EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.
Insights
Discover the insights you need to make better decisions today, to shape the future with confidence.
See more
Highlights
Global Business Districts Attractiveness
Global Business Districts Attractiveness Report 2025
04 Dec 2025Marc Lhermitte
Services
EY helps clients create long-term value for all stakeholders. Enabled by data and technology, our services and solutions provide trust through assurance and help clients transform, grow and operate.
- See All
- 1||About EY-Parthenon
- 2||About EY-Parthenon
Spotlight
Industries
Discover how EY insights and services are helping to reframe the future of your industry.
See more
Case studies
Energy resources
How AI drove data optimization for oil and gas capital projects
06 Aug 2025EY Global
Strategy and Transactions
Rivada is reimagining wireless internet as a commodity
11 Jul 2025EY Global
About us
At EY, our purpose is building a better working world. The insights and services we provide help to create long-term value for clients, people and society, and to build trust in the capital markets.
Recent Searches
Trending
-
What if disruption isn't the challenge, but the chance?
Transform your business and thrive in the NAVI world of nonlinear, accelerated, volatile and interconnected change. Discover how.
26 Jun 2025 EY wavespace™ -
Geostrategic Analysis: December 2025 edition
Read the December 2025 Geostrategic Analysis for our take on geopolitical developments and the impact of these political risks on international business.
10 Dec 2025 Geostrategy -
How can reimagining today's workforce help banks shape their future?
By focusing on four bold imperatives, banks can differentiate in the competition for top talent and drive higher returns on people investments.
09 Sep 2025
How CFOs can connect pricing strategies to drive revenue growth
In this episode of The Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast, host Myles Corson speaks with Riya Grover, CEO of Sequence, about how better pricing decisions help CFOs to drive revenue growth.
Related topics
In this episode of The Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast, host Myles Corson speaks with Riya Grover, CEO and co-founder of Sequence, about how CFOs and finance leaders can navigate revenue complexity and enhance collaboration.
Riya shares her entrepreneurial journey and discusses the important role of finance in shaping revenue strategy. She highlights how identifying disconnects between pricing, revenue data and accountability can improve decision-making and business performance.
The conversation explores how CFOs can leverage technology for better visibility into pricing strategies, track revenue trends and maintain pricing hygiene as organizations scale. She also discusses the impact of emerging pricing models, such as usage-based and outcome-based pricing.
The discussion highlights the evolving role of finance in driving growth and the importance of collaboration between finance sales teams to effectively manage revenue and growth.
Key takeaways:
- Understand the strategic importance of pricing for CFOs and its impact on revenue management
- Recognize how early involvement in pricing decisions can transform the role of finance leaders
- Explore the role of data integrity and collaboration in informed financial decision-making
- Learn how CFOs can leverage technology for visibility into pricing strategies and revenue trends
- Identify challenges and opportunities with emerging pricing models, including usage-based pricing
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Myles Corson
Welcome and you’re listening to the EY Better Finance: CFO Insights podcast — a series that explores the changing dynamics of the business world and what it means for finance leaders of today and tomorrow. I’m your host, Myles Corson, from EY.In this episode, I’m joined by Riya Grover, CEO and co-founder of Sequence. Drawing on her entrepreneurial journey and background in finance, Riya shares how first-hand experience with revenue complexity led her to reimagine how finance leaders approach revenue strategy.
So, let’s get started!
Corson
Riya, let's start off just to get a little bit of context. You're sort of a serial entrepreneur and founder. Talk us through your career journey and how you became an entrepreneur.Riya Grover
This is the second company I'm building. I really kind of started building companies about 10 years ago. I started my career in banking after I graduated from university, worked in an investment bank for about three-years and then went to business school. This was really the segue for me to start getting interested in technology and software, and I had always been pretty entrepreneurial in nature, but decided that this was the industry I wanted to build in and pursue.My first company was a food restaurant tech software platform. The problem we were solving was helping independent restaurants capture and tap into new segments of business, like corporate demand and venue demand. We essentially built the operating software for them to be able to host their capacity on a marketplace to capture orders, to manage payments and to fulfill those orders.
And it was a great journey. We raised a little bit of capital, but it was also a semi-bootstrapped business. We scaled it over about four years, launched into four European markets, grew very quickly to hundreds of venues and restaurants on both sides of the platform and sold it in 2020. And then, I decided to build again and launch Sequence.
Corson
We'll come back and talk a little bit more about what Sequence does and why it's so relevant for this audience and for the finance community. And just exploring that transition into the entrepreneurial world, what came first: the idea and the problem you were trying to solve or the desire to be an entrepreneur?Grover
Definitely, the desire to be an entrepreneur. I remember with my first company in those early days, just brainstorming a bunch of different things that I could build, and then going and investigating the market and talking to potential customers until I really landed on something that felt compelling to me.I would say with Sequence, my second business, having experienced a ton of stuff in the first company, actually had some ideas and conviction around the area I wanted to build in.
Corson
What gave you the confidence to make the jump from investment banking, from the end of the process into entrepreneur, starting signing yourself up? As you said, bootstrapping this from very little, that takes confidence. What were the support mechanisms? Were there mentors that helped you make that transition?Grover
I had friends who were entrepreneurs and I guess people I looked up to who had built things and encouraged me to do it. Truthfully, the conviction has to be an inner one, where you have this strong desire to do something and build something and defy the odds to do it.In hindsight, you can paint this linear picture of the milestones and the progress. The reality of the day-to-day is that it's up and down, and the lows are very low and the highs are very high. You can be working on something for six to nine months to figure actually something doesn't work out the way that you expected it to. The way the market receives something isn't what you thought. And very often, building a company in the first year or two is just about this constant iteration and finding your wedge into a market and the right way to position something to compete.
Because the reality is, most markets are naturally saturated and even if something kind of seems like an obvious pain point, you start digging into the opportunity and you get hit with: people are comfortable with the status quo because of X, Y, Z. Or there's a bunch of competitors in the market that you didn't know about. That journey of finding that product market fit is a painful one to go through. It needs a ton of grit and persistence to see it through.
And the intelligence to know when you got it wrong, like you're solving the wrong problem or you haven't found the right wedge into a market and then to pivot what you're doing to find something that will work.
Corson
I was going to say the importance of agility and the pivot is such an important one. How do you balance having the conviction in the idea and taking some of those challenges you come against with knowing when to say actually this isn't working? Because it feels like there's an interesting line to be walked.Grover
It's a really difficult one, to be honest, especially if you have investors on your cap table [capitalization table]. You've taken their money, you have a responsibility to them to deliver something. I think part of it is instinctive, to be honest. Like, you know, when you're in a market and you're offering a product, you've actually found some meaningful point of differentiation and what you're doing is something that could be loved by a segment of customers that are large enough.Sometimes, you'll get feedback that actually the product isn't quite where it needs to be or you should do things that way. You can change those things. But when you have signals that, actually, you can't quite find the right kind of point of differentiation to really wedge into the market in the way that you want to, I think it's sometimes better to actually call it and say, “You know what, I should either go back to something else or try and find a different problem to tackle.”
Corson
As you've been on these journeys, the role of finance in helping you to build a business and support, can you just talk about your experience as a CEO [Chief Executive Officer] and an entrepreneur, and how you've leant on the finance organization or the finance and the professionals that you've been working with and what value they brought?Grover
Both my cofounder in my previous company and here too have had finance backgrounds. And so, we’ve had some of that core competency at the founder leadership level in both businesses. The interesting thing about finance is when you first start a company, you think of this as really like a supporting function to fulfill the operational things that you have to fulfill, creating your management accounts, running your payroll, doing your accounts payable and your accounts receivable, etc.As you scale, things get messy very quickly. And especially, at points where you're raising capital, where you're funding the business or if you're exiting the business. And when we sold our first company, that came around very quickly. Having the right systems in place to give you the right data clarity is just so imperative. It really makes the difference between raising a mediocre funding round and raising a really good one because you're on top of your numbers, or being able to exit successfully because you're able to really tell the right story around your business based on the numbers.
And actually, particularly kind of go-to-market revenue numbers. This is so critical to be on top of what's going on. And it's just so surprising how many companies are not. They actually don't have a really good view into the makeup of their existing revenue lines, what some of the leading indicators are to determine what they can forecast going forward.
As I said, exits come around very quickly. And my advice would be to have, whether that's fractional support, the right people there or when the timing is right, an in-house finance hire who can really put the right systems in place for you to absolutely understand, at a granular level, your cost structure and your revenue structure so that a) you can more strategically drive the business and scale the business more effectively, but b) so that you have the data hygiene that when you come to raising further capital or selling the business, you are in a really strong position to do that.
Corson
That's actually a very good segue. You introduced the revenue side and so let's talk about Sequence and what Sequence does, particularly on the pricing side, which is obviously a key component of revenue. So did you want to share a little bit about what problem you're solving with Sequence?Grover
So, Sequence is a B2B [business to business] revenue automation platform. We help businesses manage the full quote-to-cash process with a pricing and CPQ, configure price quoting, billing module and invoicing module and revenue recognition module as well. I guess our point of view is that for B2B teams where sales teams can often use custom pricing, custom contract structures, range of pricing models that can create a lot of work and a lot of mess for finance teams to manage these downstream processes, billing and revenue recognition. If we can help companies capture that upstream contract data in a really structured way, we can essentially enable them to automate all these revenue operations that flow downstream.And really, I guess we've built a very modern infrastructure to support this, where companies can very flexibly come in with whatever pricing structure they have and actually achieve this unified revenue collection and revenue management workflow, whether they're early stage and this is the first platform they're adopting, or at scale as they're getting into the hundreds of customers and contracts and things are very messy at that point.
We've taken a very flexible and modular approach to building this. So, companies can typically start using us for billing and then add on things like order forms, quoting module or dunning cash collection or revenue recognition. They can kind of build up this revenue stack as is relevant for them as they scale. And it's interesting because one of the reasons in building this company was really a pain point that I very, very acutely experienced when I was building my first software business. We were B2B, we were sales-led. Our pricing evolved significantly over the course of the four or five years we were building the business, as I think it does for most companies. And to really stay on top of billing accurately against these contracts and managing revenue was really difficult. Everything else we saw in the market was a bunch of fragmented point solutions that took six to nine months to implement and didn't really give us the agility that we needed to fit our revenue workflows around our business model and our way of selling.
I saw like a really big opportunity, we have this problem. I thought there must be hundreds of other COOs [chief operating officers] and CFOs [chief financial officers] who are grappling with the same thing or managing a spreadsheet with 80 of their different contracts on there trying to figure out what they should bill every month. And what if we could make that a much more streamlined workflow and actually enable these teams to be on top of their revenue?
Corson
Obviously, revenue recognition approaches vary across industries and sectors. You're seeing particular relevance. You have examples of the particular sector verticals that this is really having a bigger impact?Grover
Yeah, I mean, we mostly sell to software companies, software, FinTech, AI. One anecdote – almost every customer call we get on to, one of the first things people will say is our way of pricing is like really distinct. No one prices like us. That is definitionally true. Revenue is not a “one size fits all” thing. Every company has their own approach to pricing and the levers that they use in contracts to get deals over the line. Some teams have multi-year step-ups in their contracts. Some have free trials, some have minimum commitments. Some have credit packages where you draw down. Some companies’ bill based on milestones when a particular implementation hurdle has been hit.All of these nuances can make it feel like it's really difficult to automate revenue management and billing and revenue recognition against these. That's why we've leaned into building this very flexible platform that can support any of these pricing structures, allow teams to define the right recognition methods and also allow for more complex revenue recognition scenarios or billing scenarios against these custom contracts. What I would say to companies when we speak to them is, it's not that like pricing has to be complex for some of these workstreams. I think complexity can be logarithmic.
In the early days, you maybe have a few contracts, actually pricing seems relatively simple, but it's all the edge cases that mount up. Somebody actually needs a credit note applied. This customer happened to get a custom discount on their contract. You layer on a new pricing model as you launch a new product. You're upselling and co-terming. And before you know it, it's very easy to have revenue slippage if you're not on top of this workflow.
Corson
I'm reading a book at the moment called There Has to Be a Better Way. They use this term “firefighting arsonists” — the people that do things that they think are for the right reasons in the short-term, which may be changing terms, but actually create all of these downstream issues. So again, if you're not capturing those real-time, understanding what actually are the consequences of those decisions that you're making in terms of the broader contractualized. So, that really resonated.Grover
One thing to add on the pricing front. We've seen a very rapid adoption of usage-based pricing over the last few years and now increasingly with AI [artificial intelligence] — outcomes-based pricing, token-based pricing — and it makes sense.If you're creating an AI chat bot that supports your core offering, it makes sense that maybe you charge for that based on the number of resolutions it's completed. Not just because that makes sense to the customer, but also because whatever infrastructure you're paying for under the hood, you're paying a variable amount for use of that infrastructure. And so, you see this implementation of usage or outcome-based pricing and that really also necessitates new infrastructure to be able to track those events, connect the logic of that usage to whatever terms you've sold in a customer's contract and actually be able to bill for it accurately. Same is true even of seat-based pricing, where seat-based pricing, seemingly not so complex to run and manage, but actually, imagine you’re a company and your customers are kind of adding seats mid cycle, right? Very natural thing to do. A new joiner joins the business somewhere midway through the month. That customer is adding another seat to use your software. Most billing infrastructure out there does not support the real-time mid-cycle proration of those seat additions in real time at the point at which it happens.
And so, if you're relying on a human to go in and manually adjust that seat at the end of the month or even if it's automatically happening at the end of the month, you have missed out on that 15-days of incremental revenue from that seat. And we actually have a customer, for example, who I think added six figures of revenue in two quarters just by making that change, by being able to automatically prorate over just on seats overnight. And so, there's a pretty meaningful revenue uplift argument as well when it comes to usage-based, outcome-based, seat-based pricing models, where if you have the right infrastructure in place, you can actually make sure that you are accurately in real time billing for every increment of usage in your platform.
And on top of that as well, because obviously those more variable pricing models have an impact on your revenue recognition. They have an impact on your sales commissioning from a strategic perspective as a CFO. You might have a sales team book a contract and have an expected revenue against it where they expect usage to be X amount but actually maybe usage comes in nowhere near that because everybody over anticipates what they expect that they're actually going to see and so the actual ability to be able to track the actual variable components of revenue against contracts is also something I think that really matters in the world of usage-based pricing.
Corson
You helped transition well. So, I was going to ask about the role of CFOs in this process, because one of the things we talk about a lot is obviously the transition from just protecting and optimizing value to creating value. Again, what our research says is, the key thing for value creation is obviously driving revenue and top line. So, I think a lot of finance executives can struggle to work out how to contribute in that area. With the things you're talking about, the ability to bring the data and the insight from the history and what's worked in the past, but look at it more prospectively and actually be involved earlier in these pricing conversations and have a seat at the table from a finance perspective is kind of aspirational, we've, I think, been focused on doing. So, we'll welcome your input on where you've seen CFOs now being able to use the technology to step in, play a role and meaningfully contribute.Grover
I think every CFO we talk to has two things top of mind. One is how can I leverage myself and my team to spend more time on, let's say, strategic activities, really understanding and getting insights from the data that they're seeing? And the second is very much in line with that, how can we leverage AI and automation to do some of the more repetitive tasks, so that we can deploy our time on the former?And, I think, we're really trying to tackle both on the revenue side. So with our product, we want to give CFOs a view into what pricing discounts sales teams are using and potentially with the ability to implement the right guardrails that they might want to impose in that process, or even just the ability to track that after the fact to say we can see revenue declining because actually usage isn't what was expected or discount rates are growing significantly. You know, we've seen significant deviation from our list prices. A big job, one of the primary functions of the company is obviously to drive revenue and to be able to forecast that revenue accurately. And we want to give CFOs the visibility to not just see revenue in an aggregate basis, but be able to break this down by customer segments and product lines and see contract evolution. Because, ultimately, that's what gives you the signals to really understand what's going on. And, I think, one of the typical behaviors we'll see is like sales are so focused on getting deals closed and aren't necessarily like spending as much time as they should. And maybe, until you have senior rev ops [senior revenue operations] leadership in the business, really diving into and diagnosing how contracts evolve once they're closed and actually what sort of real revenue is hitting the books.
Also, DSO [day sales outstanding] is a big problem for many finance teams. You know, you might close contracts, but actually have a large day sales outstanding problem. What we're really trying to help companies do with our software is track those components of revenue, understand exactly how revenue is trending, understand exactly what's unpaid and help teams to automate follow-ups to bring that down and actually make sure that all the revenue that's contracted is actually hitting the books. I think ultimately that data does arm CFOs to be kind of much more strategic and drive valuable inputs into the go-to-market function.
I was going to add one more thing, which is most CFOs will say to us, the reason this is hard to do is because there are kind of these data silos that exist. Like in many cases, actually finance teams don't have great visibility on what's happening upstream on the sales side. And you don't have a structured source of truth of that. And so, our belief is if you can unify that quoting and billing process and have that shared source of truth on products and pricing and actually give finance teams visibility into contracts that are being sent out, even with approval worth those before they get sent out, all of a sudden you give the finance team this unified data set and much more proximity to that process to really be able to drive the strategic output from there.
Corson
I think that visibility, transparency, whatever you want to call it, is so important. As you mentioned a number of times, just the quality of data from which to make informed decisions, to look at trends, and understand the impact and consequences. You started touching on it a little bit, in terms of how this fits into a technology architecture and landscape.A lot of focus on data qualities we've talked about, particularly as that's going to be a critical success factor in adoption of AI, but also just a lot of organizations are trying to rationalize, reduce total cost of ownership of the tech stack. What are the important elements you think to get right?
Grover
I mean, I think everybody will have a CRM [customer relationship management] and an ERP [enterprise resource planning]. Those are two of your key systems of record. But I guess where we're really coming in is making sure that you have a synchronized workflow between those two systems and that data is synchronous.Very often, without that order-to-cash workflow or revenue system, you have a bunch of stuff happening in your CRM, which your sales team are doing and actually finance are completely disconnected from that. And often, there's mismatches in data.
It's really important to maintain integrity between those two systems. So, very tangibly, what we do is if customers use us to create quotes, order forms, signed contracts, we'll synchronize that data back into your CRM. So, you have a proper source of truth of all of those commercial terms structured and tabularized. We'll obviously use that to drive billing and invoicing, and then also synchronize invoices and then journal entries back with your ERP. We also synchronize data with the data warehouse so company can leverage that data in their own BI [business intelligence] tool and we also can funnel it to other revenue reporting dashboards as well. But this is all really about that consistent data and strong integration between your CRM and your ERP, because then everybody is actually operating from the same source of truth and revenue data.
Corson
Anything you would say in terms of advice to finance leaders in how they can get involved in pricing at this front end of the revenue process?Grover
Yeah, I mean, I think it really depends on the stage a company is at and what the challenges are. I think, salespeople are closest to their customers and very often a market is going to determine how you price. You don't necessarily want to reinvent the mold, right? If you're in the API [application programing interfaces] services market, it's highly likely you're going to probably charge on a per API call basis because that's what everybody else in your industry does. And that's not something you necessarily want to reinvent. Pricing strategy is often driven by the go-to-market team, but pricing hygiene and adherence to certain guardrails, whether that's maintaining margins or limiting discounting or making sure that certain minimums are hit, can be something that's suddenly influenced by finance.Finance can play a great role in tracking revenue growth and the associated pricing that's being deployed to provide suggestions back to the revenue team. As you scale, the problem of hygiene, of like quoting the right things and actually maintaining margins, becomes really problematic as soon as you have five-plus, 10-plus sellers.
It's very easy to lose discipline. And, I think, that structured process upstream of adhering to certain guardrails around pricing can really make sure that you maintain the quality of revenue as you scale up. But I've seen increasingly a very close relationship foster between revenue leaders and finance leaders, where I think finance teams should and can have great inputs into that commercial model and should have a really close view of it.
Corson
Well, I think that's a great way to close that section. I think hopefully that's inspirational for a lot of CFOs to the role they can play. So, thanks for sharing that. So just in wrapping up, we would like to get to know you a little bit better. Is there a particular quote that you go back to, you reflect on regularly?Grover
My father always used to say to me, I'd always ask him why he used to work on Christmas. He was also an entrepreneur. And he'd always say to me, he who loves his work will never work another day in his life. And, for me, you asked me why being an entrepreneur was like an intrinsic motivation. And I think it really was and having done it now for several years, it really does feel like that where I'm so invested and excited by the thing that I'm doing that truthfully, like some days feel like work, but for the most part, I think that statement really holds true. So, it is one of my favorite quotes still to this day.Corson
That's great. It kind of leads into one of the other questions we ask about how you maintain wellness and balance. That's not a problem for you. You're jumping out of bed ready to go every day because you're energized about what you do.Grover
I mean, I think if you love what you're doing, and I think like to build an early-stage company, you kind of do need to be all in. I do love to exercise, I try and maintain that. I have two kids who keep me on my toes as well. That's a very important part of my life. And, I think, it gives me some sanity outside of this.But I think for the most part, I probably don't have great work-life balance, but I love my work. So, I'm able to, I think, find like real kind of personal motivation in it. For me, I think the challenge and the goalpost is always shifting in terms of the problems that you're solving.
In the last year, we have pivoted very quickly into thinking about what our agentic strategy looks like. How can AI and agents really meaningfully support some of these workflows and operations whilst keeping humans in the loop? And it's a really interesting intellectual challenge. It's a really interesting product challenge. And it's just one great example of how, as a founder, you are constantly shifting your point of reference and having to almost like continue to reinvent yourself to compete and grow in a market. And that for me is like really invigorating.