As one of the fastest-growing fintech companies, Ramp’s mission is to provide its customers with finance automation that maximizes the output of every dollar and hour.
Ramp powers over $5 billion of annualized payments volume and has raised over $1 billion in combined venture and debt financing.
Ramp’s product suite ranges from corporate cards and expense management software, to accounts payable automation and accounting integrations.
The Rutter team worked with Sam Packard, Senior Product Manager at Ramp, and Harry Ledley, Technical Lead at Ramp throughout the pilot period and implementation.
PROBLEM
Ramp wanted a complete picture of business financials to give customers better credit limits for their corporate card.
SOLUTION
Rutter helped Ramp gain access to new data sources to better understand the revenue of businesses, using integrations with commerce and payment processor platforms.
OUTCOME
Ramp was able to underwrite and approve businesses faster and with more optimal limits, creating a much better customer experience.
Impact Summary
8+ Platforms Launched with 1 API
5 Min to Set Up New Platform Integration
8x Time Saving (From Months of Engineering Time to Weeks)
the problem
Accessing New Data Sources For Underwriting
Ramp’s success is directly correlated with providing the most optimal credit limits to their customers while also minimizing risk. To do this, they need a comprehensive financial picture of a business, which requires stitching together multiple data sources.
A business could potentially get a lower limit on Ramp than they could have otherwise qualified for because we didn’t have a full picture of their financial health. If a competitor were to give them a higher credit limit, they would then be more likely to choose to consolidate all their spend with that competitor since they couldn’t fulfill their business’s spending needs with the Ramp card. It’s crucial for us to create the best customer experience possible and give more optimal credit limits by using additional data sources like Rutter.
Sam Packard, Senior Product Manager
Ramp first started leveraging accounting data for its underwriting, but realized that accounting data didn’t capture the detailed, real-time sales information about a business and lacked standardization. In order to get a fuller picture of a business, Ramp decided to pull additional data from commerce and payment platforms that were easier to validate as being closer to ground truth.
Sales data from directly-connected commerce and payment platforms is hard to fake, more standardized than the output from businesses’ accounting software, and real-time as opposed to monthly, all of which makes it favorable to use for underwriting and limit setting for our corporate card product.
Sam Packard, Senior Product Manager
the solution
Streamlining Commerce Data via One API
When Ramp was evaluating potential solutions to pull all of this commerce data, they prioritized three criteria: ease of use, reliability, and platform coverage. These requirements were important to fully streamline access to new data sources, including Shopify, Stripe, Etsy, and many more. The team knew they needed to save engineering hours and not have to worry about maintaining these platform integrations in-house. Ramp decided to pilot Rutter because it was the one provider that outperformed all the other players on those three criteria and provided a best-in-class developer experience. The resulting partnership has led to Ramp launching 8+ data integrations in a few months, saving them hundreds of engineering hours.
It made sense for us to just use one API and integrate with one solution vs using 5-10 different APIs. We went with Rutter because they had the most tech-forward engineering team, provided the best commerce and payment platform integrations, and offered a very smooth onboarding experience.
Sam Packard, Senior Product Manager
the impact
Helping Ramp Build The Best Customer Experience
Speed to Data Fetch
Customers applying to Ramp want a decision as quickly as possible or else they may not convert to use the product. When customers link their new data sources, Ramp is able to give them a decision promptly. Ramp pulls very rich data from Rutter, and importantly, it usually doesn’t take much longer to pull than other forms of data like bank transactions. Packard shared, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and having all these new data source integrations available at a fast speed allows us to provide a more prompt response to customers and a more delightful experience overall.” Ledley added, “The longer it takes for us to approve the customer, the lower the chance of activating.”
Reliability & Connection Health
Given how core these integrations are to Ramp’s offering, reliability and connection health is extremely important to maintaining a good customer experience. Packard shared, “Connection health over time is extremely important for us since we can’t lose visibility and be running blind.” Ledley also added, “This also helps us maintain our risk signals and we don’t want this information to be stale.”
Ease of Implementation & Streamlined Setup
It took the Ramp team 1-2 hours to get set up and start testing Rutter, a record time for anyone using these commerce APIs. From there, the Ramp team was able to cut down months of engineering time to build platform integrations into a few weeks. Ledley shared, “The API is so simple and such a good abstraction of the complexities of each individual platform. Rutter saves us from needing to think about bespoke integrations. Enabling a new platform right now takes us 5 mins of engineering work. Every additional platform is now free to us.”
the future
Laying the Foundation for Future Products
As Ramp continues to build new integrations to access more commerce data, Packard and the Ramp product team are excited to explore other future use cases. Packard shared...
As we keep adding new platforms and as Rutter increases its coverage, we are excited to find more key use cases that can easily be unlocked with these integrations.