With Pleo’s smart business spend tool, businesses can enable employees to take ownership over their spending with company debit cards and an innovative app, whilst real-time data and insights are pulled together in the background to provide control over spending and full visibility for finance teams.

Up until now available funds have been loaded onto Pleo accounts via bank transfer, an arduous process, taking several days to complete and requiring manual triggering by the account admin via their banking interface every time it is required.

A key pain-point for businesses, Pleo saw an average of around half of all transactions declined due to lack of funds in the account, increasing over weekends and bank holidays. This not only results in missed opportunities but also potential disruption caused by late payments to services and tools within the business ecosystem.

Pleo has now teamed up with J.P. Morgan Payments to enable auto account top up via direct debit, removing the hassle for customers of having to manually top up their wallets, thereby enhancing the customer experience. This will also ensure funds are always available for spend and therefore reduce declines due to insufficient funds.

Pleo customers can now set a low balance threshold for each Pleo account and choose how much they would like to top up, once that limit is hit. When the account balance falls below the threshold, Pleo will automatically trigger a top-up of the confirmed amount, which can be paused or cancelled at any point.

Despite the benefits of such a solution, Pleo’s auto-top up is unique against its competitors in the business spend sector. In the first two months since launch of the service, Pleo has seen 10% of its customers sign up to the service.

Mette Gade, Pleo’s Chief Product Officer comments: ‘This next phase of Pleo’s work with J.P. Morgan Payments is a big step forward in our mission to simplify global business spend management. A piece of feedback we hear from many of our 25,000 customers is that manual processes steal their time away from important and more strategic work. So our goal is to take away this friction. Working with a trusted banking partner like J.P. Morgan Payments allows us to keep innovating whilst keeping our customers safe.’

Veronique Steiner, Head of EMEA High Growth Tech Sales, J.P. Morgan Payments added: ‘We are excited to bring our market leadership in payments automation to power Pleo’s innovative new spending solution. We are proud to be selected to support Pleo on the next step of their journey to provide best-in-class spending solutions to its clients’.

Pleo customer Saltus Partners comments: “The auto top up functionality is a great way to make sure there are sufficient funds on Pleo, instead of me and colleagues in finance constantly having to keep an eye on the Pleo Wallet balance”.

This is the start of an exciting roadmap for Pleo with product expansion firmly on the horizon. Auto-top up is currently live across all Pleo markets.