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Comment by pedrofranceschi | Hacker News Reader

Pedro here, co-founder of Brex (YC W’17, https://brex.com/) writing about a major product update. In June 2018 we first shared with the HN community the launch of our corporate card for startups. Here’s our first post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418813

Just as we built our underwriting and issuing platform from scratch, we built our rewards platform internally, rather than use third-party software that typically comes as a module within existing bank industry softwares.

I have outlined the technical details of what we built in this blogpost. Would love to hear some feedback from the HN community :)

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I have been seeing billboards for Brex on my way to or back from US101, saying BrexIt. Always caught my eye, making me think it must make SEO pretty hard. :)

Either way, good luck. Looks like a good platform.

Thanks! :)

I am surprised that Google/Facebook ad spend is not showing up as a major spend category in your reports, which seems to have led to the 1x earn-to-spend ratio for that use case. I know of several companies that use Amex Business Gold because they get a higher ratio on their ad spend.

It's something we thought a lot about as we had to pick the categories most important to our customers. What we heard is that dining and travel were more important since they are so commonly offered by other cards that people didnt want to feel like they were "missing out" by using Brex. Most of the feedback was that people like using Brex and all of the features and tech - and rewards was a way for the customer to make sure they were gaining something using Brex - and we do offer points on ad spend. Also, one cool feature where we help with ads is we actually clean the vendor, so rather than seeing GoogleAds or Facebook Ads followed by a bunch of numbers - with Brex you get one clean merchant name and that helps the user aggregate all spend by vendor - a lot of users love this feature

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