
Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies - hdubugras
Hi HN,<p>Henrique here from Brex. We just launched a corporate card specially tailored for life sciences companies (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brex.com&#x2F;industry&#x2F;life-sciences" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brex.com&#x2F;industry&#x2F;life-sciences</a>), and every time we launch something new we get a lot of questions about how we chose to prioritize this feature or product, so I thought it’d be interesting to share here with the HN community. While I’ve previously posted about launching our initial tech startup card (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17418813" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17418813</a>), the decision to launch Life Sciences was much different in that we already had two existing products in the market with their own long list of improvements we wanted to make to them.<p>Here’s my blog post going into much more detail (couldn’t fit it here): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brex.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-we-chose-our-third-vertical" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brex.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-we-chose-our-third-vertical</a>.<p>Would love to get your thoughts and feel free to ask any questions you might have.
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neilsense
It would be easier to take Brex more seriously if they implemented basic
security practices like 2-factor for login.

Especially as virtual cards and transactions are shown without any kind of
additional checks after a basic username/password login flow.

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hdubugras
Thanks for the feedback and totally understand where you're coming from. We're
working on adding these security measures in the near term. We care a lot
about security too - one of the reasons we started Brex and made virtual cards
a feature is that it is a much more secure payments tool. We started on the
acquiring side where fraud is a huge issue and we're looking forward to adding
more security features shortly.

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vorpalhex
If you cared a lot about security, wouldn't you have built the platform on
basic security methods like 2fa and hard sign in from the start? Surely
patching these in afterwards will leave gaps. Are there other important
security precautions coming "in the near term" like encryption at rest?

~~~
Aloha
Is 2fa a norm in the corporate card market?

I've carried a handful of different corporate cards, and do not recall even
being offered an option for it.

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alphagrep12345
May not be the right post to ask, but here I go.

I am a credit card geek and am very interested in this space. I have some
questions

1\. Your rewards are insane. How do you even manage to give 7x on rideshare?

2\. Most millennials and Gen Z spend a lot on rideshare, Airbnbs, online
subscriptions and restaurants. Many personal credit cards provide rewards only
on restaurants, but not on any of the other categories. It's a huge untapped
market. Do you see entering personal credit card space in near future?

~~~
hdubugras
Great question!

1.) 7x on rideshare is a lot but if you think about the portfolio of spend for
a company, most of it is not on rideshare. Since our offering is superior,
people usually put all of their spend on Brex, which helps us make up for the
amount of money we're giving away on ride share. We also get back discounts
from vendors. In general though, we believe in providing the most value to
customers, so we're ok with giving away more rewards than the other corporate
cards out there.

2.) The personal credit card space is interesting, but our mission for now is
to accelerate entrepreneurs, which means we're focusing on building the best
possible financial products for businesses. The market for this is huge, so we
still have a long ways to go

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jfarlow
Small biotech cofounder here - curious how you think about lab supplies and
interactions with other of your customers. One thing that is curious is that
you have a list of your life-science customers, but that's also a list of
clients/suppliers for other of your clients. Is there any (potential)
interaction in that regard between your clients? That seems to be one of the
'perks' in the generic tech industry - trading services between horizontal
players. That might be a useful strategy here too. Even more than I want Uber
rides, I want DNA, RNA, and other biotech services & products (that might be
provided by these other clients).

Also curious about your interaction with CLSA - they're a pretty cool group
that, as you mention, serves as a node or hub in the community. What does your
interaction with them look like? To some extent they already provide some
portal into the larger lab suppliers. It's not on the payment side, but more
on the buying power itself.

Helping comply with government-approved accounting would also be a very nice
feature for those of us that make use of SBIR-type grants. Though I suspect
that that would mostly be true for much smaller biotech startups.

~~~
hdubugras
Thanks for the questions! To your first point, there's definitely some
potential interaction between our customers. We're not quite sure what that
will look like right now, but we do have our eyes on that in the future. We
offer discounts on goods and services through our rewards portal so there's
always the possibility of getting customers involved with that.

We're actually partnered with CLSA! You can read more about that here
([https://finance.yahoo.com/news/brex-launches-first-
corporate...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/brex-launches-first-corporate-
card-130000526.html)) and if you're a CLSA member you'll start to see some
communication about our partnership in the coming days/weeks.

Helping you comply with SBIR-type grants is definitely something we're
researching. We actually already have some expense management tools (such as
our receipt capture/handling) that make it easier to comply and will continue
to work to make them better.

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ValentineC
Another credit card geek here, and also a conference organiser.

How are you detecting conference ticket purchases?

~~~
hdubugras
We leverage merchant level data that's provided by the networks as an input
into our auto categorization system, which uses Google Places API and some
simple machine learning. We then overlay randomly sampled manual inspections
to ensure quality

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alphagrep12345
I looked at your careers page to get an idea of internal teams and I didn't
find any fraud related teams. How do you handle credit card fraud? Do you
outsource it?

~~~
hdubugras
We handle fraud in-house through a joint effort of a variety of teams
(customer experience, operations, engineering, etc.) and even have a webpage
dedicated to it [https://brex.com/fraud/](https://brex.com/fraud/) :)

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boltzmannbrain
Biotech-AI founder here. Already using Brex and love it!

On the new life sciences support,

1\. How do you know which companies? Do we need to explicitly sign-up/transfer
to a life sciences program?

2\. Are the life sciences rewards in addition to or replacing the standard
Brex rewards [1]?

Also a feature request while you're here: Easy payment a la Chase QuickPay.

[1] [https://brex.com/startups/](https://brex.com/startups/)

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johnmax
Hey, we are a startup in Germany. When are you going to come to
Germany/Europe?

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grepper
Henrique - this is super cool. Really fascinating and inspiring to follow your
success.

Unrelated to today's announcement, but curious if you could share a bit about
your origins in "making a new credit card from scratch" at all: forming a
relationship with a bank, card network, etc.

How difficult was it to even enter the space at all - any top takeaways or
learnings? Non-obvious struggles you may have had to overcome?

