That's the exact claim. It's not a pure calculation on individual customer ROI. In most cases, grandfathering in existing customers (keeping in mind I'm not one of them for Brex, so have no axe to grind) is simply good business. The reputational benefit far outweighs the cost.
The flip side is that if you are evaluating vendors, this kind of stability is worth looking at:
- Do they have a track record of customer-disruptive pivots?
- Are they structured (e.g. have revenues or funding) to be around for the long-term? Or might they disappear overnight, taking your business down with them?
- Are you being subsidized for growth? Do you expect for this to flip to being a cash cow at some point?
The wisdom when I was younger was "No one got fired for buying IBM." It annoyed me at the time, but having done a few ventures, I understand that wisdom now. It takes 10-20 years for a unicorn to exit. If you have a dozen vendors who are positioned such that a pivot on their side can cripple your business, and those vendors have a mean time between such pivots of 5 years, you won't last long.
With both employees and vendors, a good thing to look at is history of value-creation. If an employee created value everywhere they've worked, they're probably a good hire. If they've burned value at each place they've been, they're probably a bad hire.