannot do without. As companies transitioned to remote set-ups and invested in SaaS for their employees, it became clear where corporate spend was and was not necessary. 

Some costs that dropped to virtually nothing over the last two years, like travel and entertainment, will likely make a return this year. On the other hand, companies that have moved to permanent remote or hybrid work models will save money on office costs.

Whatever the unique circumstances of your situation, optimizing corporate spend is key to running as efficiently as possible. That could mean cracking down on redundant SaaS spends by auditing, optimizing and even cancelling subscriptions and licenses, or it could be eliminating “miscellaneous” corporate credit cards that float between employees without any controls in place.

By streamlining corporate spend, you’ll save money where it was being wasted and relocate it to areas that actually need it.

Digitization

Going cashless isn’t new, but debit and credit cards aren’t the only alternatives anymore. In fact, digital wallets are poised to make up 50% of global e-commerce payments by 2023.

COVID-19 certainly made consumers wary of handling cash, but even before the pandemic, cash was on track to make up just 10% of transactions by 2028. Now, it’s expected to reach that low level much faster. With the ubiquity of mobile phones, it’s unsurprising that digital payments on mobile devices are predicted to take over.

In the corporate world, digital payments make even more sense. They offer better spend controls, security, and convenience for users. Receipts can be submitted digitally for accounting purposes, business expenses can be pre-approved by supervisors, SaaS subscriptions can be managed easily, and there’s no need to worry about shuffling a piece of plastic between multiple employees or departments.

Oded Zehavi is the CEO and co-founder of Mesh Payments.

Take control of your corporate spend with Mesh Payments. Book a demo to learn more.

The post 2022: The Year to Come in Finance and SaaS appeared first on Mesh.