What are the long-term considerations for Ramp regarding the possibility of bringing card issuing in-house?

Karim: I think you used the right word here. The question is this option, right? In general, when you're starting a business, you're very resource-constrained. You have to think very, very carefully of where you want to expand your resources.

One framework for thinking about that is you've got to pick certain things that are your competitive advantage, and certain things that are not your competitive advantage. For the things that are your competitive advantage, ideally, you want to do a lot of it in-house, so that you can truly differentiate yourself. And the ones that are not, if there are great vendors out there, then maybe that's okay and that's enough.

So, in picking card issuers, our view was that some aspects of it are our competitive advantage, like the speed at which you are able to issue cards, for example. Or the amount of flexibility that you have, in order to control the card spend, also can become a competitive advantage. Things like what merchants can be charged to a card, or what categories of spending. These sorts of things are competitive advantages. But how exactly it gets routed through the Visa network, and how to convert from one encoding standard to another, we couldn't care less about that. We just need it to work, and we need it to work quickly.

So, in many ways, we have focused a lot of our efforts on finding a card issue partner that provides a lot of the flexibility that we need to build our competitive advantage of the product, without having to worry about a lot of how things get encoded in the back, or directly managing the relationships with the network. Because we think a lot of it is commoditized.

I don't think you want to do everything in-house, or you want to do everything with a vendor. I think the right thing to do is to carve out the space where you want to build your competitive advantage. As a result, we found that working with card issuing partners that are very smart about this, or willing to be flexible, and partner with us long-term, has been a key factor in how we choose the vendors we work with.

We think optionality is extremely important. We've built our platform in a way that if we needed to switch from one provider to another or work with multiple providers, we're easily able to do that. Sometimes there are benefits to that. Sometimes there are benefits to being exclusive with one provider. So that optionality is very valuable.