The 192-year-old bank that banks on Ramp to take the waste out of its own books
“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.”
President & COO, Hingham Institution for Savings
Hingham Institution for Savings is one of the oldest banks in America, and one of the leanest. It runs its back office like it has something to prove. Chartered in 1834 and nearing its bicentennial, it carries a $4.5 billion balance sheet with about a hundred people, at a 45.8% efficiency ratio most banks half its age never reach. "We're big enough to afford great people and technology," says President and COO Patrick Gaughen, "but small enough to give the personalized service you don't get from bigger banks."
That combination is not an accident. Since the Gaughen family took control decades ago, the stock has returned more than 5,400%, more than double the return of larger banks like JPMorgan or PNC. The family still treats the institution less like a bank than like a compounding asset. Every hire, every vendor, every piece of software gets measured against the same question: what does it return?
In an insular industry, that discipline has produced an uncommon conviction, that the best ideas usually come from outside banking. So when Hingham turned the same eye on its own overhead, betting on a young fintech like Ramp wasn't a leap. It was an allocation, and like the bank's best ones, it compounded. And in a market where every bank chases the same clients, the edge Hingham found for itself became one it could hand its own clients, too.
The cholesterol in the back office
Even with all that discipline, Hingham's finance stack still looked familiar, with one system for cards, another for bills, and a lot of human work in between. Corporate cards ran on American Express, which sent a statement and little else. Bills ran through AvidXchange, which could route payments but still left the bank to do the accounting. Expense reports lived on spreadsheets and paper.
Worse, none of it spoke to anything else, and none of it enforced the same rules. So the work moved by hand: typing invoices, chasing receipts, coding charges, and walking the building for approvals. "Every invoice, every expense report, every card statement, somebody would walk around the building to get a signature," says CFO Cristián Melej.
The waste didn't live inside any single tool. It lived in the seams, between approval and payment, between a transaction and its coding, between the moment money moved and the moment finance could see it. For a team trying to stay lean, those seams are where time disappears.
"Waste in a company is a little like cholesterol. It's not any one cheeseburger that kills you. It's the daily friction, building up, until you realize you haven't been running at your peak."
— Patrick Gaughen, President & COO
Left alone, that kind of friction compounds. The close slows, visibility comes late, and small mistakes harden into rework. Every handoff becomes another place for money to leak, or for a team to make a decision with yesterday's information. It was exactly the kind of quiet waste Hingham had spent two centuries hunting everywhere else. The fix was never going to be one more tool. It was a system that could pull the seams tight.
Where point tools add, Ramp compounds
It is one thing to know what you've spent. It is another to set the rules before a dollar moves. Hingham first felt that difference in its corporate cards. With American Express, the bank only saw spend after the fact, on a statement someone had to take apart by hand. Ramp's cards came with the rules already inside them: each issued virtually in minutes, with dollar limits and category restrictions written in, and single-purpose cards locked to a single vendor, so policy traveled with the spending instead of trailing it by weeks. Every charge surfaced the instant it happened, already coded, and the rare one that needed a person went to Slack, where the team already worked.
"There's really no implementation, the way you'd think of it with other software. You start using Ramp, set up your vendors, and go."
— Cristián Melej, CFO
But the card was only the leading edge. Because every charge already lived on Ramp, expense reports had nothing left to assemble. An employee photographs a receipt, and Ramp matches it to the transaction. Reimbursements for out-of-pocket spend ran on the same rails. Three jobs that used to be separate (a card program, an expense process, and a reimbursement process) became one, a single real-time view of every dollar an employee spent, however they spent it.
Then travel folded in. Book a flight or a hotel through Ramp Travel and the trip is captured and coded before the traveler is home, with no expense report waiting on the other end. Each piece Hingham moved over made the next one easier, until the savings stopped belonging to any single tool.
"It's taking all of these different pieces of finance, accounts payable, card payments, 1099 issuance, and making them more efficient at the same time. The integration of those things is what unlocks the savings."
— Patrick Gaughen, President & COO
Where the bills finally met the books
Cards were one half of the money going out. Bills were the other, and AvidXchange handled them in a world of its own, paying vendors but never reaching the books. Ramp Bill Pay closed that gap: a forwarded invoice becomes a drafted bill on its own, read, coded, and routed for approval, then lands in the same ledger as the cards. Even 1099 filing, the seasonal chore most banks outsource, moved in-house at no added cost, because Ramp already held the data it needed.
A bank trusts almost nothing by default, so Hingham read Ramp's security audits the way it reads a loan file. Then it became one of the first banks to run its accounts payable on the product, testing early versions for roughly two years and shaping features it still relies on today.
The change it pushed hardest for was a safeguard most software never builds. Bankers know the costliest fraud rarely looks like fraud. It looks like a quiet change to a vendor's bank account, made by the wrong person. Hingham asked Ramp to lock that down, and Ramp built it. A vendor's banking details can’t be changed by just anyone, and the instant they are, the bank is alerted. Most AP tools treat that detail like any other editable field. Ramp made it the hardest thing in the system to change, and the easiest to catch
"As a bank, we needed controls most software doesn't offer: safeguards around who can change a vendor's payment details, and who gets notified when they do. We gave Ramp the feedback, and they built it. I've never experienced that with any other vendor."
— Cristián Melej, CFO
Ramp tightened control and reduced work at the same time. By the time a bill is ready for approval, it has already been drafted, coded, matched to the right vendor, and checked against policy. A step that once ate an afternoon now takes a glance.
It arms its clients with the same edge
Plenty of companies modernize their own back office. Far fewer turn around and offer the same tools to the clients who bank with them, especially not banks. Hingham did, almost immediately. "We started using Ramp five years ago," Gaughen says, "and we probably started talking to customers about it four and a half years ago," well before any formal partnership existed. Today, Hingham is a Ramp banking partner that has put more than two dozen of its own commercial clients onto the platform, from condominium associations to professional-services firms, who together run millions through it. Ramp, in turn, has made Hingham the centerpiece of its banking-partner program.
"We were putting clients on Ramp years before there was anything in it for us. We just thought it was that good."
— Patrick Gaughen, President & COO
The referrals grow out of the bank's most unusual trait: it charges its commercial clients no fees at all. "People hear that and ask, what's the catch," Gaughen says. "The catch is we run very efficiently, and we deliver those savings back to our customers." Ramp is part of how the bank earns the right to say that, the same tooling it runs on itself, offered to clients as proof rather than pitch.
The conviction runs all the way to the front line. "At the big banks I came from, the card programs were criminally inefficient," says Brian Seliber, a commercial banker at Hingham. "Ramp is the first one I've ever wanted to put in front of a client."
The dividends of a frictionless back office
Once Ramp was in place, the work changed shape. Spending stopped waiting to be reviewed and began clearing the instant it happened, checked against the rules Hingham had already set. Today roughly 99% of card transactions need no manual review, and more than 80% code themselves. The team stopped processing transactions one by one and started watching only for the handful that fell outside the lines.
"We went from entering data to managing by exception. With Ramp, we stopped auditing spend after the fact and started managing it as it happens."
— Cristián Melej, CFO
The truest measure of the change was never a percentage, but a person's day. Accounts payable, once nearly a full-time job, now takes a few hours of one. As the bank grew, the finance team did not. It held at four people, and when an accountant eventually moved on, the busywork that had filled the role was already automated. The seat never needed refilling. "The work no longer scales with the labor," Melej says. "We could process several times the invoices we handle today without adding a single person."
"If I just think about my own time, the savings have to run into the six figures, at least."
— Patrick Gaughen, President & COO
The compounding lesson
None of what Hingham did requires a banking charter or two centuries of practice. The bank didn't tear everything out at once. It came for the corporate cards and let the platform earn each next job, one low-risk yes at a time. It refused the usual trade-off between control and speed, automating the routine while keeping a person exactly where judgment belonged. And it found that the waste it was chasing never lived inside any single tool, but in the handoffs between them.
That is why consolidation, not another point solution, turned out to be the lever. Most of all, it measured the return the way it measures any investment: not by a number on a dashboard, but by the hire it never had to make and the time its people won back.
Hingham started by taking the friction out of a single finance team's day. The same starting line is open to anyone.
