Karim Atiyeh on the ACH system's CSV reality, three-year expense reimbursement delays, and Ramp's long-game government thesis

Summary

Karim Atiyeh, co-founder of Ramp, is making a long-term bet on government as a customer — and the case starts with how broken the underlying plumbing actually is.

The ACH system, which moves trillions of dollars across the U.S. banking system, runs on batch-processed CSV files. Every bank constructs its own file, those files get shared through intermediary systems, and a computer somewhere reconciles them overnight. That's why transfers take a full day. Atiyeh describes learning this early in Ramp's life and finding it "absolutely mind-blowing" — not because the technology is sophisticated, but because it isn't.

Government expense management is the same problem at its most extreme. Atiyeh recounts hearing of a federal employee who filed an expense report in their first week and only received reimbursement after leaving — three years later. The standard process disconnects credit card statements from receipts entirely, requires employees to chase down missing documentation after the fact, and in many cases leaves workers simply not filing at all. Some get government cards with no spending controls, share them informally, and no one tracks where the money goes.

The regulatory drag

The licensing environment compounds the challenge. Ramp had to obtain money transmitter licenses not just at the federal level but in every individual state — each requiring its own stack of near-identical paperwork. Atiyeh describes sitting in a room with a team member and signing documents one by one until the pile was gone. The rules across states are "quite similar," which makes the duplication difficult to justify on any grounds other than inertia.

Ramp's positioning

Ramp is focused on non-payroll spend, which Atiyeh frames as the least politically contentious category in government budgets. Payroll cuts create constituencies and headlines. Non-payroll spend — travel, expenses, vendor payments — should, in his view, be an easy win: spend as little as possible, track every dollar. The pitch to government mirrors Ramp's private-sector pitch almost exactly.

Atiyeh is deliberately not playing for a quick program-of-record contract. Where many founders at the conference are working to close government deals within two years or risk running out of runway, Ramp is willing to think in decades. The logic is that building good-enough technology reduces the need for large Washington lobbying and relationship investments over time — a product-led government strategy, not a BD-led one.

He's also cautiously optimistic about the current moment. He says this is the first time he's felt the government is genuinely trying to modernize and build bridges with private-sector tech companies. AI makes some previously intractable problems more tractable — feeding a messy legacy database into an LLM to wrangle it is now a real option. But the incentive structures inside government still push toward dragging projects out and adding cost, and Atiyeh doesn't pretend that's an easy thing to fix.