One night, while studying mechanical engineering at San Jose State, Ron Sorisho decided to switch things up and turn his focus toward business school. Sorisho said he had always been good with numbers, and felt finance was a good avenue for him to apply his math and analytical skills.
“I found that being in finance was a good balance for using my analytical mind towards dealing with day-to-day business challenges,” Sorisho said. “I thought it was a nice marriage between the numbers world and real-life application in a business environment.”
Ripcord definitely appreciates this career change now that Sorisho has served as the company’s CFO for the last 2 years and has recently taken on the role of expanding Ripcord’s business in exciting new international markets. His work history leading up to this position began over twenty five years ago when he was recruited off campus after he had just completed his degree in finance.
Sorisho has had a distinguished career working for reputable public and private Silicon Valley companies. He has held many senior roles as CFO or COO of these companies, and prior to joining Ripcord he sold his last company to Facebook.
Technological Advancements in Finance
Sorisho spent 4 years at National Semiconductor, then continued to work in mostly operations finance for the next 25 years. He’s experienced improvements in technology that have greatly benefited his work.
“Access to tools, and being able to work much more efficiently, has just really evolved the role of finance within an organization,” Sorisho said. “I think being able to access critical data in a timely manner is super important for decision making, and that has evolved over time.
In finance you have to support various types of audits, and having access to information that’s available at your fingertips is immensely different than before.
A more recent role for Sorisho was as COO at Nascent Objects, a software as a service (SaaS) company that allowed developers to build and ship Internet of things (IoT)-type products in the consumer space. In 2016 Sorisho and the Nascent Objects team sold their company to Facebook, who then employed him as a consultant for the post-merger integration.
While working out of Facebook’s executive residency program Sorisho began looking for his next employer, and soon he got a call from auditors that were working with an exciting new startup known as Ripcord.
“I’d known these auditors for many years, and they said their client, Ripcord, was a very unique company, with very disruptive technology, and they were trying to do a lot of good for the world by accelerating the benefits of truly going paperless,” Sorisho said. “They thought I would be a good fit, and that’s how I ended up meeting Alex Fielding (company founder and CEO) and the rest of the Ripcord team.”
Enriching Financial Documents
His time at Ripcord thus far has shown Sorisho even more impressive advancements in technology for the financial industry, particularly those that save companies time and money. A good example is the high cost of accounts payable (AP) processing: whenever an invoice is processed it has to be handled by an individual, so there’s a cost associated with paying that person to manually handle reviewing the invoice, putting it into the system, and then making payment at the due date.
Additionally this is all a very time consuming process, but Ripcord helps lessen that and other costs with an automated workflow process, Sorisho explains.
“When you process paper invoices using workflow automation you’re able to take important unstructured information off of that content and interface it with critical enterprise applications like Oracle or SAP. The entire process gets automated so the next time the accounts payable person sees the same transaction is when they are reconciling their bank’s account. Without this automation, most of the process is manual, expensive, and error prone.
“So from the time you actually get the invoice, get it into the system and then authorize it for payment, your cost of transaction goes from 30 to 40 dollars per invoice to process down to like sub-one dollar. It’s an immense amount of savings, and it’s very efficient.”
Sorisho says another positive example of Ripcord’s digitization can be seen in the way it handles a company acquisition. The company being acquired maintains records in a certain document hierarchy, and Ripcord’s technology can effectively take the paper content relating to that document structure and automatically categorize it into the acquiring company’s document platform, he explains.
This technology can take the immense pipeline of content and auto-classify where all the records belong, he continues.
The Ripcord system is able to sift through and identify what records it’s actually looking at and where they belong, and then actually put them there. As opposed to doing it manually, which is just a very, very long process, and very labor-intensive.
Cost-Effective Solution
Overall, Sorisho says he’s really enjoyed his experience at Ripcord, and remains excited about all that the company can do for businesses.
“With digitization of paper content, whether it’s back office-type content that’s been sitting there, trapped for a long period of time, or content that’s part of the business process flow . . . whenever there’s a requirement for speed, accuracy, and quality, that’s a triple advantage that Ripcord can bring to the table,” he says.
“In addition it’s consolidating the entire vendor ecosystem, because to do what we’re doing you’d have to deal with 5 or 6 different vendors, and it’s costly, expensive, and error-prone, as opposed to dealing with just Ripcord, who provide the entire vertical solution to the customer.”
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