We announced the Stripe Corporate Card today: https://stripe.com/corporate-card I'm quite enthusiastic and have some observations in my personal capacity, as an entrepreneur and credit card geek.
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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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Cash in could be from any number of sources that aren't revenue. Banks are, in the main, not comfortable that they can reconstruct what your cash flow statement probably says / should say.
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For a small business D&B is just random guesses.
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