Firms’ finance teams can find themselves bogged down with time-consuming administrative tasks as they expand their services and take on more employees. One firm looking to alleviate this burdensome responsibility is Moss.
Moss, the spend management platform, closed an $86million Series B last year, setting its eyes on the UK market in 2024. To learn more about the company and its offerings, we spoke to Iain McDougall, chief revenue officer of Moss.
Tell us more about your company and its offering
Moss is a fully-integrated spend management platform, enabling small and medium-sized European businesses to proactively manage their company spend. We digitise finance workflows, automate accounting processes, and provide transparency and control over expenditures.
All in all, we ensure customers navigate their financial processes with ease and effectiveness, and help them save enormous amounts of time, while increasing accuracy.
What problem was your company set up to solve?
Moss was conceived to tackle the numerous challenges which accompany managing the finances of an SMB. We wanted to create a harmonious integrated system which allows companies to automate and digitise their finance workflows, and move away from the laborious manual processes which take up so much time. In doing so, finance teams would be freed up to focus on bigger-picture strategic work, and move away from being simply ‘number crunchers’.
Since launch, how has your company evolved?
Like many fintechs, Moss launched with a solution to a single, simple problem. In our case, it was giving SMEs an effective modern solution for corporate card spend. As time progressed, our scope expanded; we introduced value-added software on top of our card services providing customers with even more transparency and ease of use.
Presently, our primary focus is on providing exceptional solutions for finance teams and spenders within SMEs. We want to empower them with complete control over the entire spend management process. This includes everything from initial planning and budgeting to the expenditure via cards and invoices, integrated payments, reconciliation, and gaining insightful analyses.
What has been the biggest challenge or most ‘tricky moment’ to overcome?
Navigating new markets in the current macroeconomic climate brings its fair share of challenges, particularly in terms of growth. However, drawing on my personal experience in fintech and leveraging Moss’ strengths — such as the ability to attract and retain top-tier talent, fostering a transparent and data-driven culture, delivering an excellent product, and demonstrating a profound understanding of our customers’ pain points — we’ve achieved remarkable success.
This is evidenced by triple-digit+ year-over-year growth across all key metrics.
For our customers, this transformative journey translates to significant value, with a 47 per cent increase in finance team productivity, an 80 per cent reduction in errors, and a 27 per cent acceleration in employee reimbursement processes. Collectively in the last year alone, we have saved our customers’ finance teams 39,000 business days’ worth of time.
What are your biggest achievements or ‘proudest moment’ so far?
I’ve spent quite a few years in fintech and payments, with the privilege of contributing to the rapid growth of some remarkable companies. The past few years have definitely posed challenges for the fintech industry (and indeed all venture-backed companies). Especially when you consider pressures from the macro climate.
I’ve had proud moments at every fintech I’ve been a part of. Each has had its specific challenges and pain-points, and each has had a clear success story in overcoming them.
A common theme has been helping each grow in providing a single, core financial service (e.g payment processing, card issuing, etc.) and turn them into genuine software companies that have been able to grow fast, and evolve as market demands and opportunities have changed. As a result, they’ve been able to successfully deliver a continual stream of valuable and powerful software wrapped around the core financial service
How would you describe the culture of your company?
We’re impact-focused (outcomes are more important than just inputs and outputs). We value quality over quantity. We prioritise transparency and openness in our workplace, and we pride ourselves on being adaptable. We’re a young company – although with success which belies our years – working in an exciting and quickly-changing industry.
What’s in store for the future?
This is just the beginning for Moss, and the future holds enormous potential. Our initial goal was centred around addressing the corporate card and spend management challenge. However, the past few years have illuminated numerous adjacent issues that finance teams within SMEs contend with – issues we are well-positioned to assist with.
Ultimately, we’re focused on delivering exceptional software and dependable payment capabilities and empowering finance teams to automate their end-to-end workflows. This includes tasks like managing accounts payable. This strategic approach aims to provide these teams with enhanced visibility and control over company spending. Ultimately, this will save them valuable time and resources during monthly book closures.
