EXCLUSIVE: “The Power of Foresight” – Kunal Galav, Marija Nakevska and Jérémie Bouguéon, Pleo in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Pleo is moving beyond spend management to provide enterprise-level cash intelligence to SMEs

For much of its life, the Pleo platform has been synonymous with smart spend management. It was designed to bring clarity, control and autonomy to company expenses, and it’s carved out a strong position in Europe’s fintech ecosystem by addressing a familiar frustration: the disconnect between employees spending company money and finance teams trying to track it after the fact.

But, as the needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) have evolved, so too has Pleo’s ambition. Its newly-launched cash management suite marks one significant pivot. It moves the company beyond expense tracking and into a broader, more strategic role at the heart of business finance.

This is not simply a product expansion.

It is a reframing of what Pleo is: from a tool that monitors spending to a platform that orchestrates it. One that connects spend, cash, payments and decision-making into a single, continuous flow.

The fragmentation problem

A useful way to understand the switch is to revisit the challenge Pleo’s Chief Finance Officer Søren Westh-Lønning called out in previous interviews for this magazine. He has described SMEs as operating in a ‘decision-making crisis’, where data is growing exponentially but the ability to turn it into meaningful insight is lagging behind.

Jérémie Bouguéon, Product Marketing Lead, Cash Flow Domain at Pleo, sharpens that diagnosis further. The issue, he argues, is not a lack of data – but a lack of trusted, connected data.

“Finance teams are getting stuck doing data plumbing instead of decision-making,” he says. “They’re often using three or more tools just to manage cash. It can take up to five hours a week just to consolidate a view.”

That time cost is more than an inconvenience, it is symptomatic of a deeper structural issue. Fragmentation forces finance teams into a reactive stance, where they are constantly reconciling, validating and stitching together information rather than interpreting it; a limitation which comes with a significant opportunity cost in a highly competitive marketplace.

Disconnected systems, manual processes and disparate data streams don’t just slow teams down, they actively undermine confidence. Pleo’s own research found that two in five business leaders do not feel confident in the financial agility of their company. It’s a drag that SMEs, which thrive best when nimble, can ill afford. That lack of alignment is something echoed at executive level.

As Marija Nakevska, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Pleo, puts it: “You can have the sales lead, marketing and finance all showing up with different data, and the conversation becomes about which data is correct, rather than what actually matters for the business.”

The result is not just inefficiency and missed opportunity but, in some cases, risk as well.

“Too often, this means that leaders get surprised,” she adds. “They haven’t had clear visibility of their cash position, and they’re simply reacting too late.”

This confusion hasn’t happened by accident. It is the by-product of a decade of fintech innovation that has delivered best-in-class point solutions for almost every financial task – payments, expenses, payroll, forecasting – without necessarily connecting them into a coherent whole. It’s solution soup: a toolkit that looks sophisticated on paper but breaks down under pressure.

From rear view to open vista Pleo’s cash management suite is all about moving finance from hindsight to foresight.

“The big change we’re seeing is teams moving from reactive cash management to proactive control, so cash becomes a lever for growth,” says Bouguéon. “Behind decision paralysis is a combination of uncertainty and high stakes,” he continues. “In a volatile environment, the cost of being wrong goes up, but the cost of waiting goes up, too. By the time you update a manual spreadsheet, the window to act has closed.”

That tension is particularly acute for SMEs, where margins are tighter, and the consequences of misjudging cash flow are more immediate. Decisions around hiring, inventory, expansion or pricing all hinge on accurate, timely financial information.

“Finance leaders have the responsibility to make decisions, but they don’t have the tools to support them,” says Nakevska. “They’re often getting information only at the end of the month, after a lot of manual work.”

That delay creates a dangerous lag between reality and perception – one that can lead to poor decisions or missed opportunities. The demand for more timely, consolidated information is clear. According to Pleo’s research, 70 per cent of businesses say tools that enable real-time decision-making are vital for success, which might explain why Pleo is taking such a significant punt on investing in better, more joined-up systems.

“What finance leaders are asking for is decision speed with confidence,” Bouguéon says. “To unlock that, you need to turn raw transactions into actionable intelligence.”

What Pleo has developed is something closer to a full-service financial assistant: a system that consolidates accounts, entities and currencies into a single, unified interface for finance teams. At a functional level, that means answering the questions that matter most to SMEs: Do we have enough liquidity to cover payroll? Which account should fund which payment? Where are we exposed to foreign exchange costs? How can we deploy surplus cash more effectively?

At a strategic level, it means elevating finance from a reporting function to a decision-making engine, one that actively shapes business outcomes and helps identify risks before they materialise, highlights opportunities to optimise cash, and enables teams to act in real time. It also fundamentally changes how finance interacts with the rest of the business. Instead of being a checkpoint at the end of a process, it becomes embedded in decision-making from the outset – informing strategy, guiding trade-offs and enabling faster execution.

That insight sits at the heart of Pleo’s evolution. And, for Nakevska, its cash management suite, bringing spend and cash management under one roof with real-time visibility, automation and multi-currency control, was a logical fork in Pleo’s journey.

“For years, we’ve helped businesses simplify how they spend,” she says. “Cash management is the next step – helping them simplify their entire financial view.”

And it doesn’t take a genius to realise how attractive that sounds to other finance providers. Kunal Galav is Vice President of Pleo Embedded and responsible for delivering its scalable business-to-business embedded finance solutions.

“SMEs have all these wonderful tools,” he says, “but they still have to sit at the end of the week or month trying to bring everything together. That’s the biggest pain point.

“They’re saying: ‘I have the tools across my business requirements, but it doesn’t solve my problem because I don’t know what’s happening when I actually need to know it’.

“Pleo Embedded is solving that same problem, but through the platforms that they already use.”

Banks, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms and payment providers can integrate Pleo’s capabilities directly into their own products – bringing spend and cash management into the processes on which SMEs’ existing workflows are built rather than forcing them to adopt another standalone tool.

The commercial logic is compelling. Partners gain deeper engagement, higher retention and greater relevance among their SME customers, while businesses gain access to financial tools in environments they already trust.

This approach also reflects a broader change in fintech distribution. Increasingly, value is created not just through product innovation, billion transactions in 2025, while SMEs account for nearly 90 per cent of businesses globally and more than half of employment.

This approach also reflects a broader change in fintech distribution. Increasingly, value is created not just through product innovation, but through how and where that product is delivered. By embedding its capabilities into partner ecosystems, Pleo positions itself as infrastructure rather than destination – a subtle but significant shift.

“Rather than building everything, we want to enable our partners to offer spend management, powered by Pleo, to be successful together in the market,” says Galav. “We have already started the pilots and in 2026, we will be bringing them to life.”

Scale, partnerships and the Mastercard link

That partner-led model in itself isn’t new, but its centrality to Pleo’s strategy, is. Pleo already serves 45,000 SME customers across Europe, and the same infrastructure is now being extended through its partner ecosystem.

Its relationship with Mastercard is particularly significant, and it’s helped shape Pleo’s approach to distribution, integration and scaling across European markets. Mastercard is pursuing a parallel vision. Its recently launched Virtual C-Suite – including a ‘virtual CFO’ – is designed to bring executive-level financial intelligence to SMEs.

The scale of that ambition is considerable.

Mastercard’s network processed around 175 billion transactions in 2025, while SMEs account for nearly 90 per cent of businesses globally and more than half of employment. Both approaches point in the same direction: the democratisation of financial intelligence – delivering insights, automation and control to a segment that has historically lacked access to enterprise-grade tooling.

A crucial piece of this puzzle is Pleo’s multi-currency capability. For SMEs operating across borders, foreign exchange costs remain a hidden drain on performance, quietly eroding margins and complicating cash flow management. Pleo aims to simplify that by enabling businesses to hold and spend in multiple currencies from a single platform.

This is all part of a broader shift in how finance operates, says Bouguéon. “Modern cash management comes down to three things,” he says. “Visibility, automation and optimisation.”

Visibility means consolidating all accounts and currencies into one place. Automation involves moving money with rules and guardrails. Optimisation is about reducing avoidable costs and making better use of available cash. And the impact is tangible.

According to Galav, Pleo can reduce manual expense work by up to 80 per cent and save finance teams around 70 per cent of their time, while giving them access to real-time data. Pleo’s embedded services, cash management tools, and multi-currency accounts are not separate initiatives. They are components of a single vision.

“This isn’t about adding more features,” Bouguéon emphasises. “It’s about solving a bigger problem.”

And increasingly, he believes, AI will contribute to closing that gap between operational finance and strategic finance – between managing money and using it to drive growth.

“I think we’ll see a model of autopilot with human oversight,” Bouguéon says. “Manual reconciliation and cash movements will dramatically shrink. Finance teams will be answering not ‘what did we spend?’, but ‘what will we spend?’,” he says.

For Nakevska, it means there’s less risk of finance officers being surprised by what’s in the figures, while finance teams spend less time gathering and validating data, and more time interpreting it, stress-testing scenarios and guiding the business.

They become, in Bouguéon’s words, ‘a true risk mitigation hub for their company’.

The future is connected

Ultimately, Pleo’s transformation reflects a deeper shift in financial services. It’s no longer enough to provide tools that solve isolated problems. The real value lies in connecting them, and turning disjointed data into actionable intelligence.

And if Pleo succeeds, it won’t just be redefining its own role – it will be reshaping the financial infrastructure that SMEs rely on every day.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 18-20

The post EXCLUSIVE: “The Power of Foresight” – Kunal Galav, Marija Nakevska and Jérémie Bouguéon, Pleo in ‘The Fintech Magazine’ appeared first on FF News | Fintech Finance.