Flex Elite Explained: Personal Rewards That Scale With Your Business Spend

Personal rewards tied to business

Saakyan says Flex has been "business only for the last three, four years ever since inception." Its new product, Flex Elite, extends that relationship to personal spending, with rewards that scale with what the business already spends through Flex.

He gives the example of an e-commerce brand running $100 million a year of ad spend through Flex. That customer, he says, could get 5% cash back on personal spend.

The Net 60 wedge

The Net 60 Card remains the core product. "You get sixty days of float at 0% interest. And if you pay it back early, we'll give you 2% cashback," Saakyan says, and he estimates the card alone handles between $5 to $10 billion in spend a year.

He says a competitor called Parker tried a similar model and had to file for Chapter 11. Saakyan credits Flex's credit head Vishal, who he says spent about twenty years in the industry at Capital One and Citibank and previously managed over $200 billion in loans.

Banking other neobanks

Saakyan says fintechs struggle to get even an operational account because of regulation and flow of funds, and that Flex has started to bank them. "Flex is your favorite neobank's favorite neobank," he says. He adds that a planned API will support co-branded cards, but only for specific partnerships, and he does not see it as a Dakota or Rain competitor.

Advice for founders

Saakyan argues that most founders are building crypto neobanks for a market that is "very, very small and very, very kind of saturated already," while many businesses and consumers do not care about crypto. He calls global banking for businesses "the next frontier," saying one business onboarded is worth maybe a thousand consumers.