Expensify has opened an office in London to build its U.K. user
base. The company plans to grow the office's five-person staff this year but
did not specify how many employees it would add.
A European expansion was “inevitable,” according to Expensify
CEO and founder David Barrett. “We had roots there for a while, working out of
coworking spaces in Germany and the U.K., but now we’re formalizing things and
ramping up overall,” he said.
Before establishing the U.K. office, Barrett said, Expensify, which processes expenses in real time rather than waiting for employees to submit for reimbursement, wanted to ensure it was technologically equipped to process Europe-specific
line items like taxes and currencies on a greater scale. The software supports
160 currencies.
“There were a lot of small details, so we made sure we
understood the needs of the market and not try to oversell ourselves,” Barrett
said. “The easiest thing to point to is tax support. The European tax system is
much more complicated than in the U.S.”
Until the end of the year, Expensify is offering its expense
reporting suite for free to new Europe-based customers that sign up before May
31.
Competing against more established Europe players like
Concur and KDS doesn’t faze Barrett. “We’ve already gone up against all of
those competitors for a long time, and we have a high win rate against both,”
he said. “[Competing] in Europe doesn’t change the dynamic much.”
The company already was serving 1,000 clients in the United
Kingdom, both local companies and U.S. companies with offices there. Customers
include fast-growing ridesharing companies Uber and Lyft, as well as
multinational technology company Yahoo.
Last year, technology research company Gartner
named Expensify one of the fastest growing enterprise resource planning software
companies, based on 2014 revenue growth. Expensify has 18,000 clients and more
than doubled revenue in 2015, according to Barrett.