Cashback Subsidies Threaten Float

This risk is really about who gets paid for the customer relationship. Float is built to charge for software that controls spend, collects receipts, codes transactions, and closes the books faster. But well funded U.S. rivals can use cashback as a shortcut, giving finance teams immediate savings at signup and making the card itself, not the workflow software, feel like the main reason to switch.

• Float makes money mainly from monthly subscriptions, while Keep in Canada and Brex historically leaned more on interchange, deposit economics, FX, and other financial revenue. That matters because a company funded by card economics can hand more value back upfront through rewards without needing software fees to carry the model.
  1 sacra 3 sacra 4 sacra 5 sacra
• Ramp and Brex have a much larger capital base than Float. Ramp had about $1.9B in estimated total funding and $1B in annualized revenue by August 2025, while Brex had about $1.5B in funding and $700M in annualized revenue by August 2025. Float had raised about $92.6M as of June 2025. That funding gap gives U.S. players more room to treat rewards as customer acquisition spend.
  1 sacra 2 sacra 6 sacra 7 sacra
• The deeper industry shift is that card volume alone is no longer the whole game. Ramp’s growth into bill pay, procurement, and paid software shows the winners use cards to get into the workflow, then expand into higher margin software. For Float, the strongest defense is owning Canadian workflows so tightly that cashback becomes a perk, not the main buying reason.
  1 sacra 4 sacra 5 sacra 6 sacra

Going forward, the Canadian market is likely to split between products that win on financial yield and products that win on workflow depth. Float’s path is to make spend controls, accounting sync, bill pay, and local banking fit so embedded in Canadian finance operations that a temporary rewards subsidy from a foreign entrant is not enough to dislodge it.