Ep. 134 - Finance Goes Agentic: What to Automate and What to Control, with Dori Finance

Justin Hanna (0:05)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast, live here in Lisbon at Fintech Meetup Europe. Joined by Dawn Chen, Founder and CEO of Dori Finance. Dawn, thank you so much for joining us. Firstly, tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you got into this industry.

Dawn Chen (0:17)

Thank you so much for having me. It's super exciting. So starting from the story, I have been a fractional CFO for a few years, and I've been working with businesses, mostly scale-ups and SMEs across the world. So they are from different industries, but they all share similar business characteristics. Even though their scale-ups quite develop SMEs, but they are still difficult to get a set up a full as like a finance function.

That's how we as fractionals getting, like there's a gap, the market demand. So I've been playing that role with cross-border businesses that have headquarters either in the US or UK and have subsidies around the world. And they all share similar financial problems. And that's how I come up with the ideas of building in the agentic era. So yeah.

Justin Hanna (1:21)

And finance going agentic sounds great, right? What's it actually look like day to day?

Dawn Chen (1:28)

So let's say we start with what the, what an SME owner is actually already doing, right? So you running a one, maybe a let's say 10, 10 business, 10 people business and you have to check your bank, bank transactions all the time, make sure that you don't have any fraudulent transactions or you don't recognize anything that you actually pay, but you have no idea since you have so many things going on, you have some receivables that have been sitting there for overdue for 30 days, but you, no one is really checking or has the time to do. So this already something that SME owners have to deal with on a daily basis. And then, going on, it means that we have, we automate the majority of this work that are repetitive and done manually.

So imagine you wake up having your coffee and the agents are already taking in all the bank transactions from yesterday, card transactions, put them together, go around, through your bank, your mail in your inbox and grab all the invoices you already received and then match them together against the banks and tell you what is, what invoices is missing, what invoices is going to be due in three days, et cetera. And then what you will see as an owner is not a list of things that you have to do, it's a list of decisions you have to make. So you are in charge of your business rather than dealing with all these day-to-day messy invoices, transactions, emails, et cetera. So this is what Argentic means in real daily work for SME business.

Justin Hanna (3:29)

And what's the decision when we're starting with SME businesses as opposed to big, large financial businesses?

Dawn Chen (3:35)

Yeah, so it's actually from my own experience, it's a very underserved market.

So in a big corporation, you have a CFO office that covers different part of the workflows and they are sitting on top of a very complex ERP. So it means that if you want to automate that, it's not going to change the whole workflow they already put inside an organization. You are just probably improving the efficiency inside the organization, right? So there's not much. I think that, yeah, there are things to do, but it's not going to make a huge impact on a business owner's life. So we choose to start from the small businesses just exactly because it's also where my passion is. And it's also the business characteristic also fits very well the agentic model because 90% of the transactions are repetitive, they are more or less the same, and they are relatively simple compared to a complex business environment in a corporate. So with all this, it's much easier to go agentic and at a much faster speed than selling B2B contract with the enterprise, right?

Justin Hanna (4:59)

You mentioned before around, you want the agents to do a lot of the admin work than humans to make a decision.

Dawn Chen (5:06)

Yeah.

Justin Hanna (5:07)

At what point are we going to trust the agents to make a decision for us?

Dawn Chen (5:11)

So I would say, like I said, there are 90% of the transactions or the works are actually repetitive. So if they are, we already know that they are repetitive, then we can give the autonomous to, to autonomy to the agents and set. But the overall principle, I would say, and also what we have been building is that they, you need to make sure that they don't go off track.