Pleo rolls out credit cards and secures e-money licence

Written by Ruby Hinchliffe
30th January 2020

Pleo, a Danish fintech offering company cards which automate expense reports, has partnered with JP Morgan and Mastercard to roll out its corporate credit card across Europe.

The start-up is switching up its purely prepaid card offering model, jumping off the back of its $56 million Series B funding round last May. Pleo landed the largest Series A ($16 million) Denmark had seen in 2018 in a decade, and its Series B last year was Denmark’s largest Series B to date.

JP Morgan’s API will enable Pleo to process customer payments in real-time

Its deal with JPMorgan will see the multinational investment bank provide an application programme interface (API) solution which will enable the company card provider to process customer payments in real-time.

The cards will still be able to be paired with accounting software and mobile apps so receipts can automatically be matched and companys’ spending can be tracked in real-time.

“Collaborating with JP Morgan and Mastercard will enable us to scale our revolutionary technology faster across Europe and help us move from our initial version of a product – the prepaid card – to something much more scalable for the future and more widely accepted – corporate credit cards,” says Pleo’s CEO and co-founder Jeppe Rindom.

The company says “moving from prepaid cards is just one part of the infrastructural change”, revealing the fintech has also secured an e-money license in Denmark to offer credit to its “key clients” across Europe.

The first two countries to see Pleo’s expansion will be Spain and Ireland in 2020, “with four new markets expected by the end of the year”. Currently the start-up works with 6,000 companies across six markets: the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, and Spain.

“We have invested a lot of effort and resources behind the scenes to bring something to the market that will differentiate us from both direct competitors and standard bank offerings currently available on the market,” says Rindom.