Stickiness in Approval Workflows
Andrew Hoag, CEO of Teampay on building expense management for the enterprise
The real lock in sits in approval logic and accounting workflows, not in a piece of plastic. A company can swap one issuer for another with limited behavior change, but it is much harder to rip out the software that routes requests, encodes policy, syncs to ERP and HR systems, and becomes the place employees go before money moves. That is why the category has been drifting from a card land grab toward higher margin software and workflow control.
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Teampay was built around request, approve, pay, and reconcile, with the value concentrated in the request and approval layer. The product encodes thousands of company specific rules, pushes employees through the right approvals, then triggers whatever payment rail fits, card, ACH, check, wire, or reimbursement. That makes the software the system of record, while the card becomes a replaceable endpoint.
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Ramp and Brex both started card first, but the market has already shifted beyond pure interchange. By the end of 2023, Ramp had reached $30B annualized TPV by adding bill pay, and the category battleground had moved away from card volume toward B2B subscription SaaS. Ramp explicitly uses control before the transaction and interpretation after it as the wedge into broader finance automation.
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The upmarket pattern supports the point. Brex now says startups and mid market buyers want an all in one stack, while enterprises buy best of breed tools for travel, procurement, and spend management separately. In that world, the winning card is the one embedded inside Navan or Coupa with full reconciliation, which means stickiness comes from workflow integration and global capability, not from employee loyalty to a branded card.
Going forward, winners in spend management will keep using cards to land accounts, but the durable economics will come from owning the software layer around policy, reconciliation, procurement, and vendor management. As companies grow from dozens of employees to thousands, card rewards matter less and process matters more, which pushes the market steadily toward SaaS like margins and deeper workflow moats.