Intro to Ramp

I'll be starting at Ramp, a startup involved with corporate cards and expense management, in around a week. However, there's a lot I don't know about the credit industry and Ramp. I figured I should have answers to these questions if I was going to work at a credit card company, so here it goes

What is Ramp?

Prior to starting Ramp, members of the founding team sold a Paribus, a company that saved consumers money on purchased items if the item price decreased. This is important because Ramp was founded on saving customers time + money.

Ramp provides a software that simplifies the process of corporate cards and expense management. Typically, companies use a credit card for employees to purchase items, but they have to manually enter the transactions into their accounting software. Receipt matching is a time-consuming process, as demonstrated by Kevin from the Office.

Ramp's software automates this process, allowing companies to issue corporate cards to their employees and automatically sync the transactions to their accounting software. These transactions are then processed and matched to the company's accounting software. This allows the company to know what they spent money on, why they spent it, and when they spent it, allowing books to be closed more quickly and accurately.

How Ramp makes money

Ramp, like most credit card companies, makes money through interchange fees. Interchange fees are the fees that credit card companies charge merchants for processing transactions, which is usually a flat 3% of the transaction amount. Surprisingly, Ramp does not allow balances to carry over monthly, so Ramp can't charge interest on carried over balances. This model is perfect for customers, because it incentives Ramp to make the product so good customers continuely use the Ramp card.

Interchange fees aren't the only way Ramp makes money. Ramp has a freemium model, where users can use the software for free, but for larger companies or certain features, Ramp charges a subscription fee. Lastly, Ramp allows businesses to earn interest on their operating balance. This is advantageous for both parties, since it allows the business to earn interest on money (that typically earns no interest) and gives Ramp a portion of the interest.

Where I fit in

I'm joining as a SWE on the Compliance team. The Compliance team is responsible for ensuring that Ramp complies with all relevant regulations and laws. It's also important as Ramp is trying to get government entities to use their product, which come with a lot of regulations.

The most important job of the Compliance team is sanctions compliance. Sanctions are regulations that prohibit certain individuals or entities (determined by the country's government) from engaging in transactions with other individuals or entities. Since Ramp is providing credit to companies, Ramp needs to ensure that they are not providing credit to sanctioned entities or allowing credit to be transferred to sanctioned entities. The project I'll be working on involves this and well automating checks for sanctions compliance.