Fifth Third teams up with Brex for agentic commercial cards | PaymentsSource

• Key insights: Fifth Third has teamed up with Brex in a multiyear partnership for commercial card issuance. 
• What’s at stake: The deal gives Fifth Third a more competitive commercial card proposition and helps boost Brex’s distribution network.  
• Forward look: The pending Visa-Mastercard settlement with merchants could increase demand for agentic workflows in commercial cards. 

Fifth Third is accelerating its embrace of agentic artificial intelligence by adding supporting technology from financial software seller Brex. 

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A new partnership enables Brex to power Fifth Thirds commercial cards, which are built on Brex Embedded, the fintech’s proprietary API-based payments infrastructure. Brex cards allow its customers to automate expense management workflows using agentic artificial intelligence. 

“The partnership brings the next level of advisory and support for the whole commercial payments value chain that we’ve been working on through our managed services [and] Newline,” Brigit Chayt, head of commercial payments at Fifth Third, told American Banker. “More and more our customers are telling us that in this environment, they want to be spending more time on strategy and what’s the right competitive response to an ever changing landscape. They don’t want to be spending time with their spreadsheets and closing the books and trying to figure out how to allocate payments.”   

Brex’s AI agent handles tasks that would traditionally be performed by back office, Art Levy, chief business officer at Brex, told American Banker. 

“You used to have someone who is reviewing expenses, doing your bill pay auditing, doing payments, doing your accounting,” Levy said. “Now it is all in an agentic workflow.” 

There are four main agents that Brex deploys, Levy said. The first is the expense agent that grabs receipts. Then there’s the review agent, which makes sure all the expenses are actually covered under the company’s expense policy, such as alcohol with a meal. There’s also an auditing agent, which eliminates the need for a business operating system and offshore review, and an accounting agent, which syncs the Brex charges into the company’s enterprise resource planning tool. 

The deal gives Fifth Third a more competitive card proposition while also boosting Brex’s distribution network, Eric Grover, principal at Intrepid Ventures, told American Banker. 

The partnership is an acknowledgment by Fifth Third that commercial cards have moved beyond employee convenience and short-term lines of credit to being thought of as an integral part of cashflow, treasury and expense management, Aaron Press, research director at IDC, told American Banker. 

“Fifth Third was already the issuer of some Brex cards, but this puts the bank more in control and gives them a stronger message to take to market,” Press said. “The pending deal to acquire Comerica, which has a commercial card portfolio, is likely a consideration as well.” 

For Brex, the partnership helps the company move up market to organizations that value the stability of a larger bank, Press said. 

“The deal is an acknowledgment that their value comes from the platform more than the cards themselves,” Press said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Brex partnering with other banks to adopt the Brex platform to boost commercial card portfolios.” 

It is also a “big win” for Brex, Aaron McPherson, principal, AFM Consulting, told American Banker. “Getting 8% of commercial card volume at a stroke is pretty good.”

The two companies did not disclose the economics of the partnership. Commercial cards are one of the most profitable card types for issuers with an average interchange of about 3%. 

The deal is the latest example of how agentic AI is finding its way into every facet of payments. Commercial cards are a great beneficiary of agentic AI because of its ability to automate the most time-consuming back-office accounting tasks, Richard Crone, CEO of Crone Consulting LLC, told American Banker. 

“When combined with the functionality of agentic payments, [commercial cards] can finally deliver on the 30-year promise of automated B2B workflows by fusing Level-3 SKU-level data, policy controls and ERP integration before, during and after every transaction,” according to Crone. 

Level-3 data, such as SKU information, quantity, tax, unit price, and location, is important to companies because it turns the commercial card into a workflow object. 

“Only this product type provides the enriched payload required for pre-approval scripting, automated audit, contract validation, invoice adjudication, procurement procedures and policy enforcement inside ERP,” Crone said. 

Crone Consulting independently estimates that agentic invoice workflows can reduce processing costs for companies by 20% to 45% when tightly integrated with electronic invoice presentment and payment software. 

The pending Visa-Mastercard settlement with merchants could further bolster demand for agentic workflows in commercial cards if merchants start surcharging different card types. 

“Because demand for commercial card use is economically inelastic (employees must use the employer card to be reimbursed), commercial cards will be the first to be surcharged at checkout since the employee using them has no practical alternative,” Crone said. 

“Agentic workflows provide the ROI counterweight to surcharging,” he said. “Even if a merchant adds 2% to 4% in convenience fees, enterprises still net savings through automated pre-trip approvals, guided purchase paths, AI-generated expense reports, zero-touch invoice adjudication, and automated reconciliation.”