PEX Card Review

Pros

• No annual or monthly fees for PEX Visa Commercial Cards
• Spend controls
• Employee cards
• Expense management tools
• Full API access

Cons

• Low 1% cash back rate
• Limits on free employee prepaid cards
• No ATM access
• Foreign transaction fees up to 1.5%

What Is A PEX Card?

PEX is a financial product that includes corporate spending cards along with spend management and expense control tools. This PEX review will look into PEX pricing, features, perks, and more to help you decide if the PEX card is what your business needs.

PEX once offered only prepaid spending cards, but it now offers a “non-revolving line of credit” card in the form of the PEX Credit Expense program. PEX includes virtual and physical cards and can be added to digital wallets.

Since we’re evaluating PEX primarily on the strength of its corporate cards, the fact that PEX only offers 1% cash back for your purchases puts it squarely behind the best corporate credit cards and is the reason why we’re giving PEX a mediocre 2.9/5 overall score.

However, unlike most competing corporate cards, the PEX card has no strict eligibility requirements. Small businesses, sole proprietors, and pre-launch startups that won’t qualify for the likes of Brex and Ramp may find that PEX fits their business needs quite well.

PEX Rewards & Perks

PEX’s primary corporate card offering, PEX Credit Expense, offers 1% cash back on all purchases. PEX Virtual Vendor Cards, a separate product dedicated to managing subscriptions and other vendor payments, also gives you 1% cash back on purchases.

While it’s nice that an entry-level corporate card program offers cash back at all, PEX’s 1% cash back rate — and its lack of partner perks and rebates — places it behind competitors like Brex, BILL Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy), Ramp, and even Rho. That’s why PEX earns just a 1.4/5 rating in the Rewards category.

Thankfully, PEX Credit Expense now offers a $250 welcome bonus to new signups who spend at least $1 within their first 30 account days.

You can link PEX to other software products, including integrations with Zapier and QuickBooks. Some PEX users will also have full API access for customization, depending on their subscription level.

Pricing & Fees

Here are the fees you’ll face with PEX Credit Expense, PEX’s primary corporate card product.

While PEX’s corporate card is nearly fee-free, PEX’s prepaid card program charges $0/month for BASE accounts, $75/month for CORE accounts, and $200/month for PRO accounts, with the latter two account types offering exclusive features. These fees did lower our score to 3.5/5.

Nonprofits can get discounted pricing for the latter two prepaid card accounts — $30/month and $80/month respectively.

Each prepaid plan tier includes a different combination of features in categories like live expense management, PEX Data Engine, team management tools, scalability, training, and support. A trial is available, starting at $8/month, that lets users test the CORE plan on a per-card basis without starting a full subscription.

Eligibility Requirements

Available only to US-based businesses, PEX puts no other restrictions on businesses interested in using PEX’s corporate cards, prepaid cards, and spend management tools. You can apply to PEX as any type of business, from sole proprietorships to corporations.

There are no income or cash-holdings requirements with PEX either, and although you’ll need to include your Social Security number in your application (both to confirm your identity and for USA PATRIOT Act compliance), you won’t be subject to a credit check of any kind. These relaxed eligibility requirements led to PEX’s perfect five-star rating in this category.

PEX says applications typically are processed within one to three business days, and once approved you’ll be able to order PEX cards for yourself and employees (up to 200 of them with the credit card program) right away. Physical cards arrive within 8-10 business days, with expedited service available for a fee. PEX for digital wallets and virtual card payment options can be used to access funds sooner.

You’ll find no account minimums on your PEX account and no limit to the amount you can have in your PEX account. However, the maximum balance for any single PEX prepaid card is $25,000.

PEX Features

PEX delivers all the features you’d expect to see in a full-stack payment platform, resulting in a 4/5 rating for this category. As a corporate card, PEX performs well, too, with one glaring exception. As the company states, a PEX Visa Commercial Card (the card you get with the PEX Credit Expense program) is not a credit card. Rather, it is a card that lets you draw from a non-revolving line of credit.

With PEX Credit Expense, you can give cards to up to 200 of your employees at no charge. Repayment is due in full at the end of your weekly or monthly statement period.

Additional PEX products include:

• PEX Prepaid Expense: This program allows you to distribute physical and digital prepaid spending cards to your employees. Spend controls and tracking are included, and purchases will not accrue any cash back.
• PEX Virtual Vendor Cards: With this prepaid spending card program, you and your employees can get spending cards that are specific to individual vendors, giving you built-in spending control. With these cards, you can get a 1% rebate on all vendor card spending.
• PEX Grants: This program gives you prepaid spending cards that allow you to distribute funds to beneficiaries in your grant programs. You can set rules and run reports on all card usage. This program offers no cash back.
• PEX For Rewards & Incentives: This program lets you distribute prepaid spending cards to your employees as bonuses or rewards. No cash back is offered.

Here are some of the features PEX delivers:

• Employee Cards: With PEX Credit Expense, you’ll get up to 200 employee cards, free of charge. With PEX’s prepaid card program, how many cards you can get depends on your subscription tier. The base plan, BASE, includes up to 5 employee cards, each with its own customizable limits. The top-tier PRO plan includes up to 100 cards. You can add more for a per-card fee.
• Receipt Capture & Approval: Use the PEX app to capture and upload pictures of receipts. Employee cardholders can add notes with purchase details and codes to ease review and approvals.
• PEX Requests: Employees can use the PEX app to submit detailed requests for additional funding.
• Receipt Export: With Xero and QuickBooks integrations available, it’s easy to reconcile expenses. If you use other financial software, you can export CSV files.
• Spend Controls: Set expense policies to control where and how employees spend funds. You can choose automated spending rules or customize them for each employee, restricting merchant categories or setting daily spending limits. You can also set and fund per diem limits, with unspent funds reverting to the main account each day.
• Triggered Transfers: Employees cannot spend more money than is loaded on their cards. You can fund their cards by scheduled automatic transfers or triggered automatic transfers when a card balance has been spent down to a specified amount.
• Nonprofit Plans: Nonprofits can save more than 50% off subscription pricing and access most of the same features, including strong team management tools.
• Grants & Rewards: As mentioned earlier, PEX supports employee incentive and rewards programs as well as grant programs, with tools that make funds disbursement via reloadable cards. Additional setup and other fees apply. The maximum balance for any single PEX grant or reward card is currently $5,000.

You can add funds to your PEX account directly from your bank, credit union, or other financial institution. Transfer funds via EFT, wire transfer, or ACH. Here’s how long it will take for the money you transfer to become available to you in your PEX account:

Transfers from your PEX account to employees’ cards take place in real-time and will be available immediately unless you set different funding parameters.

Customer Service

PEX offers customers a full range of support options, including telephone support and live chat, resulting in a score of 4.5/5 for customer service.

You’ll also find self-help resources, including FAQs and a knowledgebase. The chatbot engages automatically when you visit the PEX website, and I was able to use it to find the answers I was looking for in the course of this PEX review.

You’ll also find PEX on Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

PEX Reviews

PEX has been accredited with the Better Business Bureau since 2011 and maintains an A+ rating. There is one complaint on file with the BBB. PEX also has a 5/5 star rating on Capterra, based on 37 user reviews, and 4.5/5 stars on G2, based on 29 reviews. Accordingly, PEX gets strong marks in this category. We gave PEX a similar rating of 4.5/5 based on user feedback.

The mobile apps for PEX are rated highly, too, with 4.7/5 stars on the Google Play store (based on 600+ reviews) and 4.7/5 stars on the Apple App Store (based on 1,000+ reviews). Let’s take a look at what these users had to say about PEX.

Final Verdict: Is PEX Worth It?

PEX offers a different kind of corporate card. It may be a good choice for companies that experience high turnover or want to put limits on employee spending, either by category, by dollar limits, or with per diem funding that resets each day.

PEX also will appeal to smaller companies that want to use a corporate card but won’t be able to qualify for typical corporate cards that are available only to corporations and that have strict cash-on-hand, revenue, and/or equity investment requirements.

Of course, PEX has two obvious drawbacks: it does not offer a true credit card, and it only offers a maximum rewards rate of 1%. Do PEX’s other features, such as its nonprofit plans, easy eligibility requirements, and robust expense-management tools, make up for these drawbacks? That’s a decision only you can make, and you now have the information required to inform your decision.

Corporate Card Review Methodology

Merchant Maverick has been researching and reviewing business credit cards and corporate cards since 2018. Our writers have evaluated over sixty different business card products. In each corporate card review, we evaluate rewards and perks, rates and fees, features, eligibility requirements, customer service, and user reviews. Read more about how we rate corporate cards.

Note: We use a different credit card rating methodology to evaluate traditional business credit cards, as they often differ from corporate cards in benefits, qualifications, and use cases.

When comparing corporate cards, we consider many data points, including the specifics of cash back and spending rewards, the presence of annual fees, the breadth and flexibility of reward redemption options, revenue and time in business qualifications, credit score requirements, and extra perks. Our lists of the best corporate cards include only those we’ve deemed worthwhile from multiple vantage points and often share qualities such as widespread availability, low fees, competitive rewards, and reasonable revenue, cash-on-hand, and time in business requirements.

We spend an average of 10-15 hours researching and updating each one of our lists, making sure the corporate cards included meet our internal standards for quality and reputation.

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