Company adds executives, doubles user base as customers add the power of virtual cards to their business credit cards of choice
Extend, a leading virtual card and spend management platform, had a strong 2022 as customers embraced the opportunity to add powerful controls and insights to their business credit cards. Since its founding nearly six years ago, Extend has empowered companies to turn their existing credit card into a spend management platform. Last year alone, Extend, which has more than 5,000 customers and processes billions of dollars of charge volume, doubled the number of active users on its platform and tripled its charge volume.
With Extend’s user-friendly Web and mobile apps, customers can easily create, send, and manage virtual cards, and ultimately control spending across their organizations. Extend is the first to offer business owners, finance leaders, and administrators a way to create virtual cards with the credit card in their pockets. Thousands of businesses – including the division-winning NFL Jacksonville Jaguars – now use Extend to create virtual cards with customized limits and controls; set budgets for specific recipients and expenses; and automate payment reconciliation as it happens.
In 2022, Extend opened a new office in New York City and doubled its team from 45 to 90 employees. The company hired David Blaha as chief revenue officer and Savan Hacknorath as chief people officer. A veteran of the payments industry with 25 years of leadership experience at American Express, Blaha joined Extend to lead sales, business development, and partnerships. Hacknorath comes to Extend from BSE Global, the parent company of Barclays Center and the Brooklyn Nets, where she was head of human resources and worked with C-level executives to build high-performing teams. In the coming year, Extend expects to further increase its team by 20%, starting with roles in engineering.
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Extend released numerous enhancements to its spend management platform in 2022, so most customers can:
- Manage company spend through new organizational features
- Enforce company policies through new receipt management controls
- Further reduce potential fraud or misuse through increased card controls
- Leverage mobile wallet to support employees on the go
- Support end-to-end reconciliation processes with integrations into preferred accounting platforms
- Deliver improved user experience with streamlined workflows and to-dos
The company also launched an open API integration—an industry-first offering that enables customers to seamlessly integrate payments into their core business applications from the very card account they already have with their bank. Security and compliance remained high priority in 2022, as well, with the launches of multi-factor authentication and expanded sanctions screening services. Finally, Extend achieved compliance under the forthcoming PCI DSS 4.0 standard and successfully completed its SOC2 audit for the third straight year.
Key partnership announcements in 2022 included those with Bank of the West, Bank of Montreal (the first organization to offer Extend’s solution in Canada), and HSBC. Extend, which now supports payments in multiple currencies, also signed expanded partnerships with Mastercard and TSYS, and reinforced existing partnerships. These institutions join a growing list of Extend partners across the payments ecosystem, including credit card issuers, networks, and processors.
“We made great strides in 2022, with strategic hires, partnerships, and product enhancements. Today, more than half of all small and mid-market businesses in the U.S. have a credit card that can already be used with Extend, with additional partnerships to come,” said Andrew Jamison, CEO and co-founder of Extend. “In 2023, we look forward to helping even more SMBs use virtual cards in ways that were once only available to large enterprises.”
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