My own businesses used personal credit cards, because (like most businesses) they couldn't qualify for credit in their own name.
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This is quite common. In addition, even when a business can get a corporate card, the market standard is to require a personal guarantee.
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This means that, if your startup goes under, the bank has recourse against you (or your employees!) personally. You pay as agreed or your personal credit takes the hit.
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Issuers don't just ask for the personal guarantee to mitigate risk. They do it because they don't have good ways to underwrite businesses at scale. People are simpler and, in the US, have much more extensive credit records.
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This means that you functionally can't get a corporate card for a business, *even a relatively successful business*, if you don't have good personal credit.
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This often hits young entrepreneurs, ones recovering from business or personal setbacks, and entrepreneurs who only recently immigrated to the US.
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Thus, the Stripe Corporate Card. It's an actual corporate charge card, issued to your business. No personal guarantee required. No personal credit check.
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"So how do you underwrite it, then?" A bit of secret sauce, as you'd imagine, but in the case where your business processes revenue on Stripe, we can make some pretty informed guesses on whether you have non-zero revenue. That is a hard thing for banks to know. Really.
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We also have an option where you can Plaid into your business bank account, and then we math out how much credit we can extend that business, based on demonstrated cash flows.
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As much as I love credit card rewards and maximizing for them, this is *almost never* the best use of founder brainsweat. You should be building things or talking to customers. So we made the card optimize itself rather than having a complicated point system.
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It picks your top two categories monthly and rewards 2% cash back; everything else gets 1%. You can have any reward you want, as long as it is an automatically applied statement credit.
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To sweeten the deal, we added a fee waiver for $50k of Stripe processing volume (after you spend $5k on the card), and a number of other startup-supporting companies threw something into the pot.
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This prominently includes AWS, which will give you $5k of credits if you sign up for the card. If you use AWS, this is a *screamingly* good deal. (Their standard promotional terms apply, including eventual expiry. c.f. https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/ )
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There are also some niceties about having your logo on it, expense management (including a very slick SMS-powered interface), virtual cards, etc etc, but the above is what was most interesting to me personally.
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The Corporate Card, and our Capital launch earlier , are just a few of the ways that we hope to start fixing business' money challenges in addition to handling revenue. If you've got ideas for things that would help you, let us know.
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