What was important to Ramp when selecting a partner for its card issuing platform?

Karim: There are many card issuing platforms out there. You have some of the older ones, like TSYS and First Data. They're battle-tested. They offer managed services in many cases. And a lot of the big banks use them. Maybe i2c is a slightly more modern, but I would probably bucket it in that same category of battle-tested. They've all been there for a while. They work, but a lot of the interactions require older types of integrations. And they don't have a clean API, for example.

Then you have some of the newer players, like Marqeta, Galileo, Synapse, Lithic and Stripe. A major benefit of the newer players is they tend to have much better documentation, cleaner, more modern APIs, that are more familiar to your modern developer and enable a faster speed of iteration when you're getting started in building the product.

So I suspect that for a small issuing company that's getting started, it'll be a lot faster to get off the ground if you're picking any one of the modern players.

The second consideration is what use cases do they support. And they're all very different. Some issuers allow you to issue on Visa, others on MasterCard. Depending on your use case, you may want to be on one network versus the other. Some allow you to issue prepaid cards, others don't. Some allow you to respond to the needs of businesses better. Others are focused on issuing consumer cards.

And, in some cases, some of these platforms have the ability to allow you to create bank accounts or virtual bank accounts. You have to figure out what you're trying to solve with your own use case and pick one of the players that satisfies that.

The third one that I think is the most interesting, and it was very important to us at Ramp is their product roadmaps, values, and the speed at which our partner moves. We have very ambitious goals at Ramp. And that generally has been a very important factor in how we pick our vendors and partners. We want partners who are equally as ambitious, and who are there to support us in the long run.

And when you're looking at vendors through that lens, it becomes more important what the roadmap is, and how fast they're able to move than exactly what the current snapshot of their features is. Because most of the value that you're going to be creating for that partnership is going to come over the next five or 10 years. It can be a pretty significant investment to integrate with any of these card issuing platforms. So, ideally, you don't want to be doing it very often.