Fintech One-on-One
Jess Conroy, CEO of ROH, on Building the Financial Core Hotels Never Had
Why It Matters
Modernizing hotel finance unlocks significant cost savings and revenue capture for an industry that processes billions of dollars daily yet lacks basic automation. For investors, operators, and frequent travelers, Roe’s solution promises faster, more accurate billing, better margins, and a smoother guest experience, making this a timely breakthrough as AI and fintech converge on traditionally manual sectors.
Key Takeaways
- •Hotels still process payments manually, causing inefficiency.
- •Rowe offers AI-first platform for real-time revenue visibility.
- •Automation replaces weeks of manual reconciliation with instant reports.
- •Solution began with events, now spans full hotel financial stack.
- •Transaction-based pricing aligns Rowe’s success with hotel profitability.
Pulse Analysis
The hospitality sector has long operated without a true financial core. Most hotel reservation systems merely capture booking data, leaving staff to manually copy card details, calculate charges, and reconcile dozens of revenue streams each day. This fragmented workflow creates hidden errors, delayed cash flow, and costly labor overhead, especially for large brands that juggle multiple property‑management, CRM, and ERP platforms. Without real‑time visibility, hotels struggle to track the true value of each reservation, from room upgrades to ancillary services, leading to missed revenue and inefficient operations.
Rowe tackles this gap with an AI‑first infrastructure that sits beneath existing SaaS stacks rather than trying to retrofit legacy software. By ingesting data directly from reservation, events, and catering systems, the platform delivers instant, end‑to‑end visibility of both inflows and outflows. What once required days of manual spreadsheet work now appears as a single source of truth within seconds. The solution launched on the notoriously complex meetings‑and‑events side—where PDF contracts and manual invoicing were the norm—and quickly expanded to cover the entire hotel financial stack, automating payment processing, e‑signatures, and real‑time revenue reporting.
For a franchise‑heavy industry, Rowe’s transaction‑based pricing model aligns its success with hotel profitability, ensuring that every dollar saved on reconciliation translates into shared upside. Managing over a billion dollars across its portfolio, the company demonstrates how AI‑driven automation can unlock hidden margins, improve guest experience, and free staff to focus on hospitality rather than bookkeeping. As hotels increasingly demand scalable, real‑time financial insight, Rowe’s approach positions it as a pivotal fintech innovator reshaping the economics of the global hospitality market.
Episode Description
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.
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