Centime and Fyle Team to Bolster Small Business Spend Management

Small-business-focused cash management solutions provider Centime has teamed with expense management firm Fyle.

The collaboration expands Centime’s platform to give finance teams fuller control over spending and cash flow, the companies said in a Wednesday (Oct. 30) news release.

As the release noted, Centime’s cash management offers accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR) and banking solutions, and is now expanding to include Fyle’s expense tracking, reporting and reimbursement capabilities.

“Expense management is vital to any CFO’s cash strategy,” said BC Krishna, CEO and founder of Centime. “Our partnership with Fyle delivers a comprehensive approach to managing not just payables and receivables, but now employee expenses as well. We’re tackling cash management from all angles, to give CFOs clear line-of-sight and control across all their cash inflows and outflows.”

The release argued that businesses hoping to scale require real-time visibility and control over spending if they hope to optimize working capital. Centime’s collaboration with Fyle empowers CFOs to automate expense approvals, enforce policies, and gain instant visibility into spending, while controlling cash flow.

The partnership comes amid — as PYMNTS wrote Wednesday — a revolution in expense management, one that is being held back by legacy systems.

“For companies with extensive legacy systems, the transition to a modern B2B payment platform requires time, investment and operational overhaul,” that report said. “Legacy infrastructure, often built on fragmented systems and siloed data, cannot easily adapt to the real-time, integrated functionality that today’s expense management tools offer.”

Older systems often lack flexibility, the report added, creating friction for companies chasing seamless integration and transparency. Legacy payment rails, such as ACH and wire transfers, are often slower and less efficient when up against newer methods like real-time payments.

And although new, AI-powered expense management tools can optimize internal processes, their impact is in the end held back by the traditional payments infrastructure on which many incumbents still depend.

Jonathan Vaux, head of propositions and partnerships at Thredd, told PYMNTS earlier this year that while corporate solutions have progressed, they often lag consumer-centric solutions, with many employees still resorting to personal tools for their travel needs, suggesting a gap between corporate and consumer experiences.

“There are lots of great things about card rails, but you’re trying to force the message into the message structure of the card, as opposed to using separate data API processes,” Vaux said. “Fundamentally, a lot of the technology now exists that didn’t exist 20 years ago that could enable a more optimized experience.”