Finance teams have traditionally been boxed into back-office roles centred around spending control and compliance. But that mindset is changing.
Today’s finance stack can do much more than keep the lights on — it can actively enable sustainable growth and influence big decisions.
A rise in neobanks has made it easier than before for startups to take control of their finances. This new landscape has completely changed how finance teams control payments and cashflow, create accounts and integrate accounting software.
But as businesses scale across borders and currencies, founders are still often unsure how they can turn their finance stack from a back-office burden into a strategic tool to fuel growth and opportunity, according to Ralph Karsten, group financial controller at global financial platform Airwallex, who helped lead the company through a €277m Series G fundraising round at the end of 2025.
In an interview with Sifted, Karsten unpacks how startups can use their finance stack to enable growth and runway.
What experiences most shaped how you think about finance as a strategic function rather than a back-office one?
Finance is uniquely positioned in that it has end-to-end insights into data. If you want to provide strategic value rather than just processing transactions, it's important how you structure the data.
If you build that foundational layer correctly, then from there you can build things either by providing detailed insights yourself.
I spent six years at Booking.com helping scale its payment products and I used to be quite pragmatic in how I would structure accounting flows and keep things operationally light. It meant that there was not a lot of data granularity and a lot of steps in the process. In an AI world, consuming data and translating it into insights is becoming much easier.
But now I spend more time and detail on how I input data into our systems. It feels like back-office work when structuring your data, but that’s the starting point when looking for strategic insights. If you build that foundational layer correctly, then from there you can build things either by providing detailed insights yourself or having AI models run it.
What does it mean in practice to turn a finance stack from a cost centre into a growth lever?
For us at Airwallex, a very big benefit is how we scale and go to market quickly. We’re a digital financial platform, which means that when we open an account, we go live in 30 different currencies and we can transact money right away.
The benefits of having a finance stack that scales is that you spend less time on gathering data but actually trying to translate that data into insights.
There's a lot of strategic value in how quickly you can scale operations, set up a payroll and go live in a new market. The benefits of having a finance stack that scales is that you spend less time on gathering data but actually trying to translate that data into insights.
If your tech stack doesn't provide the insights and the flexibility, then it’s not being used as a growth lever.
How should CEOs and chief financial officers work together on investment decisions?
CEOs can be more visionary in their strategy. But in a healthy CEO-CFO relationship, the chief financial officer should always be shaping the narrative of where to invest capital and where it's deployed most effectively. Not every euro invested has the same outcome, ie: investing in performance marketing can drive short term growth, but investing in unlocking a new market should drive longer term growth objectives. Apart from the overall vision and strategy of the business, you need those financial insights on returns for the investment options for each euro and that's where the tech stack comes in. That's how a good CFO and CEO should connect.
What common mistakes do early finance leaders make when choosing tools and how can they avoid them?
The common mistake is that they underestimate the switching cost. They choose a cheap and easy set of point solutions and think if needed, they’ll switch later on. Those switching costs can generally be pretty high, from both a monetary and operational perspective.
If you don't have the connectivity within your stack then you need to keep hiring people to do different tasks.
Early on, they also often underestimate the operational efforts to actually maintain an inefficient stack. If you don't have the connectivity within your stack then you need to keep hiring people to do different tasks. Whereas if you do this properly from the start, you can be very lean and very efficient, especially in the scaling phase.
Where do you see the future of AI finance heading?
We will see a similar trend for how businesses will use AI to perform financial interactions.
We're in a transitional phase of technology with AI. If you go to ChatGPT and ask it to book you a hotel, it can find everything for you but it can't process the payment details. We will quickly move into a world of consumer finance that will include AI wallets. We will see a similar trend for how businesses will use AI to perform financial interactions. That's why startups should start working with these digitally native financial platforms from the beginning as it will allow them to do cash flow planning and reporting much more effectively.
What pain points do your tools eliminate compared to more traditional banking or finance setups?
Airwallex completely redesigns how the global money movement should work. The Wallet holds 30 different currencies for every customer, while completely eliminating the complexity of working with local banks. The ease of the product and connectivity provides huge operational and control benefits and more importantly sets up for success with entering the era of AI driven financial transactions.
Ready to turn finance from cost centre to growth lever? Check out the unified finance stack built for growth.
