Pleo: Solving SMBs’ “Frankenstein” Finance Problem

For many small and medium-sized businesses, the modern finance stack looks impressive on paper. There are tools for expenses, tools for payments, tools for accounting, tools for payroll. Yet when it comes time to close the books at the end of the week, month, or quarter, finance teams often find themselves manually stitching everything together.

In this conversation, Kunal Galav, who leads Pleo, describes this as the “Frankenstein problem” — a collection of disconnected tools that fail to deliver a single, coherent source of truth.

Pleo has spent the past decade building spend management solutions for SMBs across Europe, now serving 45,000 customers. Its focus is simple but powerful: reduce manual effort, give finance teams real-time visibility, and make every financial decision a smarter one. By capturing expenses at the point of transaction, aligning them with policy, and automating bookkeeping, Pleo claims to reduce manual expense processing time by around 80% and save finance teams up to 70% of their time.

But rather than trying to build an all-encompassing financial super-app, Pleo is now extending its capabilities through Pleo. The strategy recognises that SMBs increasingly want everything in one place — but that “one place” may already be the bank, the vertical SaaS platform, or the accounting provider they trust.

Instead of competing with those platforms, Pleo enables them. Through embedded partnerships, banks, PSPs, and software providers can integrate spend management capabilities directly into their core offerings — powered by Pleo, but delivered within the partner’s ecosystem.

The logic is mutual value creation. SMBs gain seamless spend management without adding another standalone tool. Partners increase retention, loyalty, and product relevance within their customer base. Everyone benefits from a unified experience rather than another disconnected add-on.

Long-standing partnerships, including a decade of collaboration with Mastercard, have helped shape this playbook. Having scaled alongside established financial institutions, Pleo understands both fintech agility and enterprise integration requirements.

Looking ahead to 2026, the focus is on bringing early pilots to life and scaling embedded partnerships across Europe. The ambition remains consistent: reduce complexity for finance teams, provide real-time data visibility, and help European businesses thrive.

At its core, the mission is straightforward. Remove friction. Automate the manual. And replace the “Frankenstein” stack with something that actually works together.

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