Welcome to my weekly fintech-focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it officially turns into a newsletter on May 1, sign up here.

If it feels like we’ve been over-indexing on expense/spend management news, it’s because there has just been so darn much of it.

Last week, I covered Brex’s big push into software, which means that its revenue generation will be more diversified as it will now be making money off of interchange fees and recurring revenue from subscriptions to its software. It also said it is placing greater emphasis on moving upmarket to serve larger customers.

As evidence of that, Brex revealed that DoorDash -- a $36 billion in market cap company -- was one of the first customers who’d taken a bet on its new spend management software product, Empower.

Coincidentally, the same day, Emburse -- a nearly $200 million-in-ARR expense software company -- announced it was doing the exact opposite. That company said it is making a big push into the SMB space and going head-to-head with fast-growing startups like Brex and Ramp.

The number of players in this space just keeps expanding, and one founder I spoke with -- Zact CEO John Thomas -- considers the sheer size of the B2B payments space to be the driving factor. The market is $25 trillion in the U.S. alone, with corporate cards making up 4%, or $1 trillion, of that total.

He shared with me where his startup is positioned in the Wild Wild West of expense management. Zact says it is focused squarely on the requirements of mid-market companies: bank-grade fraud protection, budget controls, approval workflow and accounting integration with “flexible payment type and funding support.” Airbase is another player in the space focused on mid-market companies.

Lending, however, is an area in which Thomas says Zact “refuses to play.” “We rely on the banks to do the lending, and we integrate with whatever funding solution they provide,” he told TechCrunch. “In the rush to grab market share, many fintechs are issuing credit to companies with dubious creditworthiness. We’re already seeing aggressive lending biting many of the credit card and BNPL providers."