Relay vs Ramp

Relay operates like a traditional bank. Once you hand out your routing and account numbers, vendors can pull ACH payments just like they would with any other bank. This is risky because once someone has your routing and account numbers, they have the bare minimum they need to try pulling money out of your account without you pushing “send” on anything.

That’s why “just handing out” your routing and account numbers is more risky than sharing a unique payment link and why most businesses tend to prefer stronger controls.

With that, Relay’s FDIC coverage goes up to $3 million dollars. Relay spreads your money across several FDIC-insured banks automatically so that more of your balance stays insured instead of being stuck at the $250k limit of a single bank.

Relay does not have a treasury account.

Instead, it offers a savings account where you can earn interest on your balance. With that, the interest rate varies and depends on the subscription plan you pay for. So if you're on the free plan of Relay, expect to get a lower interest rate.

While this is simple, the reality is you are not investing in government securities, treasury funds, or multi-pool yield strategies and it means you miss out on the higher yields.

In summary, if you have a large amount of money in your account (e.g. $250K+) you should automatically consider switching to Mercury since you will make more money on your money.

When you forward a bill to Relay's unique Bills Inbox email, it automatically extracts key details like vendor name, invoice number, amount, and due date using built-in document recognition so that you don't need to manually enter in the details. You can then review and edit the bill before paying.

The thing is, Relay doesn’t have vendor onboarding, which means it doesn’t automatically collect W-9s. This puts more admin on your plate before tax time. It’s a small thing that makes a huge difference if you work with a lot of contractors. You’ll need to email everyone separately, and it’s just a pain.

Similar to other banks, with Relay you can create a check payment and they will print it off and mail it on your behalf.

That said, you cannot send a physical attachment (e.g. PDF or form) with the check. You can upload it to their system and include a memo line, but if you need to send a physical document to the government for example, you'd need to figure out a solution outside of Relay.

Domestic and International wires to a USD account are free.

Relay includes invoicing and payment links so you can create, send, and track invoices without needing a separate tool.

Relay lets you open up to 20 checking accounts per business, which you can nickname for things like Income, Profit, Owner’s Pay, Taxes, and Operating Expenses, plus up to 2 savings accounts that currently earn around 1–3% interest on idle cash.

Relay is built around "Profit First" banking, that is one of their core marketing messages.

You can create percentage‑based auto‑transfer rules (e.g. Say you set a target of $1K in your income account, and twice a month, anything above that is distributed by percentage to Payroll, Tax, Owners Comp, etc.). So say your balance hits $5k, the $4k will be distributed accordingly to your percentage rules.

As a heads up though, these rules only apply between Relay checking accounts (not to savings accounts) where as with Mercury for example, you can set up similar rules that also work between savings and Treasury accounts.

If you run multiple businesses, Relay lets you register several entities under a single login and then toggle between them from a dropdown, with each business having its own set of accounts, cards, and permissions.

That said, Relay does not offer any Personal Banking solutions so you'd still need a totally separate bank for that (we are obsessed with Mercury Personal Banking, which is why we use Mercury for both business + personal, but hey, even if you use Relay for business we'd recommend switching to Mercury for personal use since its that good).

Relay gives you team access controls with several permission levels like Administrator, Manager, Cardholder, Deposit‑only, Approver, and Read‑only, and you can restrict people to specific checking/savings accounts so, for example, your marketing manager only sees the Marketing account and not Payroll.

Relay supports bill approval workflows inside its bill pay module: you can set rules like “bills over 1,000 dollars require approval” and route them to one or more approvers before they can be paid, which is great for small teams wanting oversight on vendor payments.

As a heads up though, these approval rules are tied to only bills in Relay (not any payment over X amount via ACH, wire, internal transfers, etc must be approved).

Relay has an easy to use interface, especially when it comes to setting up the auto-transfers between accounts for Profit-First banking. The app is clutter free and the dashboards are simple, intuitive, and uncluttered.

Ramp's Business Account offers multimillion-dollar FDIC insurance through its partner bank, meaning deposits are spread across multiple institutions rather than a single bank, much like most other modern banking solutions.

Ramp does give decent control over external ACH debits, allowing the ability for all debits, trusted vendors, or even granular approval before outside pulls are accepted.

The only problem is, when approval is required, the debit can still initially post to the account and then be reversed if it isn't approved in time. This means you're not exactly preventing the transaction from happening in the first place.

So while Ramp offers strong protection compared to most fintech accounts, it doesn't quite reach the level of proactive control that Mercury provides. The safeguards are better than most, but they're not as tightly built into the payment workflow itself.

The point is, Ramp is primarily an expense management solution, so when it comes to sending/receiving fund protections, they're pretty good. But when it comes to deeper banking protection features, you're better off using proper banking solution.

Ramp does offer a way to earn yield on idle cash, but it's not really designed as a core banking feature. So while you can place funds into government money market funds and other short-term fixed income portfolios, the setup feels more like a treasury add-on inside Ramp's broader expense management platform rather than a truly native banking feature.

So while the capability is there, it doesn't feel quite as simple or integrated as the best banking platforms built specifically around managing operating cash, like Mercury.

Ramp does a good job handling day-to-day payments inside its business account. Allowing all of the basic things like ACH transfers, wires, checks, and manage vendor payments.

That said, most teams actually use Ramp (credit cards) alongside a dedicated banking solution. That's what we do. So this is where the confusion begins. While Ramp has many overlapping features that banks have, it's in the details that the limitations become clear.

An example of that is when it comes to your accounting software. The thing that your bank needs to deeply integrate with on all levels. Well, if you're using one of the newer AI accounting software solutions, then you need to also be mindful around what exactly an "integration with Ramp" actually means.

Take Kick for example, the AI accounting software we use. While Ramp integrates with it, it only integrates with the corporate credit card functionality, not the invoicing and bill pay functionality. But on the other hand, our business bank, Mercury, integrates with Kick no problem.

So while Ramp does a pretty great job here, there's just a lot that unravels when you start viewing it as your banking solution, and why most companies will use a dedicated bank alongside Ramp.

Ramp is primarily an expense management solution (it's fantastic at that), but when it comes to banking, this is an area where you start to see it's limitations.

Ramp lets you open multiple "Ramp Business Accounts" per company, and you can spin up extra virtual account numbers that all are connected to the same balance. But it doesn't work like a traditional bank, where you can have many accounts with cards associated with each account.

All Ramp cards are corporate charge/credit cards tied to the entity, not true debit cards tied 1:1 to each deposit account. You don’t get 20 separate "bucket accounts" each with its own dedicated debit card the way you can with other banks.

Since Ramp is primarily expense management, you spend on Ramp cards, and then pay those statements from whichever single funding account you choose (a Ramp Business Account or an external bank).

Ramp cannot do “good banking automation” for SMBs. It cannot take deposit and automatically split it into multiple buckets (e.g. 30% tax, 20% payroll, etc).

It's banking automations are more like "Keep this Ramp Business Account Balance at $100k, if it drops below, pull funds from another external account", or if my account goes over $200K, automatically transfer the extra into a Ramp Investment Account.

You can manage multiple entities under one login and map different Ramp Business Accounts and external bank connections to each one, so you're not constantly logging in and out between companies.

But it stops at business, there is no Ramp personal banking product (we are obsessed with Mercury Personal Banking, which is why we use Mercury for both business + personal).

Ramp does have a roles system around who can see your Ramp Business Account and who can move money out of it. Admins control everything, while more limited roles can be set up mainly for viewing balances and downloading statements.

You can set up Ramp approvals when you send money through Ramp’s own payment screens (like ACH or wires you create inside Ramp), and you can choose who has to approve those specific payments before they're sent.

But there's no simple, bank‑wide rule like "any transfer over 10,000 dollars from this account, no matter how it’s created, must be approved by a founder," which you can set up with tools like Mercury.

Ramp has an incredibly simple and modern UX, and you can quickly find what you're looking for with their universal search (CMD + K), but in that, it's clear that it was built with banking as just an add-on.

So the majority of the sidebar is dedicated to expense management-type features (which makes sense, since it's primarily an expense management solution), and that's where it gets less props in this specific area.

It's definitely one of the better banking UX experiences, for a software that isn't primarily a bank.