Brian Baumgartner plays Ramp's CFO for a day in a live stunt on the streets of New York
Oct 15, 2025 with Brian Baumgartner
Key Points
- Actor Brian Baumgartner processed 84 expense receipts in a live Ramp marketing stunt on New York streets while the company's automation system hit 500+ in the same timeframe, illustrating a 6x efficiency gap.
- Ramp deployed the stunt as a direct product comparison, casting a celebrity famous for playing an incompetent accountant against its automated expense platform to make the speed and scale argument visually.
- Baumgartner attributed his shortfall partly to public distractions and lack of support, though he acknowledged a deeper point: finance teams prioritize efficiency over human connection, which his manual approach could not overcome.
Summary
Brian Baumgartner, best known as Kevin Malone from The Office, spent a day playing CFO for Ramp in a live stunt on the streets of New York — processing expense receipts in real time while crowds gathered outside and passers-by stopped to watch.
The exercise did not go well by the numbers. Baumgartner says he was tracking 84 receipts processed when he checked in, down from nearly 100 before he stepped away briefly. Ramp's automated system, running in parallel, was at 229 and climbing fast — hitting the 500s within moments. He acknowledges the gap directly: "I got no help from the people who were supposed to help me."
Baumgartner frames his takeaway as a genuine efficiency problem. "I'm starting to realize I have an efficiency issue," he says. "I need to be more efficient with finance." He adds that working on the street with a live crowd watching was probably not helping, though he plans to work until 7 PM to make up ground.
The stunt is straightforward as a marketing play — put a celebrity famous for playing an incompetent accountant up against Ramp's automation platform and let the scoreboard make the argument. Baumgartner leans into it, describing the experience as "much more difficult" than playing Kevin Malone and noting that navigating public attention, media interruptions, and a hummingbird-sized fly in the office all compounded the challenge.
He does offer one piece of unsolicited CFO philosophy: connection matters more than the numbers. "It's all about doing people for me," he says. "In finance, that's secondary in a way." Whether that holds up against a system processing receipts at 10x his pace is left as an exercise for the reader.