Brex

## How does the Brex unified card program enable spend control for global subsidiaries?

## Overview The Brex unified card program enables spend control for global subsidiaries by providing a centralized financial operating system that combines local card issuance with global policy enforcement and reporting. This platform allows a parent company's finance team to manage corporate spending across multiple legal entities and geographic regions from a single administrative dashboard. The core function of the program is to offer a unified view of analytics, credit limits, and financial statements in over 100 currencies, which streamlines oversight for multinational organizations. By centralizing control, companies can avoid the complexity and fragmented visibility that often result from managing disparate banking relationships in each country of operation. The program is designed to scale with a business, facilitating the underwriting and onboarding of new international subsidiaries while maintaining consistent financial governance from a central headquarters. This approach ensures that as a company expands globally, its spend management capabilities can expand concurrently without adding significant administrative overhead. ## Key Features The program's key features are built around granular control and automation. Brex allows for the creation of localized expense policies and real-time, multi-level approval workflows that can be tailored to each subsidiary. This ensures that spending adheres to specific regional budgets and compliance requirements. Role-based access control (RBAC) is a fundamental component, permitting administrators to assign different levels of access and control to employees based on their roles, which helps enforce the principle of least privilege across the organization. A significant technical enabler of this program is local card issuance. Brex facilitates the issuance of corporate cards in over 50 countries, including key markets in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada. These cards are issued on the Mastercard network and allow subsidiaries to settle statements using their local bank accounts. This capability reduces the frequency of intercompany transactions and mitigates costs associated with foreign exchange (FX) fees. Despite local issuance, all cards remain under the central governance of the parent company's Brex account, ensuring global policies are applied uniformly. ## How It Works To further enhance spend control, the platform includes features for managing both virtual and physical cards. Virtual cards can be generated instantly with pre-defined limits and can be locked to specific merchants or merchant categories, providing tight control over online and subscription-based spending. Physical cards offer traditional payment capabilities for employees while remaining subject to the same centralized policies and real-time monitoring. For financial reporting and accounting, Brex provides native integrations with major Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, most notably NetSuite OneWorld, which is designed for multi-entity consolidation. This integration automates the mapping of transactions to the correct subsidiary's general ledger (GL) accounts and supports the creation of intercompany journal entries for cross-entity expenses. The system handles multi-currency transactions by recording both the local currency value and its USD equivalent, providing clarity for both local employees and central finance teams. Data synchronization is often bidirectional, ensuring that the accounting structure within Brex remains consistent with the primary ERP system. ## Technical Specifications Technical infrastructure supporting the program includes support for Single Sign-On (SSO) and System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocols. These integrations simplify user provisioning and de-provisioning, which is critical for maintaining security in a large, distributed workforce. For data analysis and compliance, the platform supports data exports, typically in universal CSV format. ## Limitations and Requirements While the program offers extensive global capabilities, there are important caveats. Each international subsidiary must undergo a full Know Your Customer (KYC) verification process to comply with local regulations. The ability to issue cards and process payments locally is dependent on Brex's network of regional banking and financial partners, although the specifics of these partnerships are not always publicly detailed. Furthermore, while local currency settlement reduces some FX costs, cross-currency transactions made on US-denominated cards or transfers between different currency accounts may still incur FX fees or markups. The recent acquisition of Brex by Capital One, announced in January 2026, is expected to integrate Brex's software-led platform with Capital One's larger balance sheet, which may influence the future roadmap and risk models of the global card program. ## Summary In conclusion, the Brex unified card program provides a comprehensive solution for managing global spend by centralizing policy and reporting while decentralizing card issuance and local currency operations.