"Even though we have more clients, more output, and more cards in circulation, we’ve been able to keep our financial system steady thanks to Rho’s scalable platform. It’s cut our workloads in half and allowed us to minimize the time and resources we spend managing our finances. Rho isn’t just our banking platform or our corporate card provider. They’re our whole financial solution.”
What is Anti Agency Group?
Anti-Agency Group is a creative marketing agency that helps clients curate outside-the-box campaign concepts across paid media, strategic marketing, and branding that support their business objectives.
Being “anti” isn’t always a negative; sometimes, it’s about challenging traditional ways of working to bring about positive, productive change. That’s the belief co-founders Amir Eldar, Charles Hsu, and Amanda Au had in mind when they started Anti Agency Group (AACG). AACG is a decentralized marketing and consulting collective that ”focuses on people power, rather than profit margins, to drive creativity and deliver strategic results.”
“We like to zig when everyone else says zags,” said Eldar. “We’re buying ads for our clients, but we’ve had many instances where we advise them against spending their money because it would just be putting a Band-Aid on top of a bigger problem. We don’t look at the next three months; we look at the next 24 to help you build your business holistically.”
Challenge
When AACG first launched in 2019, it worked with a large, legacy bank that moved slowly and made them feel unimportant as a newer business. Whenever questions arose, they would call a 1-800 number, wait 45+ minutes to speak with an agent unfamiliar with their finances, and ultimately walk away with generic, imperfect answers.
What’s more, the team didn’t have an effective way to control and track employee expenses, and ad spend accurately. To support AACG’s bold ambitions, they needed a partner with the right technology, financial services, and world-class support. One day, they got a cold email from a tech-forward banking platform called Rho and decided to give it a shot. They closed their legacy bank account six months later—and never looked back.
Solution
The Rho platform helps AACG streamline its finances in three critical ways:
- Spend control: AACG can issue virtual Rho Cards with the proper spending controls and budget labeling to account managers in seconds. For entertainment clients, they might create individual Rho Cards for specific projects or ad platforms.
- Eliminate expense delays: Every transaction is instantly reported and categorized in the Rho platform, eliminating hours of manual processing time and stress with chasing down receipts.
- Automate accounting: When it’s time to close their books, AACG consolidates and reconciles transactions with just a few clicks using Rho’s automated expense management flows and direct QuickBooks Online sync.
Results
Before choosing Rho, AACG considered working with several small local banks as an alternative, but they found the supporting technology lacking and integrations challenging. The AACG team would have had to drive miles and spend hours in local branches to complete basic transactions.
Complexity is also an issue. The AACG team uses 20 or more cards segmented and categorized across different projects on a given day. Diverse spending patterns mean AACG often ends the month with a long, complex financial report.
With Rho, all the financial tools AACG needs are consolidated and integrated into an automated finance platform that makes it easy to track expenses and strategically plan their budgets. AACG can issue unlimited corporate cards with built-in expense management and customizable controls and save time during month-end close with Rho’s QuickBooks Online integration – all backed by world-class customer support from Rho’s client success team.
Eldar estimates that, without Rho, it would take another two weeks and another full-time hire to sort out their internal expenses and compile their P&L—not to mention providing all of their clients with quick and accurate statements.
“We’re growing 120 percent year over year,” he said. “But even though we have more clients, more output, and more cards in circulation, we’ve been able to keep our financial system steady thanks to Rho’s scalable platform. It’s cut our workloads in half and allowed us to minimize the time and resources we spend managing our finances. Rho isn’t just our banking platform or our corporate card provider. They’re our whole financial solution.”
“Like us, Rho is challenging established conventions in their industry and reimagining what finance technology should look like in the twenty-first century. I’m consistently struck by how easy our conversations are, how Rho’s team listens to my pain points, and how they propose custom solutions catered to our needs. From no ACH fees to no hurdles for issuing multiple cards, every solution in Rho’s arsenal speaks to us as a business.” – Amir Eldar, co-founder, and chief anti officer, Anti Agency Group.
Testimonials reflect individual customer experiences and opinions and are provided for illustrative purposes. There is no guarantee that your Rho experience will be the same and results may vary.
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