Expanding Into a New Market? What You Need to Think About as CFO

It usually starts with a customer.

A big client opens an office in a new region and asks if you can support them there. Then another one does. Before long, your CEO is talking about international expansion, and you’re the one who has to make it work.

Your job isn’t to say yes or no. It’s to work out whether the opportunity is real, what it’ll take, and how to stop it pulling the rest of the business off course.

Few companies have faced that question at a bigger scale than Ramp. Fresh off a US1.85 billion raise, at a US60 billion valuation, the US finance platform is now expanding, starting with the UK and Europe. We sat down with their team to find out how they made the call, and what they’d tell a CFO about to do the same.

1. Validate: is the opportunity real?

Before you model anything, look at who’s asking you to expand. The strongest case for going isn’t a market sizing exercise. It’s existing customers pulling you somewhere.

For Ramp, US customers with UK and European operations had been asking for support for years. So Ramp built for them first, and that’s what revealed the bigger opportunity:

“As more customers started using us in the UK, it became clearer and clearer that we could be of help to local businesses as well.”

So don’t let an attractive TAM lead the decision. Let your customers. If they’re already taking you somewhere, the expansion is likely to be lower-risk too.

2. Set up: what do you need in place before day one?

Once the opportunity is validated, finance’s job gets bigger. At Ramp, finance played two roles: testing the numbers, and making sure the business could actually deliver.

“We worked closely with finance both to ensure that the business case made sense, and that we were operationally set up to do so.”

The operational side is the unglamorous part, and it’s what slows you down if you leave it late: the entity, local auditors, banking and payroll. Ramp had a head start, because most of this was already set up to serve its global customers.

Even with a head start, get the structure right before you commit. Does a subsidiary or a branch make more sense? How will money flow between entities? What will you need to report locally, and how will it roll up into group reporting? Getting this wrong early means unexpected tax and messy intercompany flows that are much harder to unpick later.

3. Localise: what will local customers need that yours never did?

Every market has its deal-breakers: requirements your home customers never asked for, but local customers won’t buy without.

For Ramp, it was VAT:

“Tax compliance and recovery are fundamental to finance operations in the UK. Teams need to apply the right VAT treatment, maintain compliant documentation, and reclaim the tax they’re entitled to. That meant VAT couldn’t be an afterthought in our UK launch.”

Something that barely registers in the US went straight to the top of the roadmap.

This is where your business case can quietly change. If a local deal-breaker needs real build work, that’s cost and time that won’t show up in the model unless someone goes looking for it.

4. Protect: how do you stop it distracting the rest of the business?

The people best placed to launch a new market are usually the people already flat out running the current one, including your finance team. Ramp’s advice is direct:

“If your home market is already scaled, we recommend staffing new markets independently as much as possible. In most roles it’s very difficult to both deliver in the home market and launch a new one; the home market will often take up most of the time.”

So the UK team got as much autonomy as possible, leaning on external counsel and accountants rather than the home teams. The core business kept delivering, and the speed bumps stayed contained. The UK team has already grown past 25 people.

5. Anticipate: what might catch you out?

While having a separate team protects your home market, who you put on that team matters just as much... as you can never underestimate how different a new market can be.

Ramp anticipated this challenge, so rather than sending people from the US who’d have to learn the market from scratch, they hired people who already knew it:

“We’ve been deliberate about building our UK team, looking for people who bring local insight and want to shape Ramp’s presence here.”

The lesson? Be honest about what you don’t know, and hire people who do.

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Going global isn’t a copy-and-paste exercise. New markets need new teams, sometimes new product, and new ways of working. Validate, set up, localise and protect, and you give the expansion its best chance of paying off.

🎟️ If you're in London, join us for dinner

To mark Ramp’s UK and European launch, CFO Techstack and Ramp are hosting an exclusive dinner for finance leaders in London on 1 December. If you’d like to come along, register your interest here.

COMMUNITY INSIGHTS

🎤 How I stacked it

Khalid Ahmed, CFO at EncompaaS
Winner: Community Contributor of the Year for 2026 🏆

Khalid Ahmed is CFO at EncompaaS, an enterprise AI data platform that helps the world's most regulated organisations govern, prepare and enrich their data for the AI era. He's also this year's winner of Community Contributor of the Year at the 2026 CFO Techstack Awards.

Khalid runs a global finance function across four entities in Australia, the US and the UK. As a high-growth global SaaS business, his team has to handle intercompany reconciliations, FP&A and deferred revenue (among other challenges) across the group, quickly and accurately.

Visit EncompaaS

He's back with an updated stack, showing what's changed since his last feature.

Xero for General Ledger. Xero is the financial backbone and single source of truth across every entity.
Mayday for Month-End Automation. Mayday handles prepayments, deferred revenue and intercompany reconciliations across the group's four entities.
Harvest for Project Management. Harvest tracks client and internal projects.
xpna for FP&A (new). xpna now runs FP&A, replacing Mosaic. Khalid finds it more dynamic, more intuitive and much cheaper for their needs.
Easy Month End for Close Management (new). EasyMonthEnd gives the team visibility over the month-end close.
Microsoft 365 Copilot for Research and Analysis (new). Copilot plugs into enterprise data for research, analysis and qualitative decision support.
Claude for Modelling and Reporting (new). Claude builds models, automates reporting and acts as an extra analyst for a small team.

See Khalid's full stack.

If you want to showcase your stack contact jack.thiel@getmayday.com

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GIVE ME HOPE

A new face on Give Me Hope. We're excited to introduce Felix Matthews, an experienced CFO and now CFO in Residence at Mayday. He steps into Harriet's (big) shoes, to continue answering your important questions!

Reader's question:

"How do I give feedback to a team member who's technically strong but often misses deadlines?"

Felix's answer:

Ah, great question! As many of us know, in-house finance roles are defined by stacked recurring deadlines and constant competing priorities. Navigating this requires skillsets you don't get taught in traditional accounting qualifications. The good news is these skills can be learned quickly, and a finance function can use systems and processes to set its people up for success.

There's a constant tension in finance work: quality versus efficiency. Put yourself in a new team member's shoes, perhaps still in probation. It's natural that they will prioritise 'getting it right' above all else, and the same is often true of longer-serving people who care about their work. That instinct deserves celebrating. It's the baseline we all want from a finance function, and it gives you a positive way into the feedback.

Before having the conversation, make sure you understand their workload fully. Are their tasks clearly prioritised? Is there a benchmark or target for how long they should spend on each one? If someone doesn't have a framework and is struggling with competing priorities, they might simply adopt a 'last in, first out' approach. Equally, if the expected task duration isn't quantified, or it's just 'as quickly as possible', you're in danger of the message being a reductive 'you're too slow'.

Armed with this information, the conversation can quickly progress to identifying specific tasks that are taking longer than expected, or how the team member handles prioritisation and time management. Gently probing their approach will unearth training and development opportunities. Just as important, make it safe for them to use the framework you provide. If they defer a request and then get chased by a senior colleague, back them up when they say 'not now'.

Repeatedly in my career I've encountered early-career, highly capable accountants who just need basic training in time management and prioritisation methods to improve efficiency. Whether that's the Eisenhower Matrix (Do, Decide, Delegate and Delete), which can sort ad-hoc requests by urgency and importance, or Pomodoro timers for focused blocks of uninterrupted work, improvements can be quick without sacrificing quality. At a team level, agreeing target times for recurring tasks and moving task management out of spreadsheets and into a dedicated tool does a lot of this for you.

Missed deadlines from a capable person are rarely a talent problem. More often, nobody has told them how long a task should take, or what to prioritise when they're juggling multiple requests. I hope this helps!

Have a question you’d like answered? Submit your questions here.

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EVENTS

Social: "Year End Close: Community Drinks" 🍻

Spots are filling up for our final community get togethers for 2026. Grab your spot today, and bring a finance peer with you!

Cape Town, Thursday 12 November: Book your spot
Adelaide, Thursday 3 December: Book your spot
London, Thursday 3 December: Book your spot
Melbourne, Wednesday 9 December: Book your spot [sponsored]
Sydney, Thursday 10 December: Book your spot [sponsored]
Perth, Thursday 10 December: Book your spot

Note, spots are limited so please only register if you intend to come along.

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Dinner: CFO Techstack x Ramp: Euro Launch

If you're in London, join us for dinner 🎟️

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Webinar: Why most budgets go off track...

Before you lock in your 2027 budget, join David Tuck (Mayday), Sam Newton (Gravitate Accounting), Andrew Griffiths (HFL Education) and Alex Keselman (ApprovalMax) in discussing: "Why most budgets go off track by Q2, and how to stop yours". Register here.

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THE STACK EXCHANGE

🧵 This week's top threads, from The Stack Exchange

The Stack Exchange is the place to connect with peers, stay on top of the latest apps and industry news, and work through the challenges that don't have an easy answer.

Want to join the conversation? Sign up free here.

NEW IN THE WORLD OF CFO SOFTWARE

🗞️ News from the stack-o-sphere

Budgetly, the spend control system, hires former Xero executive, Ian Boyd,as CRO. Read more.‍
Projectworks rolls out a consulting CRM with AI proposals: Accepted proposals become projects with their agreed pricing already set up. Read more.‍
Deel launches Pangaea AI models for HR and payroll, betting specialists can cut the cost of answers by 98%. Read more.

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WHAT THE DATA SAYS

📊 Stat of the week

Only 23% of finance professionals feel very prepared to manage the financial complexity of international growth.

Source: Tipalti 2026 Global Finance Outlook Index

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MORE OF THE GOOD STUFF

And lastly, our top picks!

🎧 Podcast: CFO Thought Leader, “1222: Scaling Through Acquisitions, Integration, and AI” with Kara Childress, CFO of Vensure. Listen here.

📝 Article: Australian fintechs split as overseas revenue rises" (CFOtech Australia). Read here.

😆 Joke: How do you know a CFO has started planning an international expansion? Their spreadsheet now has a tab called “FX (don’t touch)”.

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