Big news: we’re introducing cashback on our Corporate Cards. And we’re doing it differently from everyone else in the UK market. While most providers cap your earnings or attach qualifying conditions, we’re launching up to 0.75% (depending on your pricing tier) unlimited cashback on every transaction made with your Webexpenses Card.
No thresholds, no category restrictions, no caps tied to your subscription tier.
Now, if you’re an accountant or finance professional, your immediate reaction is probably healthy scepticism. After all, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. So let’s start with the obvious question: what’s the catch?
Well, there isn’t one. But there is a reason why no one else offers this model, and it’s worth understanding why.
What is cashback on corporate cards and how does it work?
Every time an employee uses our Corporate Card to pay for business expenses, you earn a percentage of that spend back. It’s the same principle as consumer credit cards, just applied to your business spending.
Most corporate card providers offer cashback rates between 0.5% and 1.5%, with various conditions attached. These conditions typically include:
- Capped earnings based on your subscription tier (often around your monthly software fee).
- Qualifying spend thresholds you must hit before cashback kicks in.
- Restricted categories where cashback doesn’t apply.
- Geographic limitations (US spending only, for example).
Your actual cashback ends up being far less than the headline rate suggests. In many cases, it’s designed to offset the software cost rather than generate genuine additional value.
The UK corporate card cashback landscape
Looking at UK corporate card providers, the cashback situation breaks down into four camps:
- No cashback at all: SAP Concur, Xero, Zoho Expense, and several others don’t offer any native cashback programme. You’re simply paying for the software.
- Capped or conditional cashback: Payhawk caps earnings at your subscription amount (typically around 3% of spend, but limited to offsetting your monthly fee). Pleo gates their 0.75% cashback behind a £199/month base fee plus high per-user costs, effectively capping the benefit at around £1,000 in spend.
- Rewards instead of cashback: Some providers, like Airwallex, offer points-based systems rather than actual cash, which reduces flexibility and the real financial value.
- Then there are US players like Ramp and Expensify, which lead with aggressive cashback rates (1.5% to 2%) but restrict them to US spending only, making them largely irrelevant for UK businesses.
What you won’t find elsewhere in the UK is unlimited cashback with no qualifying criteria. That’s what makes our approach unusual.
Why unlimited cashback is so rare
Here’s where we get to the heart of your question: if unlimited cashback is viable, why doesn’t everyone do it? The answer is simple economics.
When you use a card to buy something, the merchant pays a fee to process that transaction. This is called the interchange fee. That money doesn’t disappear into the ether. It gets divvied between three parties:
- The card network (e.g. Visa or Mastercard)
- The card issuer (the bank that actually issues the card)
- The expense platform provider (companies like Pleo, Payhawk, or Webexpenses).
Most expense management platforms treat cashback as a loss leader or customer acquisition cost. They’re willing to give back some of that interchange revenue to make their software appear “free” or heavily subsidised. But they cap it because interchange revenue is their profit margin.
For many platforms, especially those focused on card revenue rather than software value, that interchange split is where the real money lives. The software exists primarily to facilitate card usage, which generates the interchange revenue that funds the business.
This creates a strategic tension. If you give back all the interchange as unlimited cashback, you’ve just eliminated your primary revenue stream. So platforms cap cashback in ways that protect their economics:
- Cap it at your monthly subscription fee (makes the software appear “free”).
- Add qualifying spend thresholds (so low spenders get nothing).
- Restrict cashback to certain categories (high-interchange purchases don’t qualify).
The result? You’ll get enough back to feel good about it, but not enough to fundamentally change your ROI calculation. The platform keeps the bulk of interchange revenue while marketing the cashback benefit.
How we make unlimited cashback work
So now you’re probably wondering: if we’re giving back 0.5% or 0.75% with no caps, no qualifying spend, and no category restrictions, how do we make money?
The answer: we’re a software company first, not a card company. Our business model is built on subscription revenue for expense management software that genuinely saves you time and money. The cards are an extension of that, not the core product.
Our margin comes from you paying for our software. That’s enough to cover card operations without needing to cap your earnings.
This isn’t charity. It’s a different business model. We’d rather you use our cards heavily because it means you’re embedded in our ecosystem, which reduces churn and increases the value you get from the software.
The more you spend through the platform, the more data flows through it, the more automation works, and the stickier we become.
A real-world cashback comparison
Let’s run the numbers with a concrete example: a digital agency spending £500,000 per month on Meta and Google Ads.
| Provider | Cashback rate | Potential cashback | Actual monthly cashback | Monthly software fee | Net monthly position |
| Webexpenses | 0.75% (uncapped) | £3,750 | £3,750 | ~£252 | +£3,498 profit |
| Payhawk | 1.5% (capped) | £7,500 | £499 | £499 | £0 (breakeven) |
| Pleo Beyond | 0.75% (capped) | £3,750 | ~£1,000 | ~£523 | +£477 profit |
| Traditional bank | 0.5% (limited) | £2,500 | £2,500 | £0 | +£2,500 profit |
On paper, the bank card looks competitive. But it doesn’t give you automated expense policy enforcement, real-time visibility, or integration with your accounting stack. You’re still manually processing receipts and reconciling statements. Not to mention the fees that a bank would charge.
With Webexpenses, you get the cashback and the operational efficiency. Your Corporate Cards feed directly into the same platform handling approvals, reporting, and integration. The ROI compounds.
Why you should reroute your spend
Right now, you’re probably funnelling business spend through employee personal credit cards or traditional corporate cards that offer you zero benefit beyond basic spend tracking.
Every penny your team spends on client meetings, travel, software subscriptions, and ad spend is currently a pure cost. You’re not earning anything back, and you’re creating manual admin work reconciling those expenses later.
Unlimited cashback on expense cards flips that equation. Suddenly, your accounts payable become a revenue stream. Not a huge one, but 0.75% on six or seven figures of annual spend adds up quickly. For a company spending £1 million annually through cards, that’s £7,500 back in your pocket with no cap (and a free expense management platform to boot).
And unlike consumer cashback schemes, this isn’t about optimising your personal spending habits. It’s about rerouting spend you’re already making through a system that pays you for the privilege while simultaneously reducing your administrative burden.
The question isn’t “what’s the catch?” The question is “why haven’t I done this already?”
Why we built it this way
We could have launched with a capped cashback model like everyone else. It would have been easier to explain, easier to forecast, and probably more profitable in the short term.
But we kept coming back to the same insight: finance teams are tired of being sold “solutions” that create new problems. Capped cashback is just another version of that. It looks good in the sales pitch, then disappoints in practice when you realise the benefit maxes out at breakeven.
We wanted to build something that actually moves the needle on your P&L. Something where the CFO can legitimately say “our expense management platform makes us money” without needing an asterisk and three paragraphs of caveats.
So we built unlimited cashback into our expense management platform from the ground up, designed our pricing to be profitable without gouging on interchange, and structured it so there’s no gaming required.
You spend, you earn. Simple.
Getting started with cashback that pays you back
If you’re currently using corporate cards without cashback, or you’re hitting caps on your existing provider, the maths here is straightforward. Route your spend through our Corporate Cards, earn 0.75% back (or 0.5% depending on your pricing tier) with no limits, and use our platform to automate the expense management process that’s currently eating your team’s time.
Setup is simple. Cards are issued quickly, spending controls are configured to match your existing policies, and everything flows directly into your accounting system through native integrations.
You’re already spending the money. You might as well get paid for it.
Ready to start earning on every transaction? Register your interest in unlimited cashback.
