Case Study: Espresa achieves real-time, compliant employee benefits with Emerline and Marqeta integration

Espresa eliminates 95% of administrative overhead with Emerline

Espresa, a company specializing in employee engagement and benefits, faced significant operational challenges with its Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) platform. Their traditional reimbursement model placed a financial burden on employees, who had to pay for benefits upfront and wait weeks for repayment, while also creating a massive administrative overhead for HR teams due to manual receipt processing and policy checks. To overcome these scalability issues and align their operations with their modern brand, Espresa partnered with fintech vendor Emerline to re-architect their LSA program using Marqeta's card issuing platform.

Emerline implemented a real-time, card-first solution powered by Marqeta's Just-in-Time (JIT) Funding. They built a sophisticated rules engine and a JIT funding gateway to approve transactions against company policies instantly at the point of sale. This eliminated the need for employees to use personal funds and removed manual administrative work. The results for Espresa were transformative: a 100% elimination of employee-fronted costs, a 95% reduction in administrative overhead, and absolute real-time spend compliance, enabling global scalability and dramatically improved user adoption.

Espresa