The Briefing: How Ramp’s early adoption of stablecoins increased our Corporate Treasury returns
Editor’s note: The Briefing is our series highlighting strategic projects and insights from experienced finance pros. Follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter to get alerts for new briefings.
Over the past two and a half years, Ramp has been fortunate enough to raise over $620M in a mix of equity and debt financing. This is a significant amount of capital by any metric, but especially so relative to our low operating burn. As a result, we have a meaningful amount of excess cash on our balance sheet that we likely won’t deploy operationally for at least one, two, or even more years into the future.
As Head of Finance, capital allocation is one of my major responsibilities. As a result, I needed to figure out a way to allocate and invest all of this excess capital. Like every Corporate Treasurer or CFO, I’m tasked with efficiently managing investments by maximizing returns while also ensuring it's available when the company needs it. At the same time, I also have a fiduciary responsibility to my stakeholders and Ramp’s investors, and I have to make sure our capital is invested in a prudent manner.
As all market participants know, the current yield environment is challenged. We are 10+ years into a zero-interest rate environment and easy Fed monetary policy. One consequence of that is traditional bonds and fixed income securities are not producing compelling investment returns. For context, investment grade (IG) bonds currently yield on average 3-3.5%, but the average bond in the IG universe is also a 12 year bond! So that means we need to take 12 year duration risk just to get to a 3-3.5% yield. Most corporate treasuries aren’t interested in taking duration risk that long. Firstly, because you may need to tap into that cash well before the bonds mature. Secondly, the mark-to-market risk on that bond is quite high from an interest rate sensitivity perspective, so you’ll be saddled with all sorts of unrealized gains and losses, which will create noise in your financial reporting.
