Why "AR Automation" Was Never the Right Name: Alex Louisy on Building Financial Relationship Management

Getting paid should be simple. Ask any finance team and they'll tell you it rarely is. Today's guest built an entire company around that gap. Normally, Alex is on this side of the mic asking the questions. Today, we're flipping the script because there's a story only he can tell. In this episode, we talk about how Alex set out to build an AR financing platform and ended up naming and building an entirely new category, financial relationship management. We get into the customer feedback that changed how he saw the business and why AR Automation was never the right name for the problem. We also talk about why this matters more now than ever, as AI starts to reshape how companies collect cash and manage financial relationships at scale. This is the growth-funded CFO. Let's dive in. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Growth-Minded CFO. And today is a very special episode because normally, we have an external guest on the pod, but today, our guest is my co-host, Alex Luisi. So the origin story of this particular episode actually is my fault. We were after the pod hanging out at Alexi's offices here in New York, and I was sitting around with his sales team who are a bunch of very friendly folks here in the New York office, and they had a demo up, and I asked if they would mind to kind of show me a demo of this tool that we've been doing this podcast for years now, and I had never seen one. They're so quiet about sharing the tool with me so far. It's all been about CFOs in the podcast, and I finally saw a demo, and the first thing out of my mouth was why the heck have we never talked about this on the podcast? And so today, that's what we're doing. I will be interviewing Alex about his role as the CEO of Uploah, understanding a little bit more about why he built this tool and the problem they're solving 'cause I think it's really fascinating, and more people should know about it. So without further ado, Alex, are you ready to be on the hot seat? - I am ready. I would say thanks for having me on the show. - Yeah, you're so welcome. So without further ado, let's kick it off, as we would any other episode, Alex. Louisie, can you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do? - Thank you so much, Lauren, for having me on the show. I'm very, very happy to be here today, and I'm happy to change seats as well, and being a guest, and thanks for prompting this. I know that we've been running this amazing podcast for a long time now together, and one thing that was super important for me as we sponsored that podcast was that we didn't want it to be too commercial or-- - Right. - Bring, like, you know, but a flutters all the time. And I think it was interesting to hear your perspective on what you do is actually interesting, and might be worth talking about. And I am 100% convinced that's why I've dedicated now eight years of my life to this company. So it's probably because there's something interesting behind that, but I think it's indeed something that is worth sharing with other CFOs, and hopefully something interesting. So thanks for bringing that idea. - Yeah, of course. - It's very much appreciated. Yeah, so I'm Alex, the co-founder and CEO of Upflow. We provide best-in-class solution for cash collision for B2B businesses. So in a nutshell, very simply, we help B2B businesses get paid by the customers. It's as simple as that in terms of value proposition. It's more complex from a kind of like a technical perspective, we can go into this later. But the one thing that is interesting, I would say, and probably why we want the word to spread out a little bit around this discipline and category, is that it's a discipline that is very, very immature from a kind of like financial perspective. And I often take the parallel between expense management and procured to pay type of things when you think about how do you spend your money. HCFOs, for all listening to that show, has 10 or 50 names of procured to pay or expense management platforms. There's a lot of things. It's probably I would say sometimes I say that it's probably the fourth generation of category when you think about ramp, for example, that's the latest like shiny one that we see in the market. But there's been like a lot of other players in the space starting with Cooper a long time ago. Oftentimes if you ask the same question to CFOs around, what are the cash collection players in the space? No one can really name any player. And the reality is that we know one of the leaders in the market and even that we are small and tiny company compared to those AP companies. And one of my big learnings from this looking at the market for eight years now and how during the go to market in this is that very few people are educated around this. And part of what we do out of flow beyond the billing product and telling it is also about educating the market. This podcast is a way of doing it as well. But I'm glad that we have the opportunity to discuss this further today. Yeah, we can actually we can actually dive in deep. So maybe the best place to start is about the origins or maybe because I think starting with kind of the trigger of like why this area of the payment or a cash flow process was so important to you. So bring me back in time too. When you first started the company, what was going on that triggered you to think that there was a solution needed here? Yeah, I might even start before the company itself because I think the origin store is interesting in that space in a sense of, you know, from my perspective of an engineering background then I did a master of finance. I've always been interested about finance and how like these numbers can represent more than just numbers and how a company actually actually work and perform. And I also come from a like entrepreneurial family and everyone was starting businesses. So I wanted to build my own business. And at that time when I quit my job to just say, okay, I'm going to start my own company. This is in 2017. I literally feel that need to quit my company to focus on, okay, what's next and what do I want to do? And I had my background was more in financing. And my idea was to work on a company and it was I was back in France at that time in Europe and I was very interested about what was going on here in the US at that time on the consumer side of things where it was getting way easier to get financing based on more dynamic data points. So typically the old way would be that you go to a bank, you bring your, you know, your balance, if you're a business, you would bring your balance, you'd like three balance sheets, a couple of like paper and stuff and it's all static, right? And this was the first time where companies would, for example, connect to your QuickBooks and try to analyze something a little more dynamics. It seems like very old now, but this was the early days of that. And I really wanted to do the same and I said, we should be doing the same in Europe. That's great, let's do this. And I started talking to you a lot of CFOs, business owners around, why would you need this short-term financing? And the idea of getting this short-term financing more dynamic was interesting for them, but as we often do in prologue, you ask for the five Ys and why do you need this money? And the one thing that was really interesting for me is that everyone was answering, we need to bridge that gap, the working capital gap between, we need to pay our bills, we get paid by our customers, but we always get paid late. And so we need this extra financing to get paid to be able to bridge the gap and be able to pay our payroll and all expenses on time. And I suddenly took a step back on this and not only realized it was really hard to do a financing company because you need licensees and everything and a lot of capital to get started and it's high risk. But there was also this idea of, okay, why is it still so complicated in 2017 back at that time to just get paid by your customers? And I started having this intuition at that time that the problem was not really about bad payers and people do not want to pay, but more on the process of doing it. And I still see it today and we were discussing this in previous times, like it's like, it's 2026 and it hasn't really changed, but it's crazy to think that we talk about, we talked about big data, we talked about blockchain, we know we talk about AI, we send rocket to the moon and stuff, and at the same time, whenever we wanna get paid by our business, we take all of this structured information that we have in an accounting system or an ERP, we put all of that into PDF. So we just structured the entire information that we have, all the line items, everything, we just put it as text. Then we say, this is great, we're not sending it via mail, we're now sending it via email. So it's an electronic invoice, great. Now, someone on the other side opened this message with an attachment in a mailbox. This invoice is due in 30 days, 60 days, based on payment terms. So now you need to put it somewhere. Remember in 30 days, 60 days that it's due, make the payments, take all this information from this piece of PDF, restructure all of this information into your own accounting system, make the payment manually by opening it in your bank interface and wire the money or even worse sometimes in 30% of cases in the US, write a check. And this is one invoice and you do this like, what, if you were in a market business, is a hundred a thousand times a month. And this is this was for me at that time, nonsense and still nonsense, but the intuition we got at that point in time in the very early disavow flow was, okay, how can we build a platform that help streamline and ideally change that overall process? And that's why the motto pretty early of off flow was revolutionizing how B2B companies get paid and I know that everyone wants to revolutionize something, right? It was really a bad saying, okay, the changes you've seen by you remember the days of you had no expense management system where everyone was sharing the same credit card that was saying in the on the office of the CFO and you would pick one and no one knew what was what would be expense and suddenly you have those amazing platforms that everyone knows, how can we create the same experience but on the cash collection site, which in insight is even more important, right, like collecting your money is probably more important as a business than spending it. And so that's how we started off flow. And we said we're going to start with the SaaS product at that time, like this is this was the, this was the main thing. We're going to start with a SaaS product that helps optimizing your accounts receivables, so basically after the point where the invoice is out and then from there, we will move into more categories that really help change the process. And that was really the starting point. And I am, and it's now the intuition that we had at that point in time is now 100% confirmed from the data that we see just to give you a rough idea of flow is currently processing more than $3 billion a month worth of payments collected by our merchants across the entire base. So this gives us like a lot of data, a lot of understanding of how this works. But that's, yeah, that was the, that was the initial point and where we've taken it for so far. Super. So I want to talk a little bit about that journey from that starting point. The, the, where the product started this thesis of, there needs to be disruption in the space of AR because it's, people are sitting around waiting to pay borrowing money because this is taking so long with all these steps. Zooming to, today, because you've had all this data, you've done so much learning about what actually works. So walk me through as someone, it's, as a CFO, you know, I've, I've been in the AR process. I've been both on, you know, in the AR side of things, but also the AP side of things, understanding what it's like to be a payer. There are so many factors that can slow things down or, or, or, or, or make payments happen. So in these years of gathering this data, what are some insights around the stuff that happens to happen for those days that gap to shrink? Yeah. I might stay quite high level, but I think the one thing that I want CFOs to walk away from is maybe like two main concepts. The first one is around the fact that your customers actually want to pay you. It's interesting to see how everyone and I think I, I have this rant against newspaper and, and governments when they talk about this problem around late payments, for example, they always talk about bad payers. Always, this is the number one culprit. It's actually the part of your customers that do not want to pay you. And I'm often telling business owners, if all of your customers don't want to pay you, the problem is not, you know, the bad payers, whatever, it's just that you don't have a business, right? Just in general, I mean, it's just, it's basic, but it's, if, you know, most of your customers want to pay you, that's the first thing. So once you have that in your mind, and I'm not saying that 100% of your customers want to pay you, I'm just trying to get the 80/20, but now that you have it in your mind, that most of your customers want to pay you, the questions as a CFO or as a business owner becomes, how do you make it easier for your customers to actually pay you? That's the, that's one thing where we work a lot on adult flow. And that's why we designed like the entire product as a, as a positive experience, and we like to say that we turn like all these negative words, late payments, bad debts, bad payers, like into positive one, because that's what it is. You're trying to put this process as a, as another part of your relationship with your customers, and you want to turn it into a positive one, okay? So that's the first one. The second one, and it's alluded to it just right away, just a second ago, but it's the fact that the act of paying your invoice or the act of paying a vendor, which are our customers in our case, so your vendor is a part of your customer relationship. And this is something that is really important, and if you take a step back and if you look at, we're very inspired to flow by the consumer world, we look a lot at consumer apps, this is, this is a lot of our product and design principles are coming from the consumer world. If you look at the consumer world, when you go on a website, and you buy something online, first it's online, there is no paper, like paper checks or I'm gonna, I'm gonna wire money from my bank account and stuff, everything is online, but it's very clear, for example, that team have dedicated significant resources and money to optimize the conversion for now. Everyone is familiar with this term, right? Everyone knows that if you get to a point where you're about to pay, and there is a hiccup on the payment portal or the payment page, it's, we talked about, for example, like, you know, shoe business or something, it's just like, you might lose some customers because they just couldn't pay you and move them do something out. They move on. Have you seen a CFO thinking about the payment experience in the BGB space this way? No, they're just like, all right, they send an invoice, where sometimes they're not even the payments information attached to it, and they wonder why, like, they don't get paid on time. Yeah. And so, I'll always remember this sentence from a very successful CFO, a very, very large startup in Silicon Valley back in 2019, I think, who's telling me the sentence that was very, very much shaping, like, how we do things that the employee said, we spend an enormous amount of money, energy, and resources at making every touchpoint of our customer relationship amazing. The way we prospect them, the way we close them, the way we onboard them, the way we do QBRs and stuff. But it told me, the moment we send them an invoice, it's a miserable experience for them. They get this email coming from a no reply email. It's a PDF attached, but you don't even know what it is. You have to download the thing. The invoice is an obscure document that you don't even know. It's not even branded. It's just like, everything is off. You don't know for the right payment method. People want to pay you by car, but you don't have no idea on how to do it. They receive like 10 different reminders for 10 invoices at the same time. It's a miserable experience. I think, for us, these are the two things that were really important. The second concept that they were important was considering collecting your payment in a good way as a part of the customer relationship and that you need to work on, and the CFO, in that case, is the person who need to take place into that touchpoint for the customer, which is very much aligned with a gross-minded CFO in terms of how we position it. If you provide your customers with a good experience there, you also participate in a good, overall experience with your company as a vendor. Right. It's how you can contribute to the experience that customer has. It's interesting because I recall this even from my day's Deloitte actually doing management consulting. I remember looking a lot at Ecommerce tech and we would put so much attention into customer friction points. Exactly. In all of their parts of the process, there is such an obsession of ensuring nothing gets in the way of a customer, or a potential customer becoming a customer, or a current customer who's using the product, having a great experience. We obsess about all of these touch points, but then when it comes to invoicing, it's always an afterthought. If it's something that can be automated easily, then it's literally not thought of. When it's not something that can be automated easily, which is often the case, and we'll get to that, then it's often done in a very sloppy way because there's not an easy built-on way to handle this. I'm curious if I think maybe pivoting to this idea of automation, because I think a lot of folks, when they hear about the cash collection process being smoother, the knee jerk reaction is, well, we can just solve all of this with automation. Let's accept credit cards and let's make sure that everything happens in an automated way. We have AI, we have agents, we can just boop boop boop, let the machines do it. Having done AR in the past, I see that that wouldn't work for a lot of the companies that I'm at, and I've been at a very small scale, thinking even just working in consulting companies, when we have a client that we're potentially going to bill, I recall in our process, we had a whole step system where the AR person actually had to check in with each project team to ensure that everything was going well with the client before sending them a gigantic bill, which is incredibly manual. But something that we did wrong for ages and lost customers and then eventually evolved to do correctly. Talk to me a little bit about, I know that one of the things I love about learning about it flow is I feel like it addresses that nuance. How did you get there and what does solving for that problem look like? Why does automation not do it? One thing that was really hard for us, and I think we still even evangelizing the market on this one is that we sit in a category if you look at G2 or any kind of like category. category classification we sit in to, we sit in the AR automation category, what is AR automation or what does it bring like in terms of product and process that you do. AR automation reminds everyone around sending automated reminders. Yeah. Okay. We hear and we think that we are going to get paid by sending more reminders and we all know that it doesn't work. Right? If you are in a very, if you only have like very small customers and you don't care about them and if you don't care about your customers, it's usually not great. But if your process is saying I'm sending out an invoice, then I'm sending five reminders and the last reminder is about if you don't pay us with shut down the services, well, this usually don't work. And what you described earlier is I think why I hate the name AR automation and that's why we decided and we will talk about it later to create this entire new category around that because we know that first off, if your customers want to pay you, if they're not paying you when you do the process, maybe it's because the process is not right. First thing and that's what CFO should be thinking about. The second thing is that we 100% know that this is a collaborative process and this collaborative process involves way more teams than only the finance teams and that's actually at the heart of the value proposition of upflow. When we look at it, we say upflow is a business tool, not a finance tool. The reason why is because you want your account managers, your salespeople, your customer success managers to not only know, but also to act on this part of the business. And more generally, it's around how does the CFO, you know, we talked a lot about and the podcast around how CFOs get a front seat in front of the business in terms of communicating around what's important. Collecting cash for a business is probably one of the most important thing that you can think of when you think about like the long-term survival of the company, but also not only the survival, we often say that collecting cash in a good way, all investors know that, all good investors know that, is a very, very strong sign of the health of your company as well. Right. Right. And I think just taking the step back of, no, this is not only about the finance team that does a great job and it's usually the team that is accountable for that. Right. But making sure that everyone can collaborate around this is really, really hard. And that's how we built a flow from a philosophy perspective, making sure that the right people can access to the right information and give the right context. Typically, the example you gave is a contact we see all the time on enterprise account, which is sometimes this is really not the right moment to send that invoice or really not the right moment to send that reminder for our pain invoices because there is a really good reason for this invoice to not being paid. Right. And it's usually not the finance team that has this information. That's right. So what do you see oftentimes? You see this giant spreadsheet and it's always the same process. I've seen it a million times. People tell me like, yeah, that don't worry. No problem. Our cash collection process is super solid. And then this cash collection process is basically one to month exporting all the outstanding invoices from their suite or whatever you're using, putting everything in a big spreadsheet with a lot of colors. I have a wonderful collection of horrible spreadsheets on our desk. Very colorful. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because they love putting colors that's green, that's orange, that's red, et cetera. And then we sit down in this horrible meeting where we go down the list of customers one by one and we try to explain on the comment on the cell on the side why what should we do about this customer, why are we not getting paid, et cetera, et cetera. And I think, and oftentimes this is not because again, this is not because the customer did not want to pay, but it's because there is a problem with that invoice. And so I think taking into account this collaborative aspect is extremely important in the process. And I think it's it's a good reminder of how the finance team can become strategic because what we've seen with people using a flow and a classic example is that the cash collection metrics and cash collection performance is becoming a metric that everyone looks at. Typically, you know, just saying, looking at, okay, so you're a really great salesperson, but do we actually get paid on the deals that you sold? That's an information that is usually not really seen. Do I have this information around my the status of like payments for my customers when I go into meeting with them or when they're really older from us because we have a reoccurring business. This type of information is actually a really important, lies into the collaboration piece. It's interesting. So it adds extra data points sort of that customer profile throughout the business. Again, customer relationship. It's just another part of the customer relationship is you do NPS, right? Like, are they happy or not? I can tell you that there is a very strong correlation between customers paying you on time and customers being happy and super interesting. And so also probably a leading indicator for things like churn or or net revenue retention. As you went along in your journey, building this tool out and customers started using it, you know, I think there's certain types of customers for whom a tool like this is particularly helpful, right? So, you know, if you're just, you know, an e-commerce website, this is, you know, you're not really, you don't deal with invoices. So probably not you. But as you encountered customers, what were the things that surprised you about what they were getting out of the tool? What the best, those best customers who really needed it? What did you find out about them? Yeah. So I think we're now pretty tight on terms of ICP and companies we want to serve and company we don't want to serve. It's not what is interesting with what we do and that can be also a very dangerous trap is that pretty much any BGB company could potentially be using a flow, right? Every company who needs to, who manage like more than, you know, 15 voices a month is potentially a good target for us. I don't think it's really interesting that I go into our own ICP and so because I think the, what is interesting for CF was out there is more the generic around that. But what I would say and what is interesting is the most surprising feedback that we got in the early days of people when we put the product in the hand was really getting back to us and we heard that many several times and it was a, wow, we were not ready for this was when CF was actually told us, in fact, this is not an AR automation tool. This is not a tool to send reminders. You guys have built a CRM for our accounts receivable and it was really decided here that in the same way we built a category that Salesforce started with a CRM that was, yes, of course, you can run a list of leads on the spreadsheet and give it to the sales team and say go and run with it. You would never do this today, right? You would never, it would make everyone laugh. But that's exactly what CF was arguing to their AR manager or, or like finance team doing cache collection every day. And when they said this, they said yes, this is exactly what we're doing. We're building the CRM for accounts receivable because we know that we need to enrich that information. We need to put processes, workflows, we need to put more than just automation on it. We, for example, we can get into it. But the fact that we introduced payments as part of our offering was actually a very strong way forward in terms of much more than chasing reminders. And that's how we first introduced based on the feedback of our users, the concept of financial relationship management that we know called FRM. But it's really something that was the starting point of the feedback we got from our users around this. And the other thing that I would say, Laurent, his learnings for CF was out there and I really encouraged him to think about this this way is the fact that the cost of not managing well there account receivable was under evaluated by 10X. It's just like it's crazy to think around this is never the priority. Like you, it's the gentle sales team that you've seen in our offices, most of their objection when they call people and see a foes, they often say this is not a priority. We have other priorities. We need to do a new billing system. We are putting a new expense management tool. And then the interesting thing and that was part of our DNA from now on when we started looking at this is that we said, all right, cool, this is not a priority. Let us run the numbers. And we now have a free product that you can hook on to your net suite, your QuickBooks in two seconds, where we just give you like the cost on a monthly or in a yearly basis. So how much does it cost your business to be paid late or never being paid because that's also the reason. And this is huge, huge. And so that's part of like the thinking as well. The two things that were that we were not expecting is the fact that people thought that this would not be a problem. And it is actually huge problem for the business. And the second thing was themself telling us the category we were creating. And this was just where the two main like, you know, unexpected points on the journey of the heroes of journey. I mean, it makes sense when you think about it because, you know, you think about the process of going down the sales funnel and kind of managing a deal as it gets closer and closer to converting and the process of getting an invoice paid. And there really are so many parallels. It's very much the same thing just happening with a different thing that is the deal, right? What the deal is just getting paid. Hopefully your conversion rates a lot higher on your AR process than it is on your sales process. But yeah, it's very similarly shaped problem. But the two percent loss on that, you know, the 2% loss rate, which is actually the 2% bad debt rate. You know, it's often times, it's one of the vision we have enough flow that you get straight out of the gate when you connect them off flow is just looking at like how much of your business last year did not collect, right? And see if it was often located and say, "No, that's not correct." You know, it's just like, "No." And then say, "All right, cool. Let's click on it. Let's see, like this invoice has been sitting here for the last eight months. It hasn't been classified bad debt yet, but it's been sitting here as a. Well, you're never going to collect that revenue, right? And then when it's 2%, 3%, and you know, the math are pretty simple. 3% of your total revenues, the one that are on your P&L? Yeah, that's a lot plus the debt cost of what you're holding for the time you're waiting. And so it's, it is actually a parallel with the sales sims and we took a lot of inspirations from sales school. It's actually like, you know, like all these, the tools around like email automation campaign where, you know, for example, the sales team is knowing when an email has been received, opened, who has interacted with your email and stuff. We have the exact same category in our flow when no one and from the financing thought that they would be tracking an email to see if it was open click or not, right? Right. We did the exact same thing because surprisingly, you would be surprised, Lauren, to know that probably 15% of the emails that are being sent at the first place when you close a new customer is are the invoices are sent to the wrong person. Right. And it's like, of course, it is the case because you always send the invoice to the person who signed the order form or the contract. That's usually the sea level. I think and the sea level is not the person who's going to process the payment. Right. But if you get this wrong and if you don't have the right collaboration with the team and stuff. So, you know, that's obvious. And that's a typical example of like, it's not the customer did not want to pay. It's just that you send the invoice at the wrong place. Yeah. And then how horrifying that you're sending all of these you haven't paid your bill yet. Reminders to the CEO of this company. That's it. And that's and we see that all the time. So this is just an example of like one of the many, many different angles that we can we can tackle. But the point is that the parallel with the sales team is actually a really great one because this is something that we often see. The sales team have been like flooded with the it's amazing tools and you know, we gave them like, there's so many. And then I'm very happy for the finance teams now because I think since we started eight years ago, like the finance teams were still like the the team that was running on the most antiquated tools and you know, they had the horrible ERP with like the great buttons all over the place. I think and we contributed to it in a way. But the finance teams are now equipped with a new generation of of software and tools that are much better. But it's still very much behind other teams. Let's talk about the problem itself and how that is evolving in recent times because I know you've mentioned that like in the past five years, the importance of this issue also has shifted that there's maybe more of a problem now than there was before. So so talk to me about where this is going. I think this you know, there's always this like ebbs and flow on the situation around cash and is cash very expensive or not. The situation is particularly acute when cash is expensive, right. When interests are zero, we I don't. Yeah, I think it's a bad way of looking at the problem when see if we're saying like I don't care because money is costing me zero, I think it's a bad way of looking at the problem because in the end, not looking at this at this process will end up in bad depth and bad debt whether the money calls zero or 10%. Not getting paid is always bad. Not getting paid is very expensive. And in general, coming back to my point around, you know, well run business actually collect the money on time is holds through whatever the cost of cash. But what is interesting is that usually when the interest rates are super high, this is usually the moment as well where in the tech environment where we are very, very active in terms of our user base, this is the moment where there's usually very limited money from investors. And so those companies that could be running on like I don't care because I have you know, 20, 100 million in the bank. So if I'm getting paid on time or not, it doesn't really matter what is important is my revenue suddenly is becoming a big issue and they need to be good. But with some companies raising $5 million and having an AR balance of $2 million, you just like all right, maybe there's something wrong and maybe there's something to do about it. And what is the shape of this $2 million in AR like do you think that you can collect them or is this like a lost cause and you should actually be writing them off. I think it's interesting. So the thing is that over time like there's moments where it's more acute than others, but I think that if you just take a step back, the way to look at this category shouldn't change over time. It is a mission critical part of your business and you should get that part right if you're a CFO. And the first part of getting it right is actually measuring it and having the right instrumentation on it. What is fascinating for me is how much time like CFO spend time like in the ball reporting, like building like those AR cascades and you know, we talked about LTV to CAC, etc. And when you ask them like how do you measure the performance of a cache collision? They don't even have an answer. Like it's just, you know, the prime indicator for us is DSO, like how long does it take you to get $1 of revenue from they say as outstanding. And it's basically a measure in days of how long does it take to between the moment the dollar of revenues is issued towards the moment where you actually get the money on your bank account. And oftentimes CFOs don't even know the number. They think they know but it's a wrong number. They measure it once a quarter, once a year. It's not dynamic, it's not segmented. And they don't have a target, you know, for us when you look into your flow, we set with them at the start from start, we say all right, this is your DSO right now. And this is the target that we think we can achieve. And it's extremely satisfying for the balance teams to see these numbers, kind of like improving over time. One of the most valuable, like one of most rewarding things that we have at our flow is that we sell a tool that has a very, very strong error I embedded in it, right? When you see it happening, when you see a CFO coming back to you, it's like after three months, I reduce my DSO by 20 days. And we see that all the time, you can see the smile on the face. And it's not a smile of like, you know, I got a good mark or something. It's like, it's a meaningful, meaningful business. And it's this at the beginning and then we help them walk the steps of the cash collection maturity stages. And this is a concept that we invented the cash collection maturity stages to try to help CFOs understand where they, where they stand on this. And often time what I say is that they're on the five steps, they're usually on step zero or one. And the first step is to just make sure what you do. Yeah, what I love about this solution for a company, for the company for whom they, this, this will really have an impact. It's such a win all the way around. So often as CFOs, we have to make cost-cutting decisions, like in order to move the needle on that profit, we're making cost-cutting decisions, we're making risky ROI decisions. There's always a trade-off. And so I love a solution that really just kind of makes it some money. You know, it's bringing in that money, getting folks to do the thing they were supposed to do anyway. So I think that's very cool. Sorry, I just do touch on this. I think the other point that is really important for a CFO when you do this, when you put a solution like ours and we have competitors that we could say that they do the same thing, but it's not the overall point. I think the other thing that is really important is that it changes. There's very few processes on finance that actually have such an impact on how the company runs as a whole, right? When you see certainly an organization that on the dashboard, like the main dashboard, that shows the main KPIs of the organization, how it's trending, it's usually revenue, it's usually the NPS, it's usually, when certainly there's one with a DSO or cash collected last month, or you know, those metrics are very much related to cash. This is a big improvement because suddenly this turned the culture of the company into something that is also cash collection driven, which is I think super important because at the end of the day, this needs to be to be seen. The other thing that is really important and we see that with all growth minded CFO is when the CFO feel that they have played a role in the relationship that they have with the customers. And it's like, and it's a very rare that the CFO has the opportunity to say, yep, we improved the NPS for the company on the outside of things, right? I'm not saying that this never happens, but even when you put a spend management tool like this is for your team, right? Like it's better for the team to do this. Here, it's really better for the customers as well, when your customers can certainly pay in one click because, oh yeah, of course, I want to pay most of the time. So when I want to pay, how can I just pay in one click? That's what we provide them with. How can I automate and put on autopate this stupid bill that comes back every single month? That is the exact same invoice. And I don't want to pay you via wire because that's fine. You know, I had this example with my landlord with the first time we took offices at off-flow. I remember the bill was 4,000 euros. It was in Paris. And I get the first one, the second one, the third one, and at the time where, as I see you, under one, making the payments every month. And I'm like, who can I just be charged for that invoice? Because it's going to be the same one for the next 12 months. And the landlord looks at me, like, as if he was shocked that I'm asking this, like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm like, I'm talking about being charged, you know? Just like, it's going to be the same invoice. I'm not going to contest. I want to pay. I'm a happy customer. And I had to pay via wire for the rest of my, and it's like, that's also what we you, we provide this technology that gets them into better, gets the customers to get a better experience around that point and the fact of paying in a seamless way, not only for the customers, but also for the fantasies because it's, you know, written back automatically in the system, you don't need to do cash application manually every day, which again is craziness in 2026. All of this is, you know, is also benefits for the CFOs to just act on this. So that's very positive. It's very cool. So I think just like we do in our normal sales, we're going to take a little pause, take a quick break, and we'll come back and ask my co-host Alex Lucy, even more questions about uploading the AR process. Still to come in this episode. The idea that you can run your cash collection process on the Topiler DOM by agents is also something that is really interesting and that we started seeing developing. But again, the question remains, can you trust this automation? Enjoying today's episode? Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and tell a friend about the show. Now back to the episode. And we're back with Alex Lucy in this special interview where we're actually talking about upflow, the sponsor of this podcast, and all of the episodes before it. So I think we also have to ask you, Alex, about the question we ask so many of the CFOs who come on this show, which is about AI and how that is impacting things. I'm curious how the advent of AI is changing things in the AR and in cash payment process. AI and AR, we need to be careful of it, not too many acronyms, okay. Accounts receivable and artificial intelligence. I think it's obviously a very interesting question and we all, we started as a SaaS company, every single SaaS company has been shaken by the arrival of AI and those agentic value proposition. I think it was really interesting to look at it because it also goes back to the foundation of what we do and whether this is something that had little value but the software was helping it or is this really something mission critical that goes beyond just more automation because it actually ties back to what you were saying earlier on, is this only about automation. And I think what is, what the short answer for me in terms of AI that it changes a lot of things and not that much at the same time. Not that much in the same, in the sense of the vision we have behind this remains exactly the same. It's interesting to see like this company is saying like, yeah, we are the AI native version of AR and that's great for them. I'm just very happy that that's because that's a great marketing wedge. And to be honest, I've seen a lot of CFOs just coming to us and say, I need to buy something that does AI and they don't even know what AI served but they want to buy some AI. I'm very happy as well that we're getting out of this wave now. But the reality is that the FRM positioning that we have this financial relationship management and the fact that we want to provide a collaborative solution, the one of the fact that we want to be very mindful of the context, bringing the right people at the right time, with the right information, omnichannel, the fact that we want to bring payments in the mix, that it's an overall experience. AI is not really changing this. AI is mostly getting to the next level in terms of automation. So some of the things needed to be automated and there are very much better automated with AI. So to give you a classic example, one thing that is very, very useful for us in our space on AI is that we manage a lot of infrastructure data, right? We do a lot of back and forth of communication, email calls, letters sometime. If you think about sometime checks and you do catch application, which is a big part of our paper position now, you need to read like these piece of paper literally AI is really good at helping this and you're making like significant improvement in terms of the efficiency in terms of what in terms of doing this. We have the same thing now with agents, autonomous agents performing catch collection. So the idea that you can run your catch collection process on the top pile out done by agents is also something that is really interesting and that we started seeing developing. But again, the question remains, can you trust this automation, right? And of course, you know, you're probably not going to put your biggest customer and your most critical customer on autopilot with an agent just answering without any control. So the question is not about building an agent tick value like solution or an agent tick, you know, catch collection process. The question is, can we do one that the financing can trust? And that's a real challenge. And I think no one talks about that. We are the only one talking about it. And right now, it's just a bunch of new players that come in and say, yeah, we have agents doing the work. Yeah, that's great. But let's see if it works. That's the point. It strikes me as very similar to the advent of AI in the sales process where we see that breakdown of, you know, I see both the sales process and the catch collection process as really a problem of information availability and nuanced decisions around people relationships, right? And it's, and I can see where in both the sale process and the payments process, it's very helpful for information availability that AI can help us kind of with those. But in terms of having that nuance and the EQ and the social skills of looking at the full picture and deciding what needs to be said next, we know from every, you know, outbound sales reach out that we get that annoys us in our email box that AI in the sale process can really impact quality. And it's because of that, really needing that human in the loop and that nuance. So that makes so much sense to me that you find it helpful in certain ways, but actually that it kind of degrades the experience or efficacy in other ways. I remember what Nicolas Voucher said on the, on the podcast when he joined and said like every single person and especially in finance is trying to get the hardest problem solved by AI when they should be doing the exact opposite. They should be giving the simplest tasks that are really time consuming and low value added. And we, I don't know if I got inspired by one of our guests on the part, but I'm totally aligned with this, right? And I think about the work of I, I know I have in mind like this person that spent half of the day on a net suite like reconciliation panel, right? You just do cash application every morning with a coffee and it's like half of a day. So someone literally spending 50% of the time matching payment, ABC of the amounts like the same invoice. And it's like there's no such a low value task that could be done. And this is now fully automated through processes, deterministic or through agent. But, and you know that this is really, this is really helpful. Touching like the, the contacts and the relationship of your biggest customer, answering in an angry way because they got the wrong bill or did not happy with the services. This is probably something that you want to handle personally manually, right? And I think this, this is, this is right. So in a nutshell, I think AI is absolutely great. We made significant investment in AI. And I think we are at the forefront of how AI is used in our product. But it doesn't change what we do. And the long term value position around this financial relationship management category that we want to create. That's the short answer for AI in our product. Very cool. Finally, what's next? So we've talked so much about how the product has evolved so far and creating this new category, what's on the horizon for upflow and how you're continuing to solve the problem. I feel Lauren, to be honest, and you know, we've talked about this many times, but it's, we started off low eight years ago. And for me, it feels like it was such a long time ago and at the same time yesterday. And the reason why it's yesterday, it's like, I still feel we haven't scratched the surface of what needs to happen. Again, you know, when you look at the players in the space, sometimes, you know, I know the team is focused on, yeah, these are competitors, but the reality is that the biggest competitor out there is just CFOs who just are not educated around that. No sales team would be running without a CRM. No fun and seem today would run without an expense management. And you would be 90% of, you would be surprised about the fact that 90% of the team we talked to still run on spreadsheets around the calculation. That's what's next for us. We want to build a household name for this category. And in the same way, you know, build.com is the, or used to be maybe the default AP solution that you would be setting up with a quick books on the side and stuff. We want to be the same solution for the mid market. We want to be this household name. And I think this is not only about just because we want to be successful and stuff, it's also because we really believe that that's what is needed in the, in the, in the, for the economy today. When we think about everyone talking about this problem, talking about bad payers, I know that we still have to do a lot of work around. No, this is not about bad payers. This is around how do you help your customers pay you? How do you get 100% of your BGB payments online, not as a, as this overall broken process and how do you stop sending those broken reminders or, and it's moving. It's moving. Europe is implementing, you know, we present in 30 countries now. You can see that Europe, for example, is moving to E invoicing, which is not a thing in the US yet, but this will probably come. There's a lot of things that happening. There's more and more online payments, there's more and more CFOs are now educated around this year that this is an important touch point and you know and you want to do this so it is moving you see the early adopters of this technology but really what's next is how do we keep on evangelizing the market and it's why it's super grateful to be on the podcast today talking about it but I think that's really about this and it's a global effort it's not only us it's not on your flow and it's a very happy to see a new generation of competitors coming in because it's also a sign that there is finally I so invested into one of our new competitors and the team was horrified when they saw it and I was actually very happy I said guys this is great this is finally like the biggest venture capital investors are interested about this category and see that there is a change that needs to happen and to be honest this is what makes us excited about what we do at El Flow what makes the challenge very difficult as well but you know we're just entrepreneur and we're building against very difficult challenges and and I think this is a this is a challenge that would be is 100% worth trying to solve because it has a significant impact for the economy and for the companies that run this this process well very cool well it has been very wonderful to have you as a guest the growth might it's very happy to be on the other side of the podcast Laura how's it feel how's it feel on the hot you know that you've done it it is it is good it's it's more about you know it's easier to tell your story and you know thinking about the questions that you have to ask for think but that's why I also love doing the the podcast as I hope with you and I think it's good to be on the both side of things yeah well I'll be very very happy to have you back in a couple of weeks it's my co-host but this has been wonderful I am back and a great special episode of the growth when it's the FO so as always if you liked this episode or if you want to hear other episodes with all of our wonderful guests where Alex and I are both interviewing them you can check out the podcast on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts we're also on YouTube you can like and subscribe to keep seeing more great episodes on the podcast if you know someone CFO or someone in finance that you think would be a great guest on the podcast please ask them to apply we have an application right on our website our new beautiful website that was just updated and you should check that out there's articles and episode recaps links and show notes and until then we will see you next time on the growth-minded CFO