As the fastest-growing corporate card in the United States, Ramp enables billions of dollars of purchases each year and is one of the financial services industry’s strongest startup success stories to recently emerge

But with Ramp’s 10x year-over-year growth comes increased risk, Ramp Head of Fraud Alex De Jesus knew that the company needed to enhance fraud detection and risk mitigation efforts to protect the organization.

“We know the importance of being able to identify and react to fraud events in order to ensure that they don't become a problem.” explained Alex. 

One of the the primary fraud vectors Alex focuses on is application fraud, where a person applies for Ramp’s services with falsified information via forged documents. This forged information could have been stolen from an innocent victim or fabricated to make a fake business look legitimate. 

Alex needed a tool that would prevent fraud across both categories in order to reduce risk and help his team continue growing responsibly. 

The risk team’s main criteria for evaluating risk tools was effectiveness

Alex and his team also consider the vendor relationship that forms through the evaluation and testing process.

“There are some vendors that are very structured in their way of selling and serving,” Alex shared. “But it’s important to me to build a relationship and work with a vendor that addresses our feedback as a customer. I always want to find a partner that is willing to communicate and work through the problem that we're trying to solve.”

Working for a successful startup themselves, the team at Ramp is also hyper-aware that the best solutions may not come from the biggest names.

“I try to be unbiased when I evaluate tools because I know that the industry changes quite a bit and quite quickly,” Alex said. “When looking for a partner, it’s important to have an open mind about the playing field. Obviously, there are the incumbents — the big players that you can consider — but you don’t want to ignore the startups that are delivering effective solutions. They may not be as well-known, but they tend to be far more flexible without sacrificing quality. They’re able to build quickly and address the needs that you have more effectively. That flexibility is a huge differentiator.”

Ultimately, Alex’s team decided to enhance their existing fraud ecosystem by partnering with Inscribe to:

• Identify fraudulent documents (like bank statements) during the application process.
• Automate parts of the account opening processes and KYC requirements, such as clearing various mismatches of addresses and names submitted during the application process.
• Parse bank statements to conduct credit analysis and help automate the underwriting process.
• Periodically collect additional documents to support ongoing account monitoring.

Ramp almost immediately saw ROI from purchasing Inscribe

“The ROI is huge and our investment has quickly paid off,” Alex said. “Depending on the credit line, it could be many times the cost of Inscribe’s solution.”

For example, Ramp was able to save $300K when Inscribe accurately identified signs of manipulation on submitted bank statements — signals that are often invisible to the human eye and impossible to detect using traditional manual review methods.

In addition to cost savings, Inscribe also provides valuable efficiency gains, with the tool reducing average processing times by 30 minutes per application. With the company processing thousands of applications each month, the total time savings on this point alone amounts to the equivalent of several full-time employees.

These faster processing times don’t just translate into a better customer experience for Ramp clients — they also improve the employee experience.  

“Inscribe saves our team from having to do routine, manual tasks that create fatigue and contribute to burnout,” Alex said. “With Inscribe we can automate a lot of that activity while enhancing the rigor of our review process.”

Finally, by using Inscribe, Ramp now has data and insights that it didn’t necessarily have access to before.

For example, in addition to identifying cases of third-party fraud, which is when an individual uses a stolen identity during the application process, Inscribe also helps catch instances of first-party fraud, which occur when a person manipulates or edits bank statements, pay stubs, or credit reports that belong to them. 

With a traditional review process and tools, these instances of first-party fraud tend to be more difficult to detect and therefore sometimes slip through standard processes. However, through automation and advanced analytics, Alex and his team can not only identify individual cases of fraud, but also start to uncover patterns and connections that can help them pinpoint such cases even faster and with more accuracy in the future.

"We want to offer the best services to our customers and to do that it’s important we know and have confidence in the information they provide so we can effectively assign the right credit line and open up the most features without taking undue risk.” says Alex. “Using Inscribe to give us confidence that we are accurately assessing the risks  is a huge component of our overall strategy.”

With Inscribe, Ramp is able to avoid risk from fraudulent applicants and better serve their customers.