WEX Says AI Accelerates Product Innovation by 20%

Global commerce platform WEX has found that artificial intelligence has accelerated its product innovation by 20%.

WEX CEO Melissa Smith said Thursday (Oct. 30) that those gains have been enabled by the company’s use of AI in customer discovery, prototyping, coding, quality assurance, infrastructure management and security.

Speaking during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Smith said that WEX is “leveraging AI to reimagine how we operate and serve our customers.”

WEX also uses AI and the company’s proprietary data to make “faster, smarter decisions” in fraud prevention, credit management, claims processing and customer support, Smith said.

“In our benefit segment, AI has reduced claims processing time from days to minutes,” Smith said. “In customer service, human-in-the-loop generative AI is boosting productivity and lowering our cost to serve.”

During the third quarter, WEX added AI insights to its field service management solutions. With this addition, Smith said, the company is “pioneering a shift from reports to real-time intelligence and action, helping customers get the answers they need.”

“With AI increasingly embedded across our platforms and operations, we believe it will help us scale the business, accelerate innovation and strengthen WEX’s long-term competitive advantages,” Smith said.

Moving forward, WEX’s strategy includes strengthening its position in the markets it serves, extending its platform into adjacent workflows and new use cases, and accelerating innovation to get more productivity out of its investments, Smith said during the call.

During the third quarter, WEX saw revenue growth across all three segments of its business, according to a Thursday earnings release.

The mobility segment, which serves fleet customers, was up 1% year over year to $360.8 million; the benefits segment was up 9.2% year over year to $198.1 million; and the corporate payments segment was up 4.7% to $132.8 million.

In supplemental material released Thursday, WEX said the mobility segment’s revenue growth was slowed by lower fuel prices, foreign exchange rates, the economic demand environment and better vehicle fuel efficiency.

In this segment, WEX has invested in targeted marketing focused on fleets with 25 or fewer vehicles, as it sees “tremendous value potential” in these small businesses, Smith said during the call.

“These businesses have historically relied on general purpose credit cards,” Smith said. “By using our fuel card, they can save on fuel costs, access discounts, manage fraud and better control their expenses.”

The benefits segment’s revenue growth was led by gains in Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), as the company saw 7% growth in HSA accounts.

“As we discussed last quarter, we see an opportunity in 2026 with new legislation which will expand HSA eligibility across public health exchanges for the first time in more than a decade,” Smith said during the call. “We estimate this could expand the [total addressable market (TAM)] by 3 to 4 million new accounts, and believe we are well positioned to benefit, given our unique partner-focused distribution approach.”

In the corporate payments segment, revenue growth was driven by greater yields on purchase volume and 10.8% growth in total volume.

Smith said during the call that one of this segment’s major offerings, embedded payments, is seeing “broad-based adoption across industries, including tech companies offering [accounts payable (AP)] automation, healthcare, payments and expense management.”

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