It started with a payment that never arrived. Christophe was working as a CFO, trying to pay a team across borders, and running into delays, fees, and regulatory dead ends. China, in particular, was a black hole. “My money is still stuck there,” he says, half serious, half still annoyed.
He wasn’t chasing disruption or dreaming up a unicorn. He just wanted better tools.
That frustration led him to crypto. Not the speculative side, the infrastructure. What if there was a cleaner way to handle global payments? What if finance teams had products built for their actual needs, instead of being treated as an afterthought?
In 2017, Request Network launched during the early ICO wave. Christophe was part of it, but what came after would matter more. He and the team started narrowing in on one idea: a product that let companies send, receive, and track crypto payments. No magic, no promises. Just a product that worked.
Request Finance was born from that focus. It started with invoicing. Then came payroll. Then full crypto-to-fiat payout rails. Along the way, they added accounting tools, acquired two companies, and stayed obsessively close to the people actually using it. Today, Request Finance processes over $1 billion in crypto payments for teams across 15 countries. It is one of the few crypto products finance teams genuinely rely on.
But none of that came quickly. In the beginning, Christophe spent six months building with zero users. He made 85 product tweaks that didn’t work. The 86th one finally did. “There’s no moment where it just clicks,” he says. “It’s a slow build. You earn it.”
He also had to unlearn a few things. One was the myth of the visionary founder, the Steve Jobs image. Early on, Christophe believed that vision would lead. Later, he realised it was execution that did. The customer conversations. The boring iterations. The nights where nothing worked but you pushed anyway. “Vision helps,” he says, “but it’s the last 5 percent, not the first 95.”
The lessons didn’t stop there. A personal security breach made him rethink how he approached risk. Misalignments in past teams taught him how to hire slower and lead better. Mistakes happened. But they became part of the system.
His advice to early founders? Take investor advice seriously, but not personally. They don’t live inside your product. You do. Be polite. Be clear. But keep your hands on the wheel.
Now, Request Finance is building towards something bigger. A decentralised operating system for stablecoin-native businesses. It won’t look like a bank. It won’t act like one either. But it might be what the next generation of CFOs log into every morning.
Christophe never set out to be a founder. But once he started fixing the problem, he couldn’t stop.
