Brex Cash Review

So Brex Cash is like a bank account, but it's not a bank. And when I ask Brex how they're doing these things when they're not a bank, they told me the following, and I'm gonna quote. Brex is a bank account alternative. They do not hold a bank charter. It does however serve many of the same purposes. Brex Cash allows businesses to store, invest, spend, and track money. When you store unallocated funds with Brex Cash, the money is one of the company program banks, there receives expected FDIC insurance coverage of $250,000. If you prefer invest, Brex Cash also allows you to [unclear] cash and market mutual funds up to $500,000. Invested cash covered by SIPC if [unclear]. Oh, that was a mouthful.

So anyhow, they are a technology company who is partnering with banks to, in essence, create a bank like experience with your money. So it isn't a bank, but it's [unclear]. Brex is using the partner bank.

0:55 Features of the account

So some of the features of Brex Cash include, it's a bank account. It has a bank account number and a routing number, so you can transfer money via ACH or a wire. No fees for either the ACH or the wire. That's a pretty big deal.

No minimum balance, no minimum opening deposit, no monthly fees. So that's cooler than most banks.

You have the ability to earn business credit with no personal guarantee, and have access to Brex expense management. Higher rewards on spend with your cash account. So you generate rewards with your Brex credit card. Those get higher when you have Brex Cash account.

And there's this thing called instant revenue for ecommerce sellers, which I'm going to talk about later. So let's take a look at the Brex Cash account in the product and see what it looks like.

1:52 Opening a Brex Cash account

So here we are in the Brex dashboard. Let's go ahead and look at the process for creating a Brex Cash account. I've already got my Brex credit card set up, and looks like we just have to click apply now.

So I'm going to go through and I'm going to fill out the information here in this screen. A lot of that's already there. You gotta say if you're a controlling officer, so I'm gonna go ahead and fill that out. Looks like it's going to have me verify my identity.

All right, so my identity's been verified. I'm going to click done.

All right, now after a lot of identity verification, I've gotten to this point which says, look for an email from Brex within the next two to three days with further details on your account status. So gonna wait for that email and we'll go from there.

3:02 Inside the account

All right, so here we are a few days later. My account was approved. Let's see what's in Brex Cash.

So you'll see that I have my bank connected for the Brex credit card. It's asking me to deposit funds from the bank into the Brex account so that I can do stuff with that money. I have my available balance. Right now it's zero, I haven't put any money in. I have an actual bank account with an account number and routing number and all that stuff.

Looks like they are using the LendingClub Bank as the underlying banking partner to manage the money. I have the ability to do wires, so I have, looks like JPMorgan Chase and a SWIFT code for wires. And supposedly I'm going to get a Brex daily card that'll act more or less like a debit card. I have the ability to add vendors here so I can pay them. And then there's statements in here, which is what I'd expect from any bank.

So as you can see, it's got a very clean experience, very straightforward, easy to use.

4:13 Instant revenue for ecommerce sellers

Let me talk briefly about instant revenue, as it wasn't demonstrated in the account.

Essentially, your unpaid revenue from ecommerce platforms can be used towards credit on your Brex credit card or Brex Cash account. You can take money into the Brex Cash account for a fee. So as you know, you sell product on Amazon or another platform and there's a period before that money shows up in your bank account. As you integrate that with your Brex Cash account, you can start drawing on that. So you can, for a fee, can take money from Amazon for 1.5 percent fee, or 1.0 percent for other platforms.

The way this is done is by connecting the payout from the selling platforms to your Brex Cash account. And the platforms they have in their documentation include Amazon, Shopify, Stripe, Square, and PayPal.

5:05 Three thoughts on Brex Cash

So here are my thoughts on Brex Cash. Three points.

First, I like the ability to increase cash flow using instant revenue feature. This is a cool feature if you're selling online, something to consider if you're cash flow constrained. It's a new tool.

Second thing, the features appear easy to use but they're somewhat simple as of this review, which is September 2021. So if you're small and everything is done by one person, it might be a good fit. But if you have a more complex organization where you need lots of approvals, there's other solutions to accommodate that. Let's see how this product progresses.

I also love that there's no cost, no fees for moving money. That is really great. Any bank that charges fees, especially high fees, is lame.

Overall, Brex Cash feels like a solution for smaller businesses and sellers. When you get bigger and have more people involved, you're probably going to need something a little bit more complex, but it's a cool solution if you're small and getting started.

If you like this video, give me a thumbs up, subscribe to our channel, ask me a question in the comments and I'll answer it, possibly even make a video from your comments. And if you need help with Brex or other accounting services, reach out to LedgerGurus with the link below.