Grasshopper 'Ramps' up its corporate card capabilities

Grasshopper, a digital bank for small businesses, is partnering with the financial software company Ramp on a referral basis to expand the capabilities it can offer to its customers, including corporate card issuance.

This is Grasshopper's first fintech referral partner. The New York-based bank, which has $606.8 million of assets, hopes it will be the beginning of a "marketplace strategy" where Grasshopper curates a small list of fintech partners for its customers. The bank also plans over time to integrate more Ramp capabilities into Grasshopper's online and mobile banking. This is also the first instance of Ramp directly integrating with a bank.

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"We empower our clients by delivering high-quality digital banking tools and resources," Chris Tremont, Grasshopper's chief digital officer, said in a press release. "Working with Ramp, we can continue to deliver on our promise of providing the right technology and services to our clients." 

The partnership will let Grasshopper clients apply for physical and virtual corporate cards through the Ramp website, a feature that Grasshopper does not offer itself. The bank says there will be a financial incentive to sign up for the card through the referral program. 

Companies that apply for virtual and physical corporate cards through Ramp can dictate spending and merchant controls — for instance, they can block transactions from specific merchants — and gain real-time visibility into company spending. The cards all earn 1.5% cash back. Users also get access to financial software. This includes expense management tools that use artificial intelligence to scan Gmail accounts for receipts and automatically match them to transactions; spending insights, which analyze transactions to alert finance teams of duplicate transactions and more; bill payments; and accounting integrations.

Both companies are working on integrating Ramp capabilities more directly into Grasshopper, such as the ability to issue cards and view Ramp transactions online through Grasshopper. Over time, Grasshopper hopes to extend Ramp's tools to fintechs it supports through its application programming interface-enabled banking-as-a-service platform. For example, a fintech client could conceivably use Ramp to issue co-branded credit cards to its end clients.