Making Business Banking Frictionless with Jeremy Klaperman of Rho

Many small and medium-sized businesses in the country rely on a disparate range of financial services to help manage their accounts, expenses, and payments. Unfortunately, this system lends itself to time-consuming processes and inefficiencies that get in the way of growth.

That’s why Rho is integrating all the financial services businesses need into one easy platform. With Rho, finance teams can view everything in one spot, scrap inefficient processes, and focus on driving value and growth.

In today’s episode of The Modern CFO, host Andrew Seski talks with Rho CFO Jeremy Klaperman about how to 1) organize information systems, 2) build out an integrated data infrastructure from day one, and 3) embrace cultures of integrity from the CFO position. With decades of experience at elite financial organizations such as Goldman Sachs, D.E. Shaw, and Citadel, Jeremy expertly navigates his role as Chief Financial Officer.

Show Links

• Check out Rho
• Follow Rho on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jeremy Klaperman on LinkedIn
• Check out Nth Round
• Connect with Andrew Seski on LinkedIn

Transcript

Please note that the transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. The content in the podcast is not intended as investment advice, and is meant for informational and entertainment purposes only.

[00:00:00] Andrew Seski: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Modern CFO Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Andrew Seski. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Jeremy Klaperman, CFO of Rho. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm excited to talk. 

[00:00:23] Jeremy Klaperman: Thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here. 

[00:00:26] Andrew Seski: So, Jeremy, you've spent most of your career across some of the most storied investment firms, from Goldman to D. E. Shaw to Citadel. But this is your first foray into the CFO role. I'd love to hear a little bit about what it's been like over the last six months crossing this chasm. 

[00:00:45] Jeremy Klaperman: It's been great. It's something that I've been looking forward to doing and planning for a while. And I think of my 20 years in investment banking and investment management as training for this because I either advised or invested in companies from all regions, from all industries, many different market cycles, whether it's the original tech bubble burst of the early 2000s to the global financial crisis to COVID. And I've had so many reps speaking with CFOs and CEOs. I've built up a great playbook of what I think best practices are and also pitfalls to avoid from everything from high level strategy to accounting to operations. And what I try to do with that is bring that to bear in my current role. And so, I view the last 20 years as kind of giving me the best practices and building up to what I'm doing now.

[00:01:40] Andrew Seski: So, can you tell us what Rho is and what the future of frictionless finance means to you? 

[00:01:47] Jeremy Klaperman: Absolutely. So, Rho provides a wide range of financial services as well as spend management software to small and medium businesses. And a lot of our clients, almost all the small and medium businesses in the country have a disparate range of providers currently that give them all these things. They might have a bank, a credit card company, an investment firm that helps them manage their treasury and their cash. They might even have a FX transfer provider if they do a lot of international business. So, they could have two, three, or four providers of financial services. Increasingly, companies are using software on the spend management side for things like tracking expenses or automating bill pay and accounts payable. So, they could have one, two, three providers on the software side. They have all these disparate systems that don't work well, don't talk to each other, and it creates a lot of manual processes, errors, inefficiency. And the finance teams end up spending a huge amount of time just trying to do basic tasks rather than controlling their finances well, gaining strategic insights, running the business. So, what we do is we take out the entire stack on the financial side and the software side with one integrated all-in-one solution that's very easy to use and the entire finance team can centrally control and command the finances. 

[00:03:10] Andrew Seski: So