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FinTech Infrastructure
Mar 31, 2022
Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and CTO of Ramp, on the future of the card issuing market
Explore more expense management and the players in the space through our EDGE Insight
Figuring out the expense gashes in corporate spending is a common pain point for businesses. Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and CTO of Ramp, believes that time wasted on understanding corporate expenses can be better used to focus on business missions and high-priority tasks. While expense management solutions have been around, tech development and modern issuers act as conduits for corporates to benefit from better visibility. Read on to learn about how card-issuing fits into fintech ecosystems, the multiplying use cases, and Ramp’s strategies.
The following interview was conducted by Sacra — August, 2021
Background
Karim Atiyeh is the co-founder/CTO of Ramp, the corporate card that helps finance teams better manage their spend and lower expenses. We spoke with Karim as part of our research into banking-as-a-service platforms and issuer processors in particular—Ramp is one of the fastest-growing fintech companies built on BaaS, with virtual cards powering their corporate card GTM on the front-end and their automatic expense categorization on the back-end.
Questions
1. Could you please talk about how card issuing platforms created this opportunity for you to build Ramp?
2. Could you please talk about use cases for customers where card issuing via Ramp really shines?
3. Providing corporate cards is only the first step for Ramp. What leverage do you get from card issuing, as you build out the financial operating system?
4. Expense management companies like Expensify and bill.com are now getting to card issuing as well. How do you think of Ramp's competitive advantage versus these players’ own cards?
5. If we just dig into issuing processing a little bit, could you please talk about the process of picking a partner, when you are looking for card-issuing platforms, and what was important for you?
6. You mentioned speed to market and scalability as two top-of-mind drivers when selecting partners. For these new generation issuer processors, the likes of Lithic, Bond and Unit, would you say speed to market is significant enough to differentiate them?
7. In terms of scalability, how scalable are these issuer processor platforms?
8. In terms of use cases, do you see, at one point, supporting more use cases will actually become a constraint for the platform to scale?
9. If we look at the landscape today, what would you look for in a card issuing partner, considering Unit, Lithic, Bond, in addition to the first generation card issuers, such as Marqeta and Galileo?
10. How do you see these card issuer platforms differentiate and position with their roadmap?
11. Would love to hear your thoughts on the dynamics between the consumer-facing FinTech and the processing platform over time. How that dynamic might affect the interchange split?
12. Last question. Could you please talk about the long-term option of taking card issuing in-house?
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