Finding longevity in fIntech with Eric Glyman from Ramp
19 Mar 2024 (6 months ago)
- Fintech has experienced rapid growth in the past 5 years and is expected to continue.
- The podcast, Found, hosted by Dominic M Davis and Becca Scac, interviews Eric Glyman, CEO and co-founder of Ramp, a spend management platform.
- Listeners are challenged to identify the lie among three statements:
- This is the second company Eric started with his current co-founder.
- They got the idea for Ramp while working at Capital One.
- Eric grew up in Silicon Valley, which inspired him to become a founder.
- Ramp is a spend management platform that provides corporate cards and software to help companies manage their finances.
- It offers real-time expense tracking, budgeting, and approval workflows.
- Ramp's mission is to make corporate finances easier and more efficient.
- Ramp provides a platform that simplifies financial operations for companies, including corporate cards, expense management, bill payment, and procurement.
- Ramp's platform helps companies save money by reducing unnecessary spending and automating processes.
- Ramp initially started as a savings app called ParaBus, which used AI to help customers get refunds for price drops.
- After selling ParaBus to Capital One, the Ramp team saw an opportunity to disrupt the credit card and banking industry by creating a card and software that helps businesses spend less money and save time.
- Ramp shifted its focus from consumer-oriented products to B2B solutions, maintaining its emphasis on good design and user-oriented features.
- Decision-making in the B2B space is more complex due to the involvement of multiple stakeholders and shared missions.
- Ramp identified inefficiencies in business spending and saw an opportunity to help businesses save money.
- Ramp focuses on business fintech, targeting the lower barrier to entry and immediate impact opportunities in the industry.
- The fintech industry has seen increased competition and innovation due to regulations and lower barriers to entry.
- Ramp positions itself as a productivity company, aiming to automate financial tasks and provide insights for better decision-making.
- Ramp utilizes AI for various tasks, including structuring data, generating text, and customer service interactions.
- Ramp's initial use of automation and AI allowed for efficient processing of thousands of responses daily, detecting response nature, emotion, and refund amounts.
- Ramp now employs machine learning to predict fields, detect receipts, and match them with transactions accurately.
- Ramp's expense intelligence feature uses NLP to automatically flag alcohol-related expenses when relevant.
- AI-powered automation is improving the accuracy and efficiency of accounting tasks, such as natural language translation into accounting categories.
- AI is being used across all aspects of Ramp, including product development, marketing, and sales.
- While AI can automate many tasks, human oversight is still necessary for custom-fit workflows.
- AI can create value and increase access by considering more patterns than humans can.
- Finance teams spend a significant amount of time on rote work, which prevents them from focusing on growth and strategic tasks.
- AI agents can be deployed to automate simple, low-risk processes, freeing up finance teams to focus on more strategic tasks.
- AI agents can assist finance teams by providing estimates, accuracy, and methodology, allowing for increased trust and delegation of tasks over time.
- The use of AI agents in finance will allow teams to focus on more interesting and challenging work, leading to increased productivity and innovation.
- Ramp measures its success by the amount of money and time it saves its customers.
- Ramp designs for modern cybersecurity by isolating risk, ensuring PCI compliance, and partitioning data to limit access.
- The venture market has changed in the past five years, with more businesses achieving great outcomes and investors becoming more willing to invest heavily.
- Platforms like Yator have made deep dives into building businesses more accessible, increasing entrepreneurs' knowledge and chances of success.
- The cost of capital has decreased, resulting in higher business valuations and increased success rates for entrepreneurs.
- Ramp's rapid development and quick issuance of its first card exemplify the improved speed of software creation and investor support for startups.
- Eric Glyman and his co-founders' diverse personalities complement each other, contributing to their successful partnership in building companies.
- Ramp's hiring strategy focuses on individuals with great potential, curiosity, passion, and a high slope of growth, rather than solely relying on the founders' expertise.
- Despite its rapid growth, Ramp still has a significant market share to capture in its largest market of cards and plans to expand globally.
- Ramp aims to address pain points in money movement for companies, focusing on procurement, bill payments, and travel, to enhance financial efficiency and user-friendliness.
- The company envisions becoming a company savings and finance agent, providing personalized assistance to businesses for optimized financial operations and decision-making.
- Eric Glyman, a guest on the show from Las Vegas, founded two fintech companies, one consumer-focused and the other B2B-focused.
- Despite the rapid growth of fintech, the financial services industry is slow to adopt fintech innovations.
- Eric Glyman discussed the potential for fintech to improve corporate cards and simplify expense management.
- The podcast hosts mentioned a previous episode featuring Brex and criticized Concur, a competing expense management tool.
- The conversation highlighted the evolution of AI and its practical applications in fintech, such as automating financial tasks and simplifying expense management.