The CFO Dashboard; Ramp, Brex or Mercury - 18 Months Later

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Hey Fintech Nerds 👋,

3. Days. Til Nerdcon! It’s real! Snag a last-minute ticket if the FOMO is becoming unbearable ;). Eternally grateful🙏.

I’m gonna have a short rest from the weekly newsletter next week because I’ll be quite occupied, then one or two more editions and a Trip to Abu Dhabi Finance Week and Solana Breakpoint to close out the year. Then I’ll start on The State of Fintech 2026. 😅

Congrats to Cash App for crushing their latest product drops. Great to see the builder energy. The AI product looks actually useful, and they did stablecoins in an elegant way. Cash App is back.

After the blockbuster $2bn acquisition talk for BVNK, did Coinbase walk, or did BVNK get a better offer? I guess we’ll find out in time.  (More in Things to Know).

JPM Coin on Base, and onchain, is a huge moment. The beginning of the wall of dollars inside banks going open loop. (More in Things to Know).

50-year mortgages seem like a dumb idea (as Alex points out and did the Math). 50-year mortgages created a bubble and bust in Japan, and failed. Juicing demand with fake buying power is already broken. We need to fix supply, for housing, income, and everything else.

3 Days til Fintech Nerdcon. This event is for the builders. You don’t want to miss it. Get your tickets here…

Here's this week's Brainfood in summary

📣 Rant: The CFO Dashboard; Ramp, Brex or Mercury - 18 Months Later

💸 4 Fintech Companies:

1. Trudenty - Risk intelligence for first-party fraud.

2. Carrington Labs - Plug and Play Credit Risk Analytics 

3. Boogi - The Cashback API

4. Keyrails - Treasury on stables.

👀 Things to Know:

1. JP Morgan launched a blockchain-based deposit on a public chain

2. Coinbase walks from $2bn deal for BVNK.

📚 Good Read: Ribbit - The Token Letter

If your email client clips some of this newsletter click below to see the rest

Weekly Rant 📣

The CFO’s Dashboard - Ramp, Brex or Mercury?

18 Months ago I wrote that I saw a three way battle to be the CFO’s preferred dashboard. The companies were in full land-grab mode in the wake of the SVB collapse and saw an influx of deposits. They all had unique approaches, but now those approaches are diverging even further. Far from competing with each other, they’re exploring white-space.

"Winning" now looks like three completely different and mutually exclusive business models.

• Ramp is the Anti-Spend and Automation company

• Brex has pivoted to Enterprise and Global

• And Mercury is the heir to the SVB throne as the “bank” for entrepreneurs and growth companies.

Each has had an impressive run.

18 months ago, each had a wedge (a card, infrastructure, the account), and they had begun a rapid product expansion. Now their second acts are becoming clearer. Here’s how I see it.

Ramp: Growing by Automating your Workflows

Ramp is a darling tech company that transcends the “Fintech” label and arguably helps define it. In part, due to the one thing tech companies are supposed to deliver, revenue growth. Ramp passed a $1bn run rate in September, and PackyM (an investor) wrote:

Only a handful of companies deliver this pace of growth at > $500m revenue, but they’re also generating operating cash flow. It’s hitting software like margins. Its uniquely focused strategy is delivering outsized results. 

Their company equation hasn’t changed:

Ramp has evolved from its wedge in spend management towards finding every part of the CFO’s workflow where they can save time or save money through automation.

• Corporate cards

• Spend management 

• Bill Pay / Accounts Payable

• Procurement workflow management

• Vendor management hub

• Travel platform

• Bookeeping

You could read all of those as features, but you wouldn’t get why those features work unless you understand that this company measures every single millisecond a user is on their platform. They’re trying to save time with 1,000s of tiny details, and automagically remove admin. You could add those line items to your roadmap and not understand at all why this business works so well. 

• In the last two years they acquired Venue the procurement platform, and Cohere an AI-powered customer support platform (long before everyone was doing this with Sierra etc).

• Their tech approach hasn’t changed. Partner with the best-in-class 3rd parties, and ruthlessly focus tech effort and energy on what makes customers go faster. Their engineers write small, independent pull requests (PRs) of 100 lines or less, getting each small change reviewed and merged independently to prevent bottlenecks and make debugging each PR simpler (and increase the odds an agent can complete the PR by itself).

If there’s a bear case, it’s that to date, they’re still very domestic. That’s a huge market, and it hasn’t exactly slowed their growth, but its in contrast to where Brex is able to win by supporting global enterprises.

(As an almost poetic example, as I was about to write this sentence, the doorbell rang. It was a FedEx delivery to my house in the UK. Inside the package was a regular letter, inside that was my new Ramp card. That’s surprisingly high friction for the anti-friction company.)

Going early on stablecoins. In August, Ramp announced stablecoin-backed debit cards, meaning any global business can fund a "wallet" with Ramp using local currency (which is converted to USDC) or by depositing stablecoins directly. Ramp then issues a corporate card linked to this stablecoin balance. They added stablecoin bill pay, so contractors (for example) could choose to receive USDC if they work for a US-based startup company.

Ramp is growing so fast that by the time you’ve written down the case study, it’s a new company. They’re diversifying their product, growing at an astonishing rate, and making new bets to go global.

Brex 2.0: The Pivot to Enterprise

Brex is no longer a startup. It's a "Second Act" company. In the depths of 2022, they appeared to be struggling to grow and were no longer the darling of B2B Fintech in the shadow of Ramp. Today, a more confident, “founder-mode” Brex fired its SMB customers and has a “Brex Mafia” of former staff who founded companies like Bridge, Privy, and became CEOs at Figure and Character AI.

They are not competing for a 100-person YC startup; they are competing head-to-head with SAP Concur and Amex for their global, public-company clients. The $700M in revenue is a hybrid model. The question for Brex is no longer "can they beat Ramp?" It's "can they slay the 30-year-old enterprise dragons?

Brex has evolved from a similar wedge in spend management towards intentionally becoming the enterprise CFO’s dashboard. Offering:

• Corporate cards

• Spend management 

• Bill Pay / Accounts Payable

• Invoice workflow management

• Treasury Management and high-yield accounts

• Travel platform

• Bookkeeping integrations

What has made Brex different during its second act is its flexibility for the larger enterprises. Its tech approach of owning more of the infrastructure, earlier, has allowed it to deploy in more global markets. While others like Ramp and Mercury are vertically integrating, Brex has been more open to partnerships. 

• Partnerships and “Brex-as-a-Service.” If you’re a Navan (travel) customer, you can generate a Brex card in the Navan user experience.  Brex handles the issuance and underwriting and is pre-loaded with company policies. 

• Tech approach more build than partner. Brex doesn’t use a banking-as-a-service partner and has built more in-house. This has enabled them to do more bespoke partnerships, launch in more markets sooner and be more flexible to enterprise needs.

Bear case? How much headroom do they have to grow? Their sweet spot is following their biggest customers as those customers go global. But similarly, those customers will start to look to other local banks and partners in time.

The wildcard is re-inventing itself with AI from the ground up. To accelerate AI adoption, they gave their engineers a $50 monthly innovation budget and pre-approved legal frameworks to test new AI tools. Brex's strategy is to be the default financial stack for the AI-native "startup" (like Anthropic, Cursor, and Glean) and ride their growth wave as they become the new "enterprise."

Owning the infrastructure might give them an edge in AI, and partnerships to gradually help be the AI-first overlay of every other enterprise financial tool.

Mercury: Filling the void left by SVB

If Ramp is the canonical tech company and Brex is an infrastructure platform, Mercury is, without apology, a better version of a bank account. Or at least, the 21st-century software replacement for one.

Their "wedge" was always the account, and their execution, as I wrote 18 months ago, was defined by a "flawless UX." They are the "founder's founder" company, and their design-led philosophy made them the default for new startups.

Then came March 2023.

Mercury is the single biggest beneficiary of the SVB collapse. When the startup ecosystem's default bank evaporated over a weekend, founders and VCs didn't all run to J.P. Morgan; they ran to the "SVB with a good UX." Mercury onboarded $2 billion in new deposits in just five days.

Their product suite is a list of everything a startup wished SVB could do, all in one dashboard:

• Checking Accounts (the core)

• Mercury Treasury (High-yield accounts with expanded $5M FDIC insurance)

• Corporate Credit & Debit Cards

• Global Bill Pay

• Venture Debt (yes, they are now in the lending business)

• Multi-currency accounts (true, holdable accounts for USD, EUR, GBP, etc.)

I see two main growth levers

• Multi-currency / Global Financial Accounts.

• Venture Debt, being the next SVB

The Bear Case? The Bear Case is simple and existential: What happens when interest rates fall? Mercury is in a race against the Fed. Their NII-driven revenue and profitability are a "windfall" of the current rate cycle. They are valued more like a traditional bank than a high-growth SaaS company.

The Wildcard is that they are using this NII war chest to frantically build out their sticky, revenue-generating SaaS products (like Bill Pay, AP, and Cards). The question is, can they build a durable software business before their primary revenue stream gets cut in half?

Mercury has always been refined, crafted, and uniquely focused on the experience it creates for customers. Everything the SVB humans did well, Mercury does digitally. Even Immad, himself a prolific angel investor, is very Silicon Valley. 

(Fun fact, Fintech Nerdcon uses Mercury for its operating account).

TradFi isn’t Cooked - But Should Take Notes

Ramp, Brex, and Mercury compete by selling an all-in-one, automated software platform for free, replacing TradFi's "stitched-together" stack of separate, paid tools.

• Ramp/Brex beat the Amex/Concur experience by bundling the corporate card with AI-powered software. Instead of pulling manual expense reports from one system and importing them to another. The expense report, rules, and controls they’re all embedded together, beautifully.

• Mercury beats traditional banks by replacing the clunky portal with a "Financial OS." with a genunely a flawless (dare I say, stunning) UX, instant startup onboarding, and bundles treasury, bill pay, and cards the account. No separate KYC’s, or logins or forms, or calling humans. Just, click, click, boom.

I think there’s three big lessons if you’re a bank

1. Software is the Product: The integrated software experience is the new competitive moat, not a "portal" bolted onto a legacy product.

2. Automation is the Standard: AI-driven, "zero-touch" workflows are the new customer expectation. The manual expense report is dead.

3. The All-in-One Platform Wins: Customers will always abandon a stack of siloed tools for a single, bundled platform that solves the entire workflow.

There’s no vendor or project that can compete with a crafted experience. You have to own the digital experience of your customers the way your relationship managers do.

The Three-Way Bet

The question of “Ramp, Brex, or Mercury” is the wrong question.

The bigger picture is the gradual re-bundling of financial services for growth companies into a single experience. 

It doesn’t matter which one of these companies “wins” or gets more revenue, because they’re not actually running the same race. 

• Ramp is the Tech company that monetizes through finance. It grows as it saves its customers time and money. Its marketing game might be the best in the industry. Their ideal client is a US tech company, but stablecoins could be a wildcard that takes them global.

• Brex is the Phoenix of Fintech. The Adyen of B2B Neobanking. They’re winning at enterprises that want flexibility and to go global. Time will tell if owning the infrastructure is a durable moat and helps them win with AI. Their alumni are reaching PayPal or Stripe status.

• Mercury is the account for Tech companies. They’re betting that the account experience can be a wedge into 100s of other products. They’ve survived and thrived through the banking crisis and fintech winter. My question is, where do they go next? Bet on AI or stablecoins? Or does the multi-currency account give them something truly special that today is mostly dominated by Wise?

These companies aren’t competing with each other; they’re heading in three quite different directions. Yes, they’re all indexed towards growth companies; how they address them is as idiosyncratic as their founders.

18 months after I interviewed all three back to back. I’ve never had more fun being an observer.

There’s a constant, focused, inevitability about their rise. Each unique. Each growing.

I can’t wait to see what they do next.

ST.

4 Fintech Companies 💸

1. Trudenty - Risk intelligence for first-party fraud.

Trudenty is building a trust network between card issuers, PSPs and e-commerce platforms to identify “first party fraudsters.” AKA, people abusing the chargeback protections baked into debit and credit cards. It uses federated learning, so data never leaves its origin, and helps score a new customer to your site from their reputation elsewhere. This means as an e-commerce merchant you could choose not to approve a transaction for example.

🧠 They shared a wild stat. 80% of chargebacks are fraud. 6/10 BNPL customers use chargebacks. This type of fraud is the largest problem and fastest-growing. These trust networks are much needed, and historically operated in closed loops and not for this use case (e.g. ,EWS in the USA). The US now has Sonar* and Plaid Beacon. The UK didn’t have a major new, first-party reputation network and sorely needed one.

2. Carrington Labs - Plug and Play Credit Risk Analytics 

Carrington helps lenders increase loan approvals, optimize pricing and monitor their lending portfolio. They pull together a cash flow score, a financial health summary, and a credit risk model to create recommended pricing for different segments. 

🧠 Banks struggled to price risk for consumers that didn’t fit their traditional credit boxes. New Neobanks and BNPL providers play there with cashflow data, but that’s hard to do if your existing systems and providers don’t enable it. Carrington partners with the “sidecores for lending” like LoanPro or LendAPI, and lets lenders grow their credit window with more battle tested models. It’s smart distribution.

3. Boogi - The Cashback API

Boogi helps card issuers like Capital On Tap or Trading 212 drive 11% more card spend through offering cashback on specific categories. It integrates 1,000s of merchants into a single API and lets customers directly opt-in to those offers (e.g. click to activate 10% back at retailer)

🧠 Merchant-funded offers have been around for a while, but finally found a UX that works. Cardlytics and TrialPay were at the forefront of card-linked offers back in the early 2010s but it never really caught fire. With today’s Neobanks, it has, and its delivering ROI.

4. Keyrails - Treasury on stables.

Keyrails helps companies turn their entire treasuries into stablecoin-first. They can access traditional rails like FedWire or SWIFT, access assets like T-Bills, AAA-CLOs, and can access deep USDC liquidity in emerging markets (e.g., the global south). 

🧠They’re already seeing traction. Average payment value is $500k, growing volume 100% QoQ, and has over 20 banking partners. They primarily support Neobanks, travel companies, airlines, and Telcos.

Things to know 👀

1. JP Morgan launched a blockchain-based deposit on a public chain

JP Morgan’s JPM Coin can now be used on the public blockchain network Base. JPM has partnered with Mastercard, Coinbase, and B2C2 to make this possible. The deposit token will be available 24/7, 365 to institutional clients, and JPM plans to expand to “other blockchains.” The token is “yield-bearing,” unlike stablecoins. 

🧠Short term, the primary use case is a JPM institutional client who wants to settle a crypto trade. They could use JPM Coin on base to do that. 

🧠Where this gets more interesting is if a JPM institutional client also has a USDC balance and wants to swap between those tokens to go “open loop” (to other banks, for example). It would look something like my diagram below.

🧠 A corporate could: 

1. Move JPM Coin from JPM closed loop to Base
2. Swap JPM Coin for USDC
3. Receive USDC in their base wallet
4. Send that USDC to a 3rd party, or swap it for another bank deposit token

🧠 JP Morgan is a monster. It's a payments business that moves trillions daily. If Kinexsys becomes the platform for all of its payments? It will dwarf the entire stablecoin industry overnight.

🧠 JP Morgan could become the biggest competitor to SWIFT. Remember, Kinexsys already has a family of products (like IIN) that help with cross-border payment transparency. To JP Morgan, Kinexsys is the hub; all other chains are the spokes. 

🧠 Case in point, JPM also did an interoperability pilot with Singaporean bank DBS. If Kinexsys is a major hub for bank interoperability, what do we need other chains for? (I can imagine JPM’s biggest competitors wouldn’t love that and would prefer neutral territory, but JPM has a massive head start).

2. Coinbase walks from $2bn deal for BVNK.

Coinbase has said it will not proceed with a deal to acquire BVNK, saying

This would have been the largest deal for a stablecoin infrastructure firm, much larger than the $1.1bn Stripe paid for Bridge. 

🧠 What did Coinbase see (or not see?) You’d imagine Coinbase, who’s operated in stablecoins, and spent far more than $2bn on acquisitions before (Derbit was bought for $2.9bn), wouldn’t do this lightly. 

🧠The temptation is to say “risk.” Stablecoins are natively cross-border, and the easiest way to get volume in cross-border is to be “easy to work with” and that may include not pushing partners hard on KYC/AML. But BVNK also has strategic investments from Citi and Visa, so, why wouldn’t they have seen that already?

🧠This opens the field for others. Could Visa, Citi or others swoop? Did BVNK get a spidey sense that there was a better offer out there if they broke away? 

🧠Coinbase already has plenty of distribution and doesn’t need to spend so big. There’s plenty of smaller competitors to BVNK with somewhat similar offerings. Those would be cheaper, and potentially benefit as much, or more from Coinbase’s distribution. I doubt Coinbase backs away from payments.

Good Reads 📚

Ribbit - The Token Letter

“Tokenization is the process of rendering the world for computers”

Tokenization is confusing. People talk about it for AI, for Crypto, for payments, for identity and 100s of other things. Ribbit brings all of these together into a single coherent thesis. They claim

1. Every person will have tens or hundreds of agents working for them.

2. Every business will have tens or hundreds of agents – per human employee.

3. Every industry will be radically reshaped by tokens and agents.

🧠The document goes into how tokens have always been a part of money. Coins evolved as a token representing a claim on gold or central bank balance sheets, a drivers licence is a token representing your identity.

🧠It breaks the types of token out neatly into. Access, (e.g. a PAN or payment credential), Memory (e.g. I bought another N64), Expert (e.g. A doctor, a lawyer), Context (e.g. my entire shopping history), Identity (e.g. I’m the Fintech Brainfood guy), Knowledge (e.g. ERP data, fraud history), Asset (e.g. Ownership rights to a house).

🧠This also launched with a memecoin (tibbr), which essentially proved Ribbit absolutely gets how memecoins can be effective marketing. Yes, this letter did well organically based on its content, but the bot ecosystem, and therefore the algo’s on social really get juiced when there’s a memecoin. In a way, that piece is a performance art of token understanding, and their importance in attention and potentially truth-forming through markets. 

Tweets of the week 🕊

That's all, folks. 👋

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(1) All content and views expressed here are the authors' personal opinions and do not reflect the views of any of their employers or employees.

(2) All companies or assets mentioned by the author in which the author has a personal and/or financial interest are denoted with a *. None of the above constitutes investment advice, and you should seek independent advice before making any investment decisions.

(3) Any companies mentioned are top of mind and used for illustrative purposes only.

(4) A team of researchers has not rigorously fact-checked this. Please don't take it as gospel—strong opinions weakly held

(5) Citations may be missing, and I’ve done my best to cite, but I will always aim to update and correct the live version where possible. If I cited you and got the referencing wrong, please reach out