Learnings from Finoa
Eight years building Finoa. €10B in assets. Institutional investors trusting us with their crypto. And invoicing still ran on spreadsheets.
We were the first regulated custodian for institutional crypto in Europe. Building the compliance, audits, and infrastructure from scratch was all-consuming — and it had to be. Serious clients mean serious obligations.
Every day we were also collecting fees, paying vendors, and tracking what was owed in both directions. Billions in digital assets secured to institutional standards, and the invoicing running on spreadsheets and email threads. It was absurd, and we knew it, but there were always higher priorities.
When I stepped back from Finoa, I started paying attention to how other companies handled this — dozens of them, across industries and sizes. The mess was always in the same place: not inside one company’s system, but in the handoff between two.
Every tool in the space solves for one side — AP or AR, buyer or supplier. But the delays, the disputes, the missed terms all happen between them, where no single company’s software has authority. That is what we are building at Causa Prima.