Pleo: Creating Seamless Spend Management for the Modern SMB

At Money20/20 Europe 2026, Kunal Galav, who leads the Embedded Finance business at Pleo, sat down to discuss the evolving landscape of spend management for SMBs. With over 45,000 European customers across 16 countries, Galav shared how Pleo is tackling the fragmented reality that many businesses face. He highlighted a common frustration: SMBs often juggle a combination of multiple bank accounts and lending providers, leading to disjointed data, manual bookkeeping, and a significant waste of time.

Galav explained that the goal at Pleo is to move away from what he described as a “Frankenstein infrastructure,” where businesses are forced to manually cobble together data from various sources into spreadsheets and documents. By consolidating everything, from employee expenses and invoices to purchase orders, into a single, automated platform, Pleo aims to streamline these payables. This shift is about more than just convenience; it is about providing finance teams with the right insights exactly when they need them, helping them transition from manual processes to strategic drivers of the business.

Looking ahead, Galav discussed the industry’s move toward “agenting,” which focuses on removing friction from the decision-making process and emphasised that the future of finance tools lies in seamless experiences, where controls and policies are enforced so naturally that employees barely notice them. By providing real-time, actionable insights, such as flagging when specific spending categories are out of sync with industry peers, Pleo enables finance teams to make smarter, faster decisions.

Finally, Galav offered a balanced perspective on the role of automation as rather than removing human oversight, he sees a future where technology simplifies complex tasks without taking the final decision out of the human hands. Using an example of travel booking, and Galav illustrated how a platform can handle the heavy lifting of scheduling while keeping managers in the loop via communication channels like Slack. For Pleo, this evolution isn’t about replacing people; it’s about making workflows fit into the natural rhythm of our day-to-day lives.

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