Ramp is one of the fastest-growing financial technology companies of all time, reaching a valuation of $8.1 billion only 3 years after being founded, and seeing 4x revenue growth in 2022-2023, even as the technology industry faced serious headwinds.
So how has the Finance function at Ramp kept up with the demands of running a lean, high-performing team? According to co-founder and CTO Karim Atiyeh, much of it has come down to picking the right technology partners. According to Atiyeh, Ramp has consistently made strategic decisions to choose vendors that can "alter the trajectory of the company," rather than build redundant capabilities in-house.
When it comes to financial tools, perhaps no team has provided Ramp's Finance team more leverage than Finley. Alex Song, Ramp's Head of Finance and Capital Markets, says "Finley may be the tool that provides Ramp the most value." He attributes this to Finley's reliability, speed of iteration, and cost savings. "Finley's a great value," says Song. "We receive the equivalent of several full-time employees' worth of work."
Background
Ramp manages several hundred million dollars' worth of debt capital today; this is the capital that fuels the company's originations and keeps credit card transactions on track. But back in 2021, when Ramp raised its first $150 million credit facility from Goldman Sachs, it needed to find an initial solution for managing the complex automation, compliance, and reporting tasks associated with operating a warehouse line of credit.
Initially, Ramp tried developing tools in-house, including internal dashboards for managing draw requests, money movement between different bank accounts, and regular capital provider reporting. Yet building in-house had several drawbacks: it tied up valuable Engineering and Data team time, required continual monitoring (especially when asset or bank data connections failed), and would have been costly to scale to multiple facilities, or securitization.
From managing an accurate borrowing base record to creating a credit facility ledger to tracking debt covenants, there was simply too much uncertainty around project scoping and maintenance. Ramp's Finance and Engineering teams realized that the job of programmatic, transparent debt capital management was best left to purpose-built credit facility software like Finley.
Solution
Rather than build internally, Ramp decided to buy Finley's software for rapid implementation and turnkey access to a digital credit agreement, funding request automation, deliverables deadline and file tracking, and comprehensive analytics.
Today, Finley integrates data from Ramp's origination sytems, bank accounts, and credit card processors, among other data sources. These data integrations ensure that Ramp can rely on Finley to monitor key transactions and financial metrics. They also allow for automated and accurate generation of XLSX and PDF artifacts that must be sent to Goldman Sachs and other capital providers on a regular basis.
Nik Koblov, Head of Engineering at Ramp, says that Finley brings "capital markets automation [supported by] the best experts in the business." He adds that, "Finley is easily saving us 3 FTEs across Finance and Engineering, and that value will only increase as we roll out ABS and/or loan sale deals in the future."
Impact
By partnering with Finley, Ramp has been able to:
- Save 3 FTEs across Finance and Engineering
- Keep an eye on key capital markets KPIs like advance rate and portfolio triggers
- Focus Data and Engineering resources on customer- and growth-related parts of the business
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