Versa: a data layer for transactions

Today we're excited to launch Versa. Versa helps merchants deliver smart receipts to their b2b customers.

Thomas and I found our way to this project via our background in fintech. Prior to Versa, we worked together at Abacus, an expense management company that I cofounded in 2014. At Abacus we processed billions of dollars of business spend. And it was there that we became aware of the headaches surrounding receipts.

Employees are required by law to capture receipts for every transaction over $75 in the US. This means you need to pull out your phone and snap a photo of the paper receipt every time you check out from your hotel, take a car, finish a meal, etc.

More and more these days, receipts are landing in our email inbox instead of our pocket. You might think that would make life easier, but in fact the expense process is mostly the same. Employees take screenshots of their inbox, or download, then upload, PDFs. In aggregate this takes thousands of employee hours.

Filing expense reports isn't much fun for employees, but the headaches are felt most acutely by finance teams. Finance teams and travel managers need receipts to comply with company policies, to comply with the law, and also for duty of care and VAT tracking. Unclaimed VAT alone results in $20b of losses every year. And so finance teams find themselves nagging employees to upload receipts so they can close the books and do their best to stay on top of spend.

Not to mention, we've all had the experience of seeing a cryptic charge on our card statement, uncertain if it's fraudulent or legitimate. These confusing charges are a leading source of chargebacks.

Beyond compliance, receipts should be a valuable customer touchpoint for retailers. Amazon has made their 'Order History' a sales driver with the 'rebuy' action; Uber has made their ride history a sales driver with the 'rebook' action. Other merchants are missing out on this channel.

Given all these carrots and sticks, it's easy to imagine a better system. The first card network was launched in 1966, and ACH was launched in 1972; in 2024 why are we still running on the same rails? The challenge, of course, is getting merchants on board.

The closest our industry has come to a solution is Concur's TripLink with E-Receipts. If you exclusively use Concur for expense management, and you travel with one of a narrow set of onboarded merchants, you too can experience Concur's version of expense nirvana. But Concur is nowhere near as dominant as it once was, with Brex, Ramp, Navan, Emburse, AmEx — the list goes on — chipping away at their market share. And the merchant coverage is still nascent.

At Versa, we're building an open-source protocol and network that puts power back in the hands of merchants. Versa is 100% free for merchants, and always will be.

And we're building Versa with security baked in. Encrypted receipt data is passed directly from merchants to buyers, never touching Versa servers. We can't read your receipts, and no other third-party can either.

We’re just getting started. Let’s get to work.

• If you're a merchant interested in joining the Versa network, please get in touch.
• If you work at a financial institution or expense management service, please get in touch.
• If you're a travel manager, frustrated by all the time you and your employees devote to tracking down receipts, please get in touch, and we'll see if we can get your top suppliers on board.