Introducing commerce sales-based underwriting for growing businesses

Businesses everywhere are looking for a leg up in today’s hyper-competitive landscape.

One of the fastest ways to gain this much needed advantage is to secure a credit limit to help your business grow and scale faster. Unfortunately, for many high-growth businesses, particularly newer companies, access to traditional sources of capital can be difficult to acquire.

Underwriting processes for traditional credit cards generally require a substantial minimum bank balance to get approved. But this is far from the only obstacle. Underwriting often requires a founder guarantee, which makes founders personally liable for paying off any business debts incurred. This can affect the personal credit of owners and dig an even deeper hole for the business.

In addition, the lack of several years of operations and audited financials can also serve as a barrier to securing credit. For businesses that don’t have excess money in the bank due to working capital obligations like inventory, marketing, and shipping, this can make securing a high enough credit limit more difficult than necessary.

At Ramp, we alleviate these pain points by giving businesses the opportunity to access higher credit limits (up to 30x higher than traditional offerings) through connections to data from Shopify, Stripe, and other payment platforms. This allows high-growth businesses to be more appropriately evaluated for the credit limits that they need. On top of this, we provide free best-in-class software for expenses, payments, and accounting that helps you monitor, control, and deploy spend in real time.

Problem: High-growth businesses need a healthy credit limit and tools to better manage finances

New businesses—especially those that are inventory-based—face a whole gamut of challenges in order to stay afloat, from market fit, to business literacy and others, according to a Preferred CFO report. But when it comes to spending, 82% of survey respondents listed poor cash flow management as one of the top reasons they fail.

This eye-opening percentage makes one thing clear: high-growth businesses need working capital to scale and need help to manage their cash conversion cycle for business-critical essentials. But beyond this, they could also benefit from a multi-pronged approach to expense management, savings, partnerships, and strategy to streamline operations. This includes:

Cash-flow visibility and control: Once acquired, capital can be difficult to manage since expense, accounting, and payment systems are typically fragmented and aren’t optimized to work together. As a result, knowing whether or not you're effectively spending your money is a challenge. Because of these fragmented systems, it’s difficult to get a clear understanding of your cash flow due to expense tracking being spread thin across multiple platforms.

Saving money: Many new business owners don’t have relationships with key partners or expertise on how to procure software and maximize savings who could help them scale through savings on their monthly expenses. Unfortunately, unless you’re a large business with established rapport, creating these partner relationships can be difficult to navigate, leaving you paying top dollar for all the things you need to run your business.

Operational excellence and procurement: Even the most seasoned business owners can always benefit from operational improvements. Whether it’s advice on brand strategy from marketing agencies, help with procuring essential vendors, or implementing important tools, streamlining how you operate is key to taking your business to the next level.

Solution: Giving you access to higher credit limits and an all-in-one finance automation platform to manage it

With Ramp, businesses finally have access to a scalable solution made for their specific needs. From credit cards to expense management and much more, unlocking and sustaining growth for your business has become that much simpler.

Here’s how we’ll help you scale your business:

Start: Get evaluated for higher credit limits to start scaling faster

We utilize connections to some of the biggest commerce platforms, web stores, and marketplaces in the industry such as Stripe, Shopify, and Amazon to underwrite credit limits for businesses using their commerce sales data. Plus, no need to worry about having multiple years of finances on hand. With Ramp, businesses only need at least a year of sales history on commerce platforms to be evaluated, allowing you to unlock growth for your business faster.

Combine the above with unlimited physical and virtual cards and software to manage your expenses, payments, and accounting, and you have everything you need to manage your growing business.

Scale: Precise controls and limits to encourage responsible spending and protect your capital

Capital for growth is necessary, but how you manage that capital is critical to sustainable growth. Ramp has precise, yet flexible card controls, expense policies, and approval workflows that can meet the needs of businesses of any size. Create guardrails–and soon, budgets–for how much you should spend on each type of expense.

Recurring card limits and category-level restrictions help ensure your money is spent on the right things, whether that’s ads, production, or software expenses. Plus, you can give every employee a corporate card with streamlined approvals and trust that they’ll spend responsibly using Ramp.

Streamline: Your expense management and day-to-day workflows with finance automation tools and integrations

Ramp consolidates all of your business-critical software into a single dashboard. From collaboration and security, to accounting, we have integrations for virtually every system you're already using to help you work more efficiently. This includes a Slack integration that allows you to approve spend in seconds and HRIS integrations to onboard employees to Ramp seamlessly.

On the expense management side, our finance automation platform gives you real-time insights into where your money is being spent. The platform allows you to protect your working capital through precise spend and merchant controls, robust expense policies, and clear approval chains so employee spend can be effortlessly managed.

Save an average of 5% and pricing intelligence to reduce spend and maximize ROI in key categories

Our finance automation platform was created with two goals in mind: saving you time and money. With our platform, you can look forward to streamlining your expense management, unlocking savings opportunities, and more. This includes:

• Partner perks and savings for advertising, SaaS and more
• Vendor contract negotiations through our Buyer team that has saved customers approximately 22% on average on their SaaS contracts
• Intelligent spending insights to surface additional money saving opportunities like reducing duplicate spend
• Discounts on a wide variety of platforms, such as 71Lbs and EasyPost

Ramp: the ultimate solution for capital-constrained businesses

Together, sales-based underwriting in tandem with our all-in-one finance automation solution gives new, capital-constrained businesses the support they need to take operations to the next level.

Apply to Ramp today