Frequently asked questions*
*and the answers to them, of course
The basics
Pleo is a centralised business spending solution for forward-thinking teams. Pleo enables employees to buy the things they need for work, while keeping companies in full control of all spending. With the help of breakthrough technology and commercial cards, Pleo eliminates expense reports, reduces administrative complexity and simplifies bookkeeping. Find out more.
Pleo works with companies of all sizes, across every industry. What unites those businesses is that they’ve experienced the pain of traditional spend management: shared cards, chasing receipts, expense reports and reimbursements. They’re ready to move past the confusion and complexity that has defined spend management for so long. Meet our customers.
Pleo’s commercial cards are issued by Mastercard, meaning they’re accepted by more than 30 million merchants worldwide. The plastic Pleo cards can be used for in-store payments, contactless transactions and have a chip and pin facility. Meanwhile, Pleo virtual cards can be used to make online purchases. On top of that, you can use your Pleo card with ApplePay and Google Pay. Find out more.
Cards can be used to purchase goods or pay for services in the same way as a credit card, but you can only make transactions when there is money in your company account. With Pleo, employees catch receipts on-the-go using their phone, the system automatically categorises expenses based on previous behaviour and eliminates the need to do manual expense reports.
Pleo was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by fintech veterans Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra, both early team members of the Danish startup success, Tradeshift, with years of experience building successful financial products. Today, the Pleo team is 800-strong, with seven European office locations (London, Stockholm, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon, Paris and our HQ in Copenhagen). Here’s our story.
Pleo is not a bank. We’re a business spending solution that helps companies to pay for the things they need and track those transactions. We connect your Pleo account to your business bank account, so you can transfer funds as needed.
We do not currently offer credit, but it’s definitely something we’re looking at for the future.
Sharing cards makes it impossible to properly track spending and can put you at risk of fraud. So we remove the need to do it at all.
As soon as you sign up to Pleo, our virtual cards can be issued to anyone who needs to buy something online. Spending limits also help to give you reassurance that issuing a card to someone on your team won’t put you at risk.
Using Pleo
Your Pleo account is connected to your business bank account. So every time you add funds to Pleo, to help your team buy what they need for work, that money comes out of your business bank account. But it doesn’t go directly to us. It goes first to J.P. Morgan, or to Danske Bank for our customers in Denmark and Sweden. This means that neither we – nor anyone else – have direct access to your money. How we keep your money safe.
Pleo cards can be used in more than 30 million locations worldwide, in-store and online, making corporate purchasing easy and convenient – just look for the Mastercard Acceptance Mark. You can also use your Pleo card with ApplePay and Google Pay. Find out more.
No. The founding idea behind Pleo is to get rid of the expense reports. When you pay for something with your Pleo card, you’ll receive an instant notification on your phone. Snap the receipt, add some basic info about what you’ve bought and that’s it. Our software will automatically categorise the purchase.
Managers or finance teams can monitor all transactions in real-time and flag anything that needs more information. When the time is right, transactions can be exported to the accounting system your business uses.
It’s very likely. Pleo can be connected to most accounting systems. We have direct integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, DATEV, e-conomic and more. Our customised CSV export functionality works well in many other cases. More on integrations.
Features
Fetch pairs up the receipt in your Gmail, Outlook or Microsoft 365 inbox with the matching Pleo expense. Fetch doesn’t just search for receipts as they come in to your email account. It can sniff out any missing receipts from the last year and notify you when it’s done. Pleo doesn’t store your emails and Fetch will only retrieve messages that contain receipts. How Fetch works.
Not every bit of business spending can be easily taken care of with a card, we know. Pleo Pocket is where you keep track of other expenses, like cash, out-of-pocket and mileage expenses. You enter the details and the amount involved, then Pleo will help your finance team to settle up what’s owed. If employees need to be reimbursed, we make that straightforward too. How Pocket works.
Assurance brings an extra layer of control to your team’s spending without the tedium of approving every single expense. Managers can be alerted when an expense is made over a certain amount– and they can then decide if it’s OK or not. How Assurance works.
Security and privacy
Every time you add funds to Pleo, that money comes out of your business bank account. But it doesn’t go directly to us. It goes first to J.P. Morgan, or to Danske Bank for our customers in Denmark and Sweden. This means that neither we – nor anyone else – have direct access to your money. When a transaction is made with a Pleo card and Mastercard looks for the funds to cover it, Pleo takes the money from J.P. Morgan or Danske Bank to pay it.
J.P. Morgan and Danske Bank are both deemed to be Systemically Important Financial Institutions, in the US and Denmark respectively. That means that if something truly catastrophic happened, the central banks in the relevant countries would step in to ensure the survival of those institutions.
Plus, your transactions are handled by a separate licensed entity, Pleo Financial Services, regulated by the FSA in Denmark.
All Pleo purchases are monitored by fraud detection algorithms which will temporarily block your card in case of suspicious activity. You will be informed via a push notification or email if your card has been blocked, along with information on the suspicious transaction. If you recognise the transaction, you can enable your card from the web app.
As well as enabling the card, you too can block your card immediately from the Pleo web app if you notice a suspicious transaction. In case of fraud you are covered by our Mastercard Zero Liability Policy. Find out more about Zero Liability Protection.
We take security very seriously. Our cardholder data is protected by bank-level data encryption and is stored in a PCIDSS level-1 compliant data centre in the EEA. All data passed between our servers and third parties is 2048-bit SSL encrypted. Card transactions data is transmitted via VPN-tunnels to a certified PCIDSS level-1 processor.
We are. We’ve worked hard to meet the highest standards of payment and data security, including Payment Services Directive 2. For existing customers, this will mean some changes in how you log in to Pleo. How PSD2 works.
"I love the way Pleo gives you the ability to let people do their jobs, empowering them, passing down responsibility."
Anthony Hanson Essential Living

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