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, was this something that was important to you prior to joining? Were these inefficiencies something that you were able to identify, you know, on the other side of the table as an investor as well?

[00:03:20] Jeremy Klaperman: Well, you can often identify the output or the symptoms of these, which is you're speaking to a CFO or CEO, you ask them what a key question is on the business, and they don't clearly have at their fingertips what you would think would be an important insight or just an important piece of knowledge. And that often comes from the data and the systems in the company not being well configured. So, having your key financial services and software services all-in-one integrated solution is one step, but not the only step you need to provide your management with the right information to run the business well.

[00:03:57] Andrew Seski: So, I wanna talk a little bit about, you know, using some of these tools yourself as a CFO for the first time now and sort of what that foray looks like. I am so lucky to have a really, really unique subset and cohort of guests on the show. Some come from banking. Some come from, you know, Big Four and audit. Some, you know, were in the Navy or the military. And it's really interesting to see, you know, kind of a career progression that lands somebody in this financial leadership role. And would love to discuss, you know, you said your entire career was basically training for this opportunity. Did you always see it that way? Or is this new role something that you took a long time to consider, kinda a different risk profile and really different environment? Or has it been kind of a natural progression of your career? 

[00:04:46] Jeremy Klaperman: Over the last decade, I've become more and more interested in it. At least for me, when I graduated from school, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to be. I knew the kind of skills I wanted to learn and what I enjoyed doing, so I went down this path. And I think it's, after working with companies for so long, what I wanna do was not be an outsider or an advisor or an investor for a portfolio, but really get in on the inside; have a portfolio of one company where I'm on the team that's driving the growth, creating the value. So, it was really a natural evolution over the last 10 years where I determined that this is what I want to do.

[00:05:20] Andrew Seski: I'm curious to know if you have kind of a definition of what you'd consider a modern CFO. I think everyone is really interested in general in some of the firms that you've worked at. I mean, they're, you know, the household names of Citadel or Goldman. It must be really interesting to have some of those unique experiences and learning from some o...