Most of us assume that major hotel brands have sophisticated financial systems running behind the scenes. In this episode, Jess Conroy, CEO and co-founder of ROH, explains just how wrong that assumption is — and why she's spent the last several years building the financial core that hospitality never had.

What We Covered:

• The manual payments problem hiding in plain sight
• Why the biggest hotel brands have the biggest challenges
• The hidden complexity of every hotel transaction
• Why the hospitality industry was overlooked by fintech
• How ROH got its start in meetings and events
• What "AI-first" actually means at ROH
• How ROH fits into the existing hotel software stack
• The go-to-market reality of a franchise-heavy industry
• A transaction-based model that aligns incentives
• Scale and growth: managing over $1 billion across the portfolio
• The stale data problem driving bad hotel decisions
• The vision: a financial foundation for every hotel dollar

Key Takeaways

• Hotel payments are a solved problem almost everywhere except hospitality itself — the industry's bias toward "human solves" left it behind.
• The complexity of hotel transactions (variable pricing, upgrades, OTAs, group contracts) makes automation far more valuable here than in simpler retail or restaurant contexts.
• Building something that didn't exist before is the hardest sales motion — you're not replacing a known tool, you're educating a market about a problem they've learned to live with.
• Year-over-year expansion within existing hotels is the clearest signal of product-market fit — customers keep expanding their use once they're on the platform.

About Jess Conroy

Jess Conroy is the CEO and co-founder of ROH, a financial infrastructure platform for hotels. A second-time founder, she has spent nearly 15 years building in and around the hospitality industry. ROH is currently managing over $1 billion in hotel transactions across its growing portfolio.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
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• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

My next guest on the Fintech One-on-One Podcast is Leif Abraham, the co-CEO of Public.com. Public has been carving out a really interesting niche in the brokerage space. They're not trying to be another discount broker competing on free stock giveaways. Instead, they're building what Leif calls the first truly agentic brokerage, where AI agents can actually help you construct and manage your portfolio.

In this episode, we discuss Public's decision to move away from payment for order flow and why trust and transparency are so central to their strategy. We also talk about their fascinating Generated Assets product that lets you essentially prompt your own personalized ETF, their nuanced take on prediction markets and why they're drawing a clear line between portfolio tools and sports betting, and how AI agents are starting to take on work that has traditionally been done by financial advisors.

In this podcast you will learn:

• The opportunity that Leif saw when he started Public.
• How the dynamic works between Leif and his co-CEO, Jannick Malling.
• How he describes Public today.
• How their Generated Assets offering allows investors to create custom ETFs.
• Why their decided to move away from Payment for Order Flow.
• How they are marketing themselves directly to the consumer.
• What Leif thinks about prediction markets and how Public will offer them.
• What they are planning when it comes to AI agents for wealth management.
• How Leif views the rollover market for retirement accounts.
• Their plans for the Crypto market.
• What success will look like for Public over the next five years.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

My guest today is Denada Ramnishta, the Chief Revenue Officer at Efficient Capital Labs. I've known Denada for over a decade, having first met her during her time at American Express where she was part of the early team building out merchant financing. She's been a consistent champion for democratizing capital access for small and medium-sized businesses, and now she's doing that at ECL, which provides non-dilutive funding and cross-border payment infrastructure for AI and SaaS companies.

In this episode, we dig into how ECL approaches revenue-based financing differently from others in the space, their AI-driven underwriting system called Aura, the fascinating origin story behind their cross-border payments product ECL Flow, why VCs are actually their top referral source, and how they're adapting their underwriting as SaaS pricing models shift from recurring revenue to usage-based models. We also discuss the so-called SaaS apocalypse and what Denada is actually seeing on the ground from the founders she works with every day.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Her journey from American Express to Efficient Capital Labs.
• What her time at Amex taught her about building responsible lending products.
• What ECL does exactly.
• What has been learned from the high profile stumbles in revenue based financing.
• How debt funding has been misunderstood by founders.
• Why VCs are the number one deal source for ECL.
• Their underwriting system called Aura and why it is unique.
• How Aura has allowed them to evolve their underwriting process.
• Why they decided to expand to underwriting companies that operate cross border.
• Why they created ECL Flow and expand into cross border money movement.
• Where they will be expanding this new infrastructure.
• Denada’s thoughts on the SaaS apocalypse.
• As pricing models change for SaaS, how they are adapting their underwriting models.
• How they are able to grow fast with very low charge off rates.
• What is next for ECL.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes