CFO tech stack (2025)

1. Interview with Pac O'Shea, CEO and cofounder, Round Treasury

   CFOs at cash-rich startups might look calm on the surface — but many are quietly battling with the banks.

   The problem? Traditional banks might be safe and regulated, but they’re not built for fast-moving startups trying to manage millions. “Most companies start with HSBC, realise the UX is bad, open a Revolut account, then a Wise account and so on,” says Pac O'Shea, CEO and cofounder of UK-based Round Treasury. “Suddenly you’re running cash across four or five platforms and wasting time.”

   The number of cash-rich startups in Europe is also rising fast. “Europe, for the first time, is now outpacing the US in terms of venture capital funding growth,” O'Shea says. “And with AI, it’s easier than ever to start a company — and all that new capital needs to be managed properly.”

   As a founder or a CFO, your focus is strategy, product market fit, generating revenue — It's not dealing with managing your money and trying to optimise everything, O'Shea says. “What we see is startups are leaving billions in low-interest accounts simply because the process of allocating and managing that cash is too painful.”

   Round’s pitch is a single platform to help cash-rich startups deposit funds across multiple banks without opening direct accounts, access near-central-bank interest rates and automate everything from payroll drawdowns to reconciliation. “We’ve essentially become a bank-agnostic layer that automates the grunt work… It’s making banks nervous but this is the direction commercial fintech is heading.”

   As for AI’s impact on finance? O'Shea is cautious. “Most AI in fintech today is just a wrapper on top of workflows. It describes problems faster, but doesn’t fix them. Until it can control execution — actually move money — it’s not transformative.” But given time, and a shift in regulation, the industry should catch up.

   Until then, the inefficiencies in business banking are big, the customer pain is real, and the category — according to O'Shea — is just getting started. “Anyone betting against this space is kind of delusional.” CFOs are only just beginning to liberate themselves from administrative drudgery.

Who early stage startups are up against