How I built it: Ramp's 'Know Your Customer' spend program
In fintech, KYC usually means compliance requirements. At Ramp, it now means something more.
With more than 30,000 businesses using Ramp, we wanted to give employees a way to explore and support our incredible customers while also putting our own product to the test. In this case, we’re testing our merchant restriction features.
That’s why we launched the “Know Your Customer” spend program: a quarterly initiative that gives every employee $50 to spend with a select group of customers.
To make it even more engaging, our Customer Marketing team crowdsourced nominations and shared details about each customer’s story and offerings.
Some of our recent featured customers:
- Barry’s—Get your sweat on with HIIT workouts
- AllTrails—Find your next hike and grab outdoor gear
- Athletic Brewing—Enjoy non-alcoholic craft beer
- Kolkata Chai—Sip on authentic chai without leaving the U.S.
- Food52—Discover beautiful kitchen and home goods
Here’s exactly how we implement our Know Your Customer spend program at Ramp.
How the spend program works
1. Set an amount and frequency
Each employee gets $50 per quarter, and the balance automatically resets at the beginning of each quarter. We select new customers each cycle based on employee nominations.
2. Decide how funds are issued
Funds are auto-issued to every employee and appear instantly upon onboarding so new hires can start using Ramp right away.
3. Set restrictions
The fund can only be spent at the five selected customer merchants. Employees can use their Ramp card in-person (for example, at Maman’s cafe on Manhattan’s Upper East Side), access a virtual card for online purchases (like ordering hydration packs from LMNT), or reimburse themselves for out-of-pocket purchases.
4. Set accounting rules
Every transaction is automatically booked to a dedicated “Know Your Customer” general ledger account in NetSuite. Since we’ve already mapped these transactions to the appropriate accounting category, we mark them “ready to sync” to the GL. This helps us close the books faster.
5. Enable auto-approval and post-purchase requirements
After the purchase, employees submit receipts and memos. The system auto-approves card transactions and reimbursements go to managers for approval. If someone loses a receipt, employees can submit a missing receipt affidavit.
Spend programs that scale
Ramp’s Spend Programs feature is one of the most versatile features in our product. It makes it easy to issue and manage company money at scale, whether for coffee, wellness, remote work, travel, or company events.
Who knew compliance could be this fun?
“I assumed I would have to choose between speed and control. What I found is that you can have both. A well-designed system takes friction out, for the finance function and for everyone else.”
Justin Webster
CFO, Denver Broncos
“A well-run district should not have to choose between getting work done at the school site and keeping control of the dollars behind it. We're not hiring more people to do more jobs, so we have to be smarter about the process. With Ramp, the purchase, the receipt, and the record stay together from the start. ”
Nick Brizeno
Director of Purchasing, San Marcos Unified School District
“AI is moving faster than the finance context around it. Prices change, models change, and the value is not always obvious from an invoice. We needed enough detail to know which bets deserved more investment — and which ones did not.”
Greg Cooley
Controller, AngelList
“Invoices, cards, tokens. The categories change but the principle doesn't: know where the money is going, remove the work around it, and make sure the spend is worth it.”
Maciej Mylik. Finance
ElevenLabs
“There's just no surprises anymore. No more waiting two months to find out how a job did. We know how it's doing as it's happening.”
Erich Kuss
Financial Systems Manager, Infinity Home Services
“More token spend isn’t proof that AI is working. Less isn’t proof that it isn’t. What matters is whether we’re buying the right level of intelligence for the work. Ramp lets us make that judgment in the same place we manage every other type of spend.”
Cody Nutt
Senior Director of Business Systems, Daxko
“Most banks treat the back office as a cost to keep down. We treat ours as a return to compound, which is why we run it on Ramp. Now we put our clients on Ramp, too.”
Patrick Gaughen
President & COO, Hingham Institution for Savings
“Browserbase builds infrastructure so AI agents can do real work. Ramp is doing the same for finance. It’s not another tool. It’s a system purpose-built for AI-driven finance, and that’s why we chose Ramp as our financial operating system from day one.”
Paul Klein IV
Founder & CEO, Browserbase
