Jess Conroy, CEO of ROH, on Building the Financial Core Hotels Never Had

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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