Alaan launches UAE’s first business card with up to 2% cashback

By Leandra Monteiro

Alaan, a UAE-based corporate spend-management FinTech, announced the launch of an industry-first business cashback card. The start-up previously had raised $2.5 million in seed funding and built a platform enabling businesses to spend through modern corporate cards and automated invoice payments. Business customers using Alaan cards will be rewarded with up to 2% of their spending in cash back.

Commenting on the launch, Parthi Duraisamy, CEO and Co-Founder of Alaan said, “It’s great to have launched an industry-first business cashback card. Consumers have long had access to such cards in UAE, but that has not been the case for SMEs and corporates. When businesses across the world are trying to conserve cash and cut spending during a recession, we are happy to be supporting UAE businesses to save and take control of their business spending.”

Founded in 2021 by ex-McKinsey employees, Parthi Duraisamy and Karun Kurien, Alaan aims to transform the processing of business expenses through its platform that provides employees with business cards to make company purchases and automatically reconciles spending in real-time.

Additionally, Alaan instantly issues virtual cards for e-commerce transactions, SaaS subscriptions, vendor payments or in-store purchases. These cards can be set up with daily or monthly spend limits and can be merchant-locked to be used only with certain merchants such as fuel stations. The platform eliminates expense reports, and the need for petty cash, and automates bookkeeping tasks via seamless integration with various accounting solution providers.

Philip Johnston, Co-CEO of Opontia, and an early customer of Alaan said, “Until now, we have had to rely on debit cards, which have high FX rates and no cashback options. We look forward to scaling with Alaan cards, both to save money and to save precious time for our finance teams, so they can focus on our business instead of month-end manual expense management.”