Most of us assume that major hotel brands have sophisticated financial systems running behind the scenes. In this episode, Jess Conroy, CEO and co-founder of ROH, explains just how wrong that assumption is — and why she's spent the last several years building the financial core that hospitality never had.

What We Covered:

The manual payments problem hiding in plain sight
Why the biggest hotel brands have the biggest challenges
The hidden complexity of every hotel transaction
Why the hospitality industry was overlooked by fintech
How ROH got its start in meetings and events
What "AI-first" actually means at ROH
How ROH fits into the existing hotel software stack
The go-to-market reality of a franchise-heavy industry
A transaction-based model that aligns incentives
Scale and growth: managing over $1 billion across the portfolio
The stale data problem driving bad hotel decisions
The vision: a financial foundation for every hotel dollar

Key Takeaways

Hotel payments are a solved problem almost everywhere except hospitality itself — the industry's bias toward "human solves" left it behind.
The complexity of hotel transactions (variable pricing, upgrades, OTAs, group contracts) makes automation far more valuable here than in simpler retail or restaurant contexts.
Building something that didn't exist before is the hardest sales motion — you're not replacing a known tool, you're educating a market about a problem they've learned to live with.
Year-over-year expansion within existing hotels is the clearest signal of product-market fit — customers keep expanding their use once they're on the platform.

About Jess Conroy

Jess Conroy is the CEO and co-founder of ROH, a financial infrastructure platform for hotels. A second-time founder, she has spent nearly 15 years building in and around the hospitality industry. ROH is currently managing over $1 billion in hotel transactions across its growing portfolio.

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