Pleo pivots to corporate credit cards and European expansion with help from JP Morgan and Mastercard

By shifting from prepaid cards to credit cards, Pleo is narrowing its competition.

Business banking provider Pleo announced a dramatic shift today, ditching prepaid spending cards in exchange for credit cards.

To-date Pleo has offered company cards for employees combined with smart expense reporting to help managers and owners oversee spending.

Today CEO Jeppe Rindom announced the startup’s new partnership with financial giants JP Morgan and Mastercard.

“Collaborating with JP Morgan and Mastercard will... 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.”

Shifting to credit cards puts Pleo in a different category from its current rivals like Soldo or even Tide, which behind their shiny apps don’t actually extend credit to their customers.

Now Pleo’s offering is becoming far more akin to Brex in the US, or a corporate card from American Express.

The news today comes after Pleo raised $56m last May, Denmark’s largest Series B round at the time, to expand beyond its current markets of Denmark, Ireland, Spain, the UK, Sweden and Germany.

Shifting its business towards credit cards will let Pleo launch that expansion, with the startup launching in Spain and Ireland this year with an additional two unnamed markets by the end of the year.

Rindom also teased several upcoming features that will be enabled by the new partnerships with Mastercard and JP Morgan, including “out of pocket expenses and mileage, subscription management, instant credit approvals and invoice payments”.