4 strategies to navigate economic uncertainty with the right data and playbook

In today’s economic climate, optimism and anxiety often seem to occupy the same sentence. And while many may point to “unprecedented times,” the reality is that economic expansions and contractions rarely follow a neat script.

I recently walked through Ramp’s latest macroeconomic data and what it signals for businesses navigating uncertainty with Ryan Foss, our head of capital markets & treasury. Here are a few steps finance teams can take now to manage volatility more effectively:

1. Look beyond the Fed for economic bellwethers

It’s important to remember that recessions are notoriously hard to predict—even after they’ve started. As I noted in the webinar:

“In March 2008, we were solidly in a recession already. But if you actually look at what the Fed was saying at the time, the Fed still wasn't sure that we were in a recession.”

This demonstrates the risk of reading too far into Fed statements and data. Fed reports and statements are a critical input, but finance leaders should also explore additional, less traditional indicators.

What to do: Monitor datasets like the new Ramp Nowcast, which provides a real-time view into business spending trends, filling the major gap in publicly available business spend data. Ryan shared that Ramp’s finance team also monitors various volatility indexes.

Prediction markets like Kalshi, where investors can bet on the outcome of just about anything, including economic movers like rate cuts and unemployment numbers, are another place to look.

“The market has millions of participants. And so to think that one business of 10 or 100 or 5,000 people is smarter than millions of participants … the market tends to be, on the margin, a little bit smarter than any small subset of individuals.”
—Ryan Foss, Head of Capital Markets & Treasury

2. AI isn’t showing up in productivity data—yet

I remain very bullish on the potential for AI to dramatically boost productivity and pull the U.S. out of a long productivity slump. But I don’t think the impact will come as quickly as some anticipate. Consider that it took five to eight years for major innovations like the PC and cloud computing to meaningfully bump productivity.

As I mentioned in the webinar, AI investments remind me of the board game The Settlers of Catan. The game has a card for “longest road” that awards the player who built the longest road throughout the game critical points at the end, and AI too could bring big rewards later.

I said this in the webinar:

“Oftentimes making technological investments and infrastructural investments does not have a near-term payoff. But if you make those investments, you may actually win long term.”

What to do: Don’t let AI optimism give you a false sense of security. Keep planning for potential downturns. If investors scale back massive funding rounds for AI companies or these businesses start to focus on profitability, the impact on the broader economy could be significant and sudden.

3. Make scenario planning routine

Ryan pointed out that the best finance teams are constantly planning for what could happen. That means understanding the effects of numerous scenarios by running frequent simulations and regularly updating assumptions—twice a year is a good target—to avoid being caught on their heels.

“After Liberation Day back in April, we charted out a number of scenarios, starting with: How would various flavors of recession affect the business? Is it a China-only tariff stress? Is it a broad-based tariff stress? Or is it just a broad-based macro recession because people feel there's some uncertainty and, therefore, they pause CapEx? We ran those stress scenarios and then pushed them through the P&L.” —Ryan Foss, Head of Capital Markets & Treasury

What to do: Proactively model how different stressors would affect the three to five KPIs that drive your business. Go as deep as possible here. For example, our finance team looked at how each tariff-related scenario would impact customers based on their industry, size, and estimated cash reserves.

4. Monitor financials in real time (to the extent possible)

Ramp has a complicated business model. We offer numerous financial products, including credit cards, to more than 40,000 businesses. But, as Ryan explained, we’ve developed a “capital cockpit” that gives finance a detailed view into the most important numbers.

“We have built an on-platform capital and cash management system where we have real-time visibility into all customer repayments, all of our debt and equity activity, all of our liquidity as a business, and we can see that at a point in time. That allows us to operate the capital structure of the company daily, weekly, and monthly with a huge level of precision.” —Ryan Foss, Head of Capital Markets & Treasury

This visibility is important if times get tough because it allows you to quickly know what levers to pull.

What to do now: Building the real-time visibility we have at Ramp may not be doable for smaller finance teams and younger companies. So you should focus on a handful of metrics you know are essential to informing day-to-day financial decisions and build from there. Automate this as much as possible with models that update to reflect the latest data.

The bottom line

The real key is to start planning early and monitor signals closely. I’ll close with this advice from Ryan:

“The one commonality amongst the best companies is they’re planning for many different future states. They're saying, ‘Hey, in this scenario, what does our business profile and shape look like? Here's what happens to the P&L and our cash flow. Here's what happens to our overall competitive position.’ And then ‘here's how we are going to go out and attack that scenario.’” —Ryan Foss, Head of Capital Markets & Treasury

→ Watch the full webinar to go deeper on what real-world data and experience tell us about the best strategies for managing uncertainty.

For more insights, watch the full webinar. And for more analysis of Ramp spend data, follow me on X and LinkedIn, and subscribe to my newsletter. All data is available for download from Ramp Economics Lab.