How Blink Digital Scaled to $50 Million in Annual Ad Spend with Slash

Blink Digital is one of India’s top creative agencies. They manage marketing campaigns for some of the most recognizable brands in the country — KFC, Swiggy, Google, Amazon Echo, and more.

They do everything in-house: scripting, media buying, creative testing, and production. With over 200 employees across departments, Blink needed tighter systems to manage two high-friction workflows:

1. Giving spend access to team members without a messy reimbursement process
2. Managing client budgets in a clean, transparent, scalable way

The Challenge: Scale Without Chaos

Juggling dozens of simultaneous client campaigns and a rapidly growing team, Blink’s legacy financial workflows had reached their limit.

Their finance team found itself consumed by administrative overhead — vetting one‑off spend requests, manually reconciling sprawling spreadsheets keeping track of various client campaign budgets, and processing a steady stream of small reimbursements.

It wasn’t broken. But it was very manual and increasingly unsustainable as the business grew exponentially.

Smarter Spend Controls with Virtual Cards

Today, Blink issues Slash Virtual Cards to employees across teams — each configured with scoped permissions and built-in controls.

Employees get spending access only where needed. And finance retains full visibility and real-time control.

Every card includes:

• Merchant Category Code (MCC) restrictions – to limit cards to specific vendors or categories
• Per-card spend limits – with controls over transaction size
• One-click pause or delete – to shut off cards instantly if needed

This lets the company operate with precision — without chasing receipts or managing shared cards.

“We barely do reimbursements anymore. Slash lets us issue cards with the right permissions and controls, so our employees can spend only where they’re meant to spend. For example, our ad buyers can only spend on Meta using their Slash cards.”

• Rikki Agarwal
  

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Client Budget Management with Virtual Accounts

Blink collects prepaid budgets from clients before launching campaigns. Previously, this meant juggling spreadsheets — tracking what had been spent, what remained, and what needed to be reported.

Now, they use Slash Virtual Accounts to bring structure to the process.

• A dedicated account for each client or campaign
• Funds routed into the right account as soon as they land
• Blink’s agency fee separated automatically before the rest is used
• Clear balances and transaction history across every campaign

This gives Blink’s team full clarity on budgets and makes it significantly easier to share reports with clients, track spending, and ensure clean financial operations.

Nerd Corner: How MCC Restrictions Actually Work

Every business that accepts cards has a Merchant Category Code (MCC). When you create a Slash Virtual Card for your business or employee, you can limit it to specific categories — like airlines, hotels, advertising services, or even just a “gas pump”.

That means you can issue a card that only works for media buying — or one that can’t be used at restaurants or for personal purchases. It’s a clean way to enforce spend policy.

The Impact

• Employees get cards they can actually use — with rules finance can trust
• Client budgets are cleanly managed in isolated accounts
• Finance workflows are faster, smoother, and easier to audit

What used to be tracked manually is now fully structured inside Slash. Blink runs dozens of campaigns simultaneously — and their financial systems keep up.

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