Finance Automation for SMEs: Moss CEO on Scaling, AI & Fintech Lessons

What if the future of finance isn't in spreadsheets or banks, but in software that actually understands your business? Today's guest helped build one of Europe's fastest growing fintech platforms, empowering thousands of SMEs to automate, spend, master real time budgeting and finally ditch the chaos of manual finance workflows. From corporate cards to E money licenses, from P2 till backing debuffing compliance, this founder's story is real redefining what finance ops can be. Stay tuned.

This once a master class for modern CFO, SaaS, builders and startup fans alike. Welcome to Startup Rad IO, your podcast and YouTube blog covering the German startup scene with news, interviews and live events. Hello and welcome everybody. This is Joe from StartupRate IO bringing you another exclusive deep dive into the minds shaping the future of startup

finance and technology across Europe. Today I'm joined by Ante Splitter, the CEO and co founder of moss, a Berlin based fintech scale up that's become a category leader in Spanish event management and finance automation for SMEs German Kaimus. If you're a founder, CFO or operator tired of juggling receipts, budget approvals and end of month chaos like everybody is, you want to

listen closely. Musk is building the most intelligent finance stack for European businesses, unifying everything from copper cards and accounts payable to real time insights, pre counting automation and embedded payments all wrapped in a user first experience. They've issued over 300,000 credit cards, raised 180 million in venture capital from the likes of Vala Ventures and Cherry Ventures and now processes more than 5 billion euro in annualized payment volume,

all while maintaining Baffin's licensing and enterprise grade compliance. Ante brings a unique lens to this space with roots in investment banking and venture capital, plus the scars and lessons of building a high profile growth fintech from ground up. Today we unpack his founder story, most products, evolution and the high stakes future of AI powered finance for SMBs. Ante, great to have you on startup radio. Welcome to the show. Hello Jern. Likewise. Very glad to be here. This was quite an

introduction. I really like that one. And of course we'll dig a little bit deeper but let me start out with asking. You were once deep in fines like investment banking, VC consulting. What was the specific pain or moment that make you say ah, forget spreadsheets, let's rebuild finance ops from scratch for European small and medium businesses at the typical frustration of an analyst or investor with Excel doesn't count. Everybody experiences that.

Yeah, it's a honestly things came Together while I was building my prior business together with Anton, who is also co founder in this company. And it was a marketplace startup. We grew very quickly to decent size. So within the first two years we had more than 25 million revenue. And everything was centered around expansion. As you can imagine, what was really behind

was our finance setup. So after 18 months, 18, 24 months, we realized if we don't get a grip on finance now, it's going to kill us, like literally. Um, and then, so what followed was a significant cleanup with temporary resources, you know, our internal team trying to find invoices, receipts. It was a total chaos and it took, I would say at least six months to clean up and another six months to, you know, properly close the books and run to the audit.

And, and I think this was the moment that that kind of sparked my hate and passion, if I may say, hate for the situation we had, but also the passion for there needs to be a better way. And then it took a while longer until it really became the vision for Moss. So it was not that right after I got extremely excited to continue with the finance suite. Instead I spent a year in venture capital and, and they realized it's a ton of other companies that have very similar pains.

And this is what together has led to actually launching the company. Thinking about the vision, thinking about the first product. And yeah, now six years later, we're still here. Actually, when you talked about the love hate relationship with the finance department, in my mind there was somebody looking very much like Sigmund Freud wearing glasses and ask, could you, could you elaborate at your love hate relationship there? But

let's forget about that. You guys must launch with bold ambitions, corporate cards, automation and now full spend orchestration. What was the first moment with friction make you doubt whether European SMEs were ready for this shift? Look, honestly, the market is still fairly early if you think about the customer adoption curve. Yeah, so the famous S curve, we're still pretty far on the left. And the main competitor has been and still is manual workflows, it's literally Excel, it's email

signature folders, especially with SMBs. So basically everything that finance teams has found as a workaround to get the job done. And

after we started, we managed to launch this first incredible product. Yeah, and we were super lucky that we actually also started with that product. And it was a cards issuing platform, a cards management platform, as you said. And then on top, the expense, expense tooling. So how can I process the receipts, how can I connect with finance and. All of those Things we may add most people, 80, 80% here from listeners at least on the audio podcast, are from Germany, Austria and

Switzerland. But we do have a lot of viewers, especially on long form YouTube, who are not familiar with the system. So basically you first make your card expenses and then you have to get also for the tax authorities, a receipt, an invoice that matches this expense. And you have to do this depending on your size and every month, every quarter, every year. And it's a big headache. It's one of the reasons I have fewer hairs. Yeah, like one really interesting point. And

honestly, I only got to learn this a bit later. Yeah, I realize. Yeah, it's so obvious. But then somehow it's also so crazy. In business, every single transaction, no matter if you spend five bucks on a coffee or if you buy a lunch for a client or if you invest hundreds of thousands or millions in machinery, everything has to be administered. Like every euro, there is no black, there is no hole in the, in the cash. You know, like it's, everything

needs to be done. So having said that, the administration is very significant burden. And now to get back kind of to your question, the biggest, the biggest point of friction, the biggest question for us was will we be able to pass beyond that cards platform and being a cards and spend management company to becoming a much bigger finance suite?

Because of course, the vision was to go into this bigger finance suite and the vision was to be able to tailor to accountants and controllers for a much bigger, much bigger domain. And, and this was a tough ride. Yeah. So once you have the first product, when it works, getting to the next one is almost like starting a new company. Yeah. It was a pretty significant kind of learning experience and point of friction for us. And also doubt. Yeah. On how the European SMEs will react.

You moved from an investor to operator, from finance theory to infrastructure execution. How did becoming a founder and especially a regulated fintech CEO r reshape how you saw yourself and your work? Yeah, look, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very hard. Yeah. The job is very hard and it's very demanding. I guess it's true for many jobs, but I need to say it's particularly hard and demanding based on my experience. And the crazy thing is the role changes constantly all the time.

Yeah. So with every new wave of hires, the, with every new executive that joins the team, with every new priority for the quarterly OKR cycle, for the strategy for the next year, a new market entry, every new kind of fire in a Team is always changing your priorities as a CEO. It will always impact on which decisions you take, what you focus on, et cetera, et cetera. So what it really taught me is to become multivariate. Yeah. It sounds now very technical, but basically

be able to switch context very quickly. So now we're recording this podcast. After that, it's going to be something entirely different. Yeah. I'm not going to have a coffee with a different reporter. But also to take decisions fast. Yeah. Especially the small ones. But then take a lot more time for the tougher decisions to shape culture.

Like things that never were on my agenda. Right. As a consultant or in any other profession, you're basically kind of getting shaped by the culture and not you're responsible for shaping that culture. So what I want to say is it's a

ton of setbacks. You have to live with those. You have to develop a positive mindset. Yeah. Otherwise you go crazy. And you need a fighter attitude. Yeah. It needs to be this willingness to win, the willingness to fight, because there is a market, there are players, and you are the new kid on the block. Yeah. You want to achieve something great, but you're nothing. You have maybe some cash from a fundraiser, you have a couple of people on your team, and now you want to

become something big. And this kind of is, I think, one of the main ways how it shaped me personally. Yeah. And also professionally. Yeah. Just trying to think this through. When you talked about a new executive coming into the team, it's like when you have a new team member, some of your jobs get absorbed by this person. You get to do more, but also you have to think more, because it's not that you need to write email, abc, but you need to tell this person what

to achieve in a month, in a year, and so on and so forth. So you need much more time to think ahead. Yeah, 100%. And it changes dynamics because maybe first you were also execution responsible. Yeah. So maybe first you were the person that worked together with the team on getting the job done, and now suddenly it's exactly what you said. Suddenly you're the context giver. Yeah. You're direction giver. You kind of. You're the control tower. To make sure we stay on course. You work

together, you help. Yeah. And this is. And this is constantly changing as the company evolves. Yeah. From. From good to bad. I actually like the picture of the control tower. Because you're avoiding the crash. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's. Especially with tech companies where one of the key strengths Is to be agile. Yeah. So one of the key strengths is to learn fast, to break

things, to iterate from there. Which also means realize where things maybe are not going not on the right path. Yeah. And I can give you, if you like, and give you like a very clear example. We once decided to focus on a customer segment that was a bit outside of our ideal customer profile. And, and that customer segment faced a little bit lower complexity in finance, but actually, you know, had some of the pains. And we went after that segment and tested how is it

reacting now? Once we had enough learnings to know what works, what doesn't work. It's so mission critical to make sure that this information tickles across all of the teams. Because the marketing team is going to continue driving, driving traffic, they're going to train your driving, investing and same on an outbound sales motion. They need to

know whether they should continue focusing or not. So it's really hard to keep this communication best in class to make sure that everybody has the context and knows what they have to do in this very quickly changing

dynamics. And I was wondering, because I've seen quite frequently when I was still a consultant in large companies that you did this with regular calls, weekly or monthly, where people participated and they worked through items, but actually they tended to get bloated and bloated and you could hear the people not paying attention and tapping in the background and all that stuff. Have you found a better way to do that? You mean with my team or for myself? Both.

Yeah. So look, I'm really, really, really bad at multitasking. Anybody will confirm. So the only way is don't even try. And this is going to avoid the typing, it's going to avoid the confusion and if it happens, people will realize immediately and it's not going to be supportive. So for me personally, it's 100% presence. If you're doing it, just be present, take your notes, be, you know, pay a ton of attention, etc, etc. On the other side, I guess there is, I don't

know, it's difficult. Right. Ideally you don't want to have so big calls. Right. You don't want to have calls where there are eight to 10 people on it and especially not if people have the time to do other stuff on the sides. Yeah. Then it sounds almost like the audience is too

big. So maybe, maybe what we try to do is we try to steer kind of ex ante on what is the audience, how can we keep it to the ones that are actually working on it, designing it, because then There is almost like no chance to escape. I'm personally always torn between doing such calls with, as you already said, the smallest possible audience or working with stuff like to do lists where you just send around to do

lists. But the problem is then always people lack the context there or misinterpret interpret what is there. Yeah, yeah, the context setting is really important but I guess like the, the magic lies somewhere in the middle. Yeah. So async, Async, whatever can be done, especially in written form. I think sometimes written form can reinforce things and bring things also back

on the same page later really, really effectively. But then when, when there is a, the benefit of a discussion, benefit of questions, then probably it's better to, to just jump on the meeting. Exactly. From our awesome audience, I would like to know what moment made you believe in your startup, share in the comments or tag us on social media until your darkest day. Moss made headlines with layoffs like many other scale ups navigating the Fintech

winter. Take us to that day. What was happening behind the scenes and what helped you push forward? Yeah, it was horrible. Honestly it was horrible, especially because in total it took 12 to

18 months. So we're not speaking about one specific day, we're speaking about the whole journey that the company has to go through and that we also had to go through. The context was fairly straightforward. Markets turned, we were over optimized on growth and that setup was not fit for purpose anymore. The burn relative to growth ambitions and especially to cash. And the years of Runway was not in line. So we had to take action on the other

side. We also made this promise. Right. So we hired people, we kind of gave them an implicit or even explicit promise. We're going to do our best to try to make this company and you successful. Yeah, we're going to try to coach you, to train you, to develop you, but we're also going to want to create equity value in this company. And then we had investors that gave us a ton of money that we

also promised we're going to do something great with that money. It's a gene is the right roi, you know, you should invest here. So honestly, there was also not really a way out. Yeah, I think if you're serious about those things and if you're more accomplished, it's kind of on the, on the fighter side. When it's uncomfortable, you will still have to grind through it and. Yeah. And then we just had to get our shit together. Yeah.

Honestly and literally we had to understand where to think about what is the Future, that is a must have. What are the strategic priors? What is the team set up? What are the regrets? And no regrets. Calculate this through, you know, through business case sessions and everything that's needed. Discuss with the board, discuss with people, team. Think about all of the consequences that it means for the employees. You know, it's like, it's pretty significant. Yeah. Because

the market was in a downturn in general. So I would say very heavy lifting and deliberate thinking with many backs and forwards to then kind of pull through. And now kind of the second wave, second phase starts. Yeah. So now you kind of completed your first milestone. The culture needs to get, needs to be brought back on track. And that's very, very, very hard. So here we learned our most painful lessons. How, how to get the motivation back when effectively there was a

severe issue. Yeah. When effectively things failed. And, and this took a year. Now it's very. Now it's great again. We are, we're so happy. Energy level is super high. Team is, is motivated, pumped company grows. All of those things are now in a good spot. But to get there was a very slow, gradual and painful process. You already talked in the beginning that you have a co founder. Let's talk a

little bit about the team demanding dynamics here. Moss scaled to 250 plus people, processed over 5 billion euro in payments and added key leaders like jan Stehler from N26. What was a painful lesson you learned about hiring trust or involving your leadership team? Yeah. So as I said before, the switch from individual contributor, even like a co founder, mostly in the beginning you just execute to a manager is pretty painful.

And I think the biggest kind of thing we had to accept is it's hard skills and it's not talent or soft skills or whatsoever. Yeah, they come into play a little bit. But there is a, it's a hard skill to manage other people and to do it right. Yeah. And at the starting point, what is, I think is the most important element is the hiring process itself. It's about the talent bar that is set. It's about the expectations being very, very clear. What do we actually need?

What is the type of profile? What should they have seen in the past? What is the minimum experience level? What are also markers that make me believe that this candidate is worth speaking and is more kind of interesting versus someone else. Right. Because we have a. There is a huge market out there. Out there. How does best in class look like? You know, like I'm sure you had the situation where you interviewed someone and you

realized I must hire that person. Yeah. It's like it's this very rare case and the 1% or whatsoever where you're so excited you think this is the perfect fit. So how can I make sure that that best in class kind of is visible at scale? This I think is really number one. But then what comes next is the onboarding journey. And I think here we made mistakes pretty significant and I think almost everyone has made those mistakes unless they are already much further in their career.

It's so much context that is centered in your heads that only you have. It's. Yeah. Or your co founder or a couple of people in the company that needs to make a transition. Right. So for the new leader to do a good job, they almost need the same context that you have. Yeah. And it's how to do this while everything is moving fast, while you're super busy, while you need to kind of give them the right information at the right time, keep them focused, you know, plug in other people,

I think is very, very, very, very hard. So I would say the, the most painful lesson has indeed been mainly around being really good in onboarding. It's too expensive if it fails. The first few days, the first month, they're decisive in what kind of habits people get in. And that's actually we want to set it up properly so that people can really understand who is there. It doesn't help if you get hired

and your boss is not there for the first two. You just by habit report to somebody else and when the new boss comes back, you'd still talk more to the other person. That's for example, something I have experience which is not great. Let's talk a little bit about emotional toll. You're building a highly. In a highly regulated space with aggressive growth and investor expectations. How has this journey impacted your professional identity, mental health or family life, especially as a

father? Yeah. It's kind of the magic question. Right. And how I like to boil it down. Then I'm going to give you some specifics. Yeah. But how I like to boil it down and challenge myself is am I happy in the current setup? So how it's going right now, is this giving me happiness and joy or is it not? And fortunately I can still answer the question with yes. Like I do not want to be. I really want to run this company. I really want to work my founders with all of the

colleagues here. I love the mission, I really enjoy working on finance, etc. Etc. Etc. There is a big however though. Yeah. And the however is it has a lot of cost yeah. So first, first in the first two years of my, of my first son and then also second son got born roughly 15 months later. I did not sufficiently see them. Yeah. So I had to pay the

price of not being sufficiently there. And only after those two years I caught up with some paternity leave. Yeah. A month. A month to spend with the kids. And this was not a good thing. Yeah. I want to clearly say this was, this was a big cost to carry, but I also miss my tennis routine, you know, in many cases or I deprioritized. So. So one part of the learning journey was also it's not going to be sustainable. It's not going to work long term. And

in particular it will not. You will not be able to answer the question of are you happy with the setup? With the. Yes. If there is no balance. Yeah. So right now, in the last two years basically revise some of those decisions. Yeah. And how to approach it and have found some more balance. It doesn't mean it's a good work life balance. It's horrible with two small kids and the company to run. But the sacrifices are very, you know, are different. Yeah. So maybe

it's seeing some friends less often. Maybe it's skipping a conference or, or, or a dinner. Yeah, attack dinner in the evening. Maybe it's something, you know, it's like other things you can still control to make sure you don't go mad. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. That's also something I had to learn. For example, what I. I've been adjusting my whole lifestyle, my whole life. For example, before 9 I usually don't do any course because I drop off my. My two

sons at kindergarten. Mondays I get to sleep in because my wife gets also a day on the weekend. And so I get up late, I do lunch and then I start working because I do have a lot of customers and clients in the US and they like to do really late calls. And so on Mondays they can book me until like 23:00 o'clock in the evening on Mondays. But you cannot do this by starting at 9am Plus I also learned the really hard way that you have to take off the weekends, at least

for me. No work, no work emails and stuff like that. There was a tough lot, tough thing to learn. But in the beginning you just work, work, work and then at one point your body screams no, stop. That's something exactly I learned as well. Guys, we'll be back after a short app break talking, for example, about a make or break moment. Founder misconceptions and market surprises.

Hey guys, welcome back with Ant, the CEO and co founder of Moss, a Berlin based fintech startup that raised 180 million years so far from investors including Cherry Ventures. We linked it here in the show notes our interview with Cherry and Peter Thiel's Vala Ventures. Ante, let's talk about a make or break moment. Was there a point perhaps during the rebrand or during regulatory approval where you had to decide do we pivot, pause or push through no matter what?

We had many of those moments and the earlier you take them kind of the smaller the moment is. This is kind of a little bit of the philosophy that we have. It's a continuum. So by being on top of data, by being on top of kind of the strategy and what actually needs to be done, what the vision is, and then following through with early signals, we had multiple of those points. Yeah. So we, we, we, we asked ourselves, for example, shall we expand more internationally? Yeah, like,

very fundamental question. It's a massive distraction for all of the teams. The product needs to be brought up to speed. Ton of other, other reasons why it's a distraction, but also how it can drive revenue. The second big one was do we really go for our own license? Yeah. Do we, do we, do we really want to get regulated and build the team that is needed to run to be compliant or do we rely

on third parties? There is a banking as a service providers currently the question is when do we expand beyond spend management? This is a pivotal moment for the company as the product suite suddenly becomes much more comprehensive. So yeah, there are 100%, there are those moments and you will have to take a decision on do we do it or do we not do it. And hopefully most of those moments are happy moments. Hopefully. It's not a moment where you say we have to pause, we have to shut down the

market, we have to shut down the product, we have to stop the company. This will be horrible. Of course. I see. Yeah, it's a steady fight. I would say that's also how it feels here. Talking a little bit about founder

misconceptions, what did you absolutely misjudge in the early days of Moss? Either about the market, your customer, or what it takes to truly digitize a finance department. I can, I can, I can tell you a little secret that maybe it's not really a secret. Don't worry, it will be just between you and me and like 50,000 listeners on the podcast. Yeah. Then that's fair. That's okay with this. Secret is fair.

If someone has not. Not misjudged a ton of things, then they probably didn't start the business. The. My main point is it's. There is such a huge ocean of unknowns and there are so crazy big complexities that if you take them, if you look at them from a starting point, it's a wall that you cannot climb. There is no way you will ever launch a company. If you knew all of the obstacles, you would just not do it and no one would give you money for it.

Yeah. So one example, we got super passionate about the broader finance suite. We had to find a minimum viable product, though. And it's this kind of. It's the one shot you have. You collect the seed funding, you build the first product. You want to show some traction. If you pick the wrong piece, you're dead. Yeah. And it can try to raise new money, but very likely it's not going to work. So we were

super nervous about it, of course. And then we picked something that retrospectively was actually way too complex. Yeah. So we thought we can launch a next generation credit card like the first of its kind, but not in a way like banks do it. Yeah. American Express or any other bank. It was a platform where customers could issue physical virtual cards with one mouse click. Set limits. Do like a ton of stuff that you cannot even do. Yeah. Like this whole card issuing platform was just

a beast. And then on top, it had the finance suite. Right. So how do I connect? How do I. How do I now attach receipts to single transactions? How do I assign accounting categories? How do I do the coding? How do I connect with Data or with NetSuite or with Exact. With Xero, like all of those ERP systems, we entirely misjudged the complexity of doing this. Fortunately, the consequence was it was just very painful and took a bit longer. But.

But it still kind of worked out and we saw many of those things again. Yeah. I remember the day when we're sitting in the Cherry office. It was an off site. We always ask them if we can work in their big boardroom. They have a nice room. It's a bit detached from the office. So we go there and then we discuss the serious stuff. And I remember when we discussed the serious decision, when are we. Are we like, are we going to leave the territory of Amex and

now expand into accounts payables or not? Yeah. Do we want to build a suite where customers can also process all of their incoming receipts? Yeah. That's very different from card transactions. And I also remember that when we took the decision yes. We brutally underestimated the requirements. So this is three years ago. We're still working on the product and expanding the product. I think the short and sweet answer is if you don't misjudge to a certain degree, you're probably

never start. You should not entirely kind of fail, but you will definitely misjudge. Yeah. That's also what I felt when he said that if you really know how big the problem is, you likely won't start here. You've described Moss as finance software that actually works like your team does. What trait in yourself once felt like a liability and and ended up shaping Mosso's user first design. Yeah. So there is an interesting insight about this, about this industry and also

here it actually took a while to get there. Even though it's super simple. Finance and finance software were almost the first proper. It was like first technology. Yeah. So amongst the first. Yeah, let's call it like this. So what I want to say with this, the ERP systems like SAP or accounting software, it was the early days of digitization, of putting codes into a piece of software to run something in a digital way. Having said that, they are their biggest, biggest, biggest pain.

If you boil it down to kind of all of the pains that exist is the user experience. Yeah. It's not that they don't offer functionality. They have the broadest suite of functionality. They had 20, 30 years of time to build all single functionality. Where it breaks is the user experience. It's not state of art. It doesn't adhere to the standards, neither in design nor in the flows. It's maybe less user centric, it's maybe more infrastructure centric. Not all data is available kind of.

That's actually their biggest pain. So what we understood and I'm so happy that our lead product designer, Moritz, who was the only person in that team when we started, got this very early, is we will only be able to create this. A very distinct and long term differentiating factor. If we exceed customer expectations on user experience. We have to take an entirely different lens. How we look at those workflows, how we design the platform, how

we incrementally optimize it. Yeah. Over and over again, small stuff, big stuff. To create this compounding effect of a superpower. And I think in this regard we are very proud and we know it's true and the market confirms it. Moss does have the best user experience. If an, if an accountant, a controller, business owner, a tax advisor, if they, if they want to have this iPhone like experience. Yeah. You find everything by Yourself pretty

much the connections make sense. You can find, you can, you have the right settings that you need and that's an objective that we widely have achieved. Yeah, entirely. Will be too optimistic. Ton of stuff to still do but. But much better than anyone else in the market. Mm hmm. I was wondering if I could ask our audience the same question. What was one founder trait you've turned from a liability to superpower? Maybe even with your co founder. Let us know on AX BlueSky threads or LinkedIn.

With over 5000 SMEs onboarded, what unexpected insight changed the way you understood CFO workflows, span patterns or ERP integration pain points? Yeah, there is. So first I think it's important to segment the market a little bit. Yeah. Now it's getting, I don't want to get too technical but just for the, for the audience also to get a better

understanding. There are small businesses, right? Micro enterprises could be a solo trader, one person, could be two, could be five, but basically a very simple and kind of easy to communicate setup. Then there is the mid segment. It's the companies to start with, let's say 10 employees and then go up to 500 or thousand. It's kind of the traditional kaimo as you said, the traditional SMBs to choose like English

words. And then there is mid market enterprise companies that operate globally, have huge organizations, many entities, etc. Etc. In that mid segment. And this is our core and this is where kind of the, the biggest share of the GDP lies. Yeah, this is kind of the biggest segment in terms of kind of the GDP in business. The very surprising insight was that they are not zero digitized. It's not like that. There is no software they use. I

mean they use anyways accounting software and erp. But even beyond that the point was it was very unsophisticated single point software. Yeah. So for example there is a tool that allows you to build approvals. So you as a company you want to stay on top and control what people buy. So what you do, you build an approval flow and now you want to buy something for 10k. Someone needs to sign off and not doing this kind of an accident or via email or via signatures. The only way is

to bring it into a tool. The challenge though is if you have one or two or three of those tools, you have

to manage your workforce on the tool. You have to onboard them, they have to log in, they have to run the process and like who wants to have three, four different tools to get the job done. It's like it's a nightmare. So the kind of. The most interesting insight was there are tools out there, but they have one big deficit. They don't connect the dots. They are isolated pain points. It's isolated solutions. They are not connected to the broader software landscape.

They are covering only fractions of the pains. And this is an option for us to tackle. We decided this is the way to tackle. You've said Moss aims to be the most intelligent finance stack for Europe's SMBs. Paint the picture. What does that look like in five years? Does it include Treasury AI, embedded FPA, cross border FX? Yeah. So now, now I love speaking about the future, but it's also very hard to predict.

Maybe starting first with the fundamental belief. Yeah. And I think this is what shapes like a lot of thinking for us at Moss and also for me personally and my co founders. The first layer that we tackle is the workflow. It's creating a digital experience. Now, for some, this might already be groundbreaking. Yeah. But if we are honest, it's only the baseline, it's only process efficiency. Right. You basically can do the job in a more orchestrated way and maybe a

bit faster and a bit more automated. The true power comes from intelligence. Yeah. So how can I digest that data and how can I use that data in a way that makes people work smarter? Yeah. Not. Not just harder. And by comparison, here would be. For anyone who is working with CRM software and in sales, think about Salesforce. Yeah. The, the company, Salesforce, the product. It's good if you can create a customer journey and a buyer list and basically move away from a Google Doc, from Excel to

having it in Salesforce. But the magic is when you get all of your KPIs, when you understand what the sales cycle is, what the big deals are, when the follow updates are, when it automates your ways of working, when it gives you the intelligence to say I'm on track or I'm not on track. And it's the same thing with Moz. We are building the foundational layer and we are moving very fast on that front. But once we have done this, we'll move and invest much more into the intelligence

layer. Because we want our customers, we want the finance teams, the business owners, to just spend as little time as possible with admin and focus most of their time on the activities that change and drive their company. Yeah. And we call it business partnering. Yeah. So you work with the team to grow sales, to reduce costs, to improve margins or whatsoever. So having said that. Yeah, it's the foundational layer. This really great workflows end to end across

accounting, across controlling. Very likely not just focused on spend, what we do now in five years from now, very likely also focus on the revenue side. But then it's the layer on top, it's kind of the cash flow forecasting, it's the budgeting, it's a lot of additional use cases, effective cost controlling, etc. Etc. That connect all of the dots in the dashboard and then help businesses improve, help businesses grow. Sounds pretty

good. Sounds like you'll have some kind of AI agent best controlled via audio and you tell him make a casual forecast this and this and this changed and let me know tomorrow what are the implications. Yeah, yeah. So I love that. If I may, if I may say, I we're so excited about the AI. AI kind of AI segment, category, trend, whatever want to call it. And one fun fact up front, AI has been

leveraged in finance since many, many years already. So OCR, extracting information from documents and categorizing it is basically a certain form of AI and it's already in most software since many, many years. What fundamentally changed with the introduction of the LLMs and with the power of the LLMs was to supercharge other parts and connect more dots and more context and more information. And yeah, so we for example right now are, have a very, very powerful AI automation

platform. So let's say a customer submits an invoice. 19 out of 20 actions that have to be taken, such as, you know, the service date, the account category, the cost center, like everything finance needs to do for the transaction. 19 out of 20 the machine can do for you in an automated way and an accurate way. Yeah, and this is just think about this change. So just think about you have to do one step out of 20. Yeah, it's a very, very brutal improvement and it's just

starting. Yeah. So on compliance checks, there's so many other areas where, where AI will supercharge the offering and it's not necessarily going to be kind of just an AI agent. I think it's almost like it's a misused terminology. It will be part of the software suite. The AI will enable a better workflow and better insights for customers through a specific user experience. It might be a prompt, it might be kind of just in the background, you

don't even see it. It's just, it's just, it just executes the job or it might be a different ways, but it's kind of, it is going to be part of the software. Let's face it this is well, but I had in mind if it's from a psychological perspective, easier for person to interact with an AI agent that at least has some personality. I'm thinking about Jarvis here from Ironman or or Skippy. Sci Fi readers would know

them, but that's a completely different topic. If anybody out there is researching on that or knowledgeable about it, hit me up Joe, celebrate IO and we can talk about and maybe even find an interview for you. Let's reflect a little bit for the closing in the Future version of ANTO 5 years older post series D looked back at this moment. What would he say to you right now?

Yeah, so I'm thinking about what the future me will say. Yeah, this is a very very good question. Yeah. So I hope it will say stay hungry, push, but don't stress out too much. Everything will be fine. I hope this is what they will say. Everything will be fine. Great. Awesome Ante. Thank you very much. Awesome interview. Hope to have you back soon and we'll now hop into the founders world and talk a little bit behind the scenes

for our subscribers. If you'd like to join us, go on substack or YouTube, become a paying member and you'll have access to access to the Founders vote. Thanks y and all the listeners. Really really enjoyed. My pleasure. That's all folks. Find more news streams, events and interviews@www.startuprat.IO Remember, sharing is caring. Sam.