As an immigrant herself, Laura Ferreira knows how hard it can be to start from scratch in a new country.

"You have a difficult time even getting a phone or phone number. You can't rent a house without having someone to cosign with you. Everything's very, very hard," Ferreira says. "We wanted to help people that are starting again—or are starting a new journey—have the same opportunities that everyone has when they are born in a country."

That's where the idea for Vambora came from. Vambora helps immigrants create a global financial data profile to demonstrate creditworthiness without the limitations of the traditional credit system. It also helps landlords and property managers screen domestic and international lease applicants using Open Banking, digital identity verification, and fraud prevention to build trust throughout the leasing process.

Ferreira joined the company in 2021, soon after it was co-founded by her husband and a partner. With a background in law, she first worked as a project manager, then quickly moved up to VP of operations, then COO. As a leader on a small team, she now wears many hats.

"My day-to-day is very dynamic. I don't have the same day twice," she explains. "The legal part is a big part of my week because I do all the contracts, agreements, and documentation. I've been doing all the regulatory and compliance stuff. I'm in charge of finance, customer experience and testing because we are still in beta. And on top of that I'm in charge of HR. So I do all of that."

With so much on her plate, Ferreira needed a solution that would help her automate her workflows and simplify the many manual processes she oversees. That solution was Rippling.

Preparing systems for future team growth

Before Rippling, Ferreira was using Wagepoint and Collage to run payroll and manage HR. But she struggled with how the two pieces of software didn't integrate as smoothly as she would have liked—plus, Wagepoint just wasn't user-friendly.

"I think it was okay for what we needed at a time, because our needs for HR had been very, very simple," Ferreira says, but she adds that Wagepoint "is very complicated" with "a lot of different tabs—information is everywhere."

"It was like a very ugly looking system, that I wasn't really sure that I was doing the right thing. It wasn't intuitive."

The process went like this: Ferreira would enter the necessary information into Collage, where it would be retrieved by a Collage HR analyst. The analyst would then email Ferreira to confirm all the information was up-to-date and accurate before running payroll on Wagepoint.

"I felt that I had to do stuff twice," she explains. "I had to put the information into Collage. And then I had to reply to the email. And then there was the communication back and forth with email, between two to three emails. She's saying, 'Okay, so we're ready for payroll, let me know if there's any changes.' And then I had to reply saying, 'No, no changes.' And then she had to reply. 'Okay. It's been submitted.' It was just a lot."

Ferreira adds, "Because our company is really small, I didn't have any issues. But if I did have 10 employees, then it becomes more complicated. That's what I was trying to avoid: Getting to that point, and then having to transfer to a new platform—it would be a nightmare. So I wanted to make sure that when we did grow and hire more people, that we were ready, and we had the right systems in place."

More features, less headache

When shopping for a new system, Ferreira compared Rippling and BambooHR. 

"BambooHR was OK, but they were very expensive," she says. "Rippling had everything that we wanted and it seemed very, very simple to use."

One of the biggest drawbacks to BambooHR was that it doesn’t offer payroll in Canada, so it wouldn’t have allowed Ferreira to stop using Wagepoint.

"We still had to integrate with Wagepoint, and l would still have to run payroll by myself. I was like, 'That doesn't make sense.'"

But with Rippling, Ferreira was immediately impressed by the simple and intuitive user experience. An onboarding specialist helped walk her through her first payroll run, and she took it from there.

"I've run payroll twice now by myself. The first time that I did, I was like, 'Okay, do I remember all the steps? Because it's been a month,'" she says. "But it was so straightforward, so simple. It was just clicking two buttons, making sure the information was correct, and then that's it. It took me five minutes to do it."

Ferreira also found she loved other Rippling products that she didn't really know she needed until she started using them, like App Management.

"App management is very, very time consuming when you are onboarding a new person," she says. "With Rippling, I can just select which software or apps the new employee needs, and then they'll already have passwords, email creation, all of those. Before Rippling, I would have to do that manually one by one, and I would always forget some, and then when the person leaves, what do I do? How do I cancel their seat and their email? That was a lot to manage and took a lot of time, and now it's all automated."

Ferreira is also looking ahead to Vambora's needs down the line, and is interested in taking advantage of Rippling's device management, and benefits administration features as the need arises.

"With all my responsibilities, there's a lot of different individual steps that I have to do," she explains. "If I have to do them manually, it takes a lot more time from my day that I could spend doing more strategic and more relevant stuff to the company."

To the US… and beyond

With new VC investors, Vambora is looking ahead, with plans to hire aggressively and expand into new markets. Rippling will help with that, Ferreira says.

"We want to grow as fast as we can, when we're ready," she says. "Right now, our employees are only in Canada. But we know our business can and will grow to other countries, and Rippling can help us with running payroll, hiring contractors, and more in different countries and different markets."

For Ferreira, one of the biggest benefits to using Rippling is that it makes sure she's ready for whatever the future brings for Vambora.

"Part of my job is to make sure that I'm seeing two steps ahead of what we will need, and be ready when the time comes," she says. "That's why we moved to Rippling. I wanted to make sure we were ready to start hiring people as fast as we could, without me having to spend three days out of my week doing all the paperwork, taking care of all the policies, getting signatures, and setting people up in the HR system. Rippling allows me to be fast—without having to hire an HR assistant or HR analyst just to do those things. That's why we made the move to Rippling."