How Ruby Built the Go-To Banking Solution for E-Commerce Businesses

After meeting in college and starting a number of e-commerce businesses together, the co-founders of Ruby, Shariar Kabir, Jordan Yaqoob, and Miguel Acero, recognized they had one persistent problem: they couldn’t find a bank that fit their needs. 

Sure, they could go to any number of banks and open up a standard business account, but then they’d also have to find a variety of providers for other necessary e-commerce services and none of them would be integrated with each other. The team would have to go into multiple platforms and painstakingly compile data together just to get a holistic view of their business.

After experiencing these problems, the founders of Ruby saw the opportunity to build not just a banking product for e-commerce businesses, but a complete financial operating system. 

“Our hypothesis is that banking in ten years will look a lot different than it does now,” says Shariar Kabir, the co-founder and CEO of Ruby. “Every vertical will have its own bank that helps businesses operate more efficiently.”

Ruby envisioned a product that offered the standard banking features businesses rely on, while also including features and functionality specific to e-commerce businesses that would allow them to save time and money.

Using a combination of their financial technical expertise and deep knowledge of the e-commerce space, Ruby set out to build the new financial operating system for e-commerce businesses. 

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Forming Strong Partnerships for Long-Term Success

When searching for the right partners to build their banking product, the Ruby team prioritized finding a partner that would offer them:

1. Easy-to-use APIs to efficiently build their banking product
2. A robust compliance framework keeping them and their sponsor bank safe

“We knew these were key to our long-term success,” says Kabir. “We did our due diligence on every partner in the space. We dug into Synctera’s API documentation and were impressed by the ease of use. Additionally, we saw that Synctera not only provided their customers a direct connection to their sponsor banks, but even provided tools for us and our sponsor bank to better manage the relationship and compliance workflows.”

With Ruby’s focus on building a compliant product with strong partnerships, Synctera ensured that they were matched with a sponsor bank that shared common values and was aligned with their overall product vision. Once matched, all three parties worked together to ensure alignment on everything from compliance requirements, to operations, to product functionality.   

Ruby and their sponsor bank continue to meet every week to stay in sync together as Ruby’s product grows and scales. 

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Build to Launch… and Beyond

After partnering with Synctera, Ruby got to work building out their product. 

As part of the implementation process, Ruby was able to leverage Synctera’s live testing environment, t-minus 10. “Having the ability to test our money in the real world greatly sped up our build process and resulted in us having a better product at launch. We were able to identify edge cases and bugs that we would have never been able to catch in a sandbox environment,” said Shariar Kabir.

After going live with their initial set of customers, Ruby instantly received positive feedback on how their product could benefit e-commerce businesses. One business, for example, was able to recover thousands of dollars in rebates using Ruby’s automated rebate process.

Today, Ruby’s product is scaling in both customer growth and functionality growth. Currently they offer their customers a complete banking platform, plus:

• Integrations into e-commerce marketplaces to provide a holistic view of the business and finances within Ruby’s app
• Expense management products, including business cards and robust budgeting tools
• Ruby Merchant Protection with automated dispute management
• A claims process for automatically finding rebates for businesses, adding up to between 1-3% of total revenue each year
• In-app double entry accounting solution that integrates with all sales channels, giving businesses a real-time view into their finances

With this set of tools, Ruby provides their customers with a birds eye view of their entire business, all from within the Ruby app. This eliminates the need for them to download separate reports, work with multiple vendors, and reconcile everything manually – saving their customers untold time and hassle.

“Synctera’s fast pace of innovation, combined with their strong focus on compliance, were exactly what we needed for Ruby,” says Kabir. “If we hadn’t made the decision to work with Synctera, I’m not sure we’d have a product live this quickly.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Ruby. They plan to continue adding new functionality focused on helping their e-commerce business customers access the financial insights they need to make better decisions. With the help of strong partnerships Ruby is confident that they found the right formula for the long-term success of their business.