How Street Talk Uses Slash to Centralize Widespread Spending

"Slash has made it so easy for us to receive and send payments."

Josh Suggs started Street Talk the way a lot of great founders start: by doing the work himself. In 2024, he was interviewing pedestrians on the streets of New York City about their experiences with consumer products. He began finding success, and an idea was born. Within two years, Street Talk had become the leading street interview ad agency in America, interviewing for a roster of 150+ clients including Dr. Squatch, PrizePicks, Monopoly, and more.

Street Talk employs 96 people, many of whom are the "Street Talkers" who conduct interviews on location in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Supervising the finances of a fast-growing nationwide company presented a challenge Josh hadn't anticipated when he was running things himself. "I'm not a CFO, I'm not a finance person – I dropped out of college," he said. "Managing finances, getting all these reports, managing our P&L, invoicing, and everything that comes with the financial side of running a company was very difficult for me, and Slash made it so easy."

Real-Time Visibility From Coast to Coast

With nearly 100 people on staff, Street Talk generates a constant stream of financial activity. Street Talkers travel and spend money onsite, revenue comes in from dozens of clients, and vendors send invoices for equipment and services. For founders who want a clear picture of their cash flow without having to sift through each transaction, that volume of data can be too much. With a live financial dashboard, Slash cuts through it all.¹

"Slash does an amazing job of going through every single data point and every single ticker you could possibly think of and giving us that data in real time, as well as giving us a broad overview,” said Josh. While he no longer manages payroll directly, he still has complete visibility into current money movement. "I can click any department and see exactly the amount, the payments, and the people. It's never been easier for me to get a bird's eye view of all the financial data throughout my company while I'm not actually in the weeds every single day."

None of this would truly be easy without streamlined desktop and mobile apps. "Most banks are slow, their UI is old,” he said, “Slash isn't just easier to use, but it looks clean, it's so simple, and it's better than any banking platform I've ever used in my entire life."

The Tools That Make Money Movement Work

With a wide range of clients and vendors, invoicing can get overwhelming for a fast-moving startup like Street Talk. Slash’s invoicing tools make things simple and allow the team to centralize their incoming payments, no matter the rail a customer wants to use.

"The biggest use case that's been most impactful for us at Street Talk has been invoicing. It's never been so easy to send invoices to a client, be able to track them from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible, and to give our clients different options to pay us." With built-in stablecoin on/off ramps, Slash allows users to send and receive funds in any format they please, including crypto.⁴ For an agency working with over 150 brands, each with its own payment preferences and timelines, that flexibility matters. "When I look at my bank account, I can actually see every transaction, and every invoice that's paired with those transactions."

Sending money is just as important for Street Talk as receiving it. Managing spend across employees in multiple cities was a headache for Josh early on, since Street Talkers often need to pay for food and travel. Once he started using the Slash Visa® Platinum Card, which allows real-time expense tracking and automatic categorization, this hurdle all but disappeared. "At Street Talk, we have dozens of contractors and Street Talkers in major cities running around,” Josh explained, “Being able to track their spending and give them spend limits when they're out doing their street interviews… has been a game changer and allowed us to give them the best possible experience while being able to get the data and track and manage all of it in one place."

Slash Cards come with configurable per-card spend limits, which means Josh can equip a Street Talker heading out to shoot in Los Angeles with a card that allows a certain budget on specific expense categories. Each business purchase made with a Slash Card can also earn Street Talk up to 2% cash back.

Building Something Bigger

Street Talk plans on coming to college campuses and international cities next. As new markets come online and the Street Talker network grows, Josh’s financial infrastructure needs to keep up. Slash was built for exactly that kind of expansion.

Josh can issue unlimited virtual Slash Cards, meaning hundreds of Street Talkers can be active at once without extra stress on spend management or accounting. With a dashboard that displays all payments in real time, Slash is also equipped to help Street Talk onboard many more clients and vendors. We’re excited to see where Josh and the team go next – if you’re in a major American city, keep your eye out!