About us
What started as a problem inside a CFO execution firm became a platform for turning messy finance data into trusted liquidity decisions, action plans, and scenario outputs for SMEs and the accounting firms that serve them.
"How much cash is really free? What is coming next? What should we do now?"
The story
Cleriqa was born from the work we could no longer scale manually.
Cleriqa began inside Onwards Capita, a CFO execution firm, not in a software lab. Over the years, we worked with SMEs that had accounting data, reports, and dashboards, but still lacked clear answers to the questions that mattered most: "How much cash is really free? What is coming next? What should we do now?"
We stopped treating this as a pure SME software problem.
At the same time, we saw accounting firms facing the opposite side of the same problem. They had the data, trust, and recurring client relationships, but their economics were trapped in manual compliance work. Delivering CFO-grade advisory was valuable, but difficult to scale without adding more people.
That tension became the starting point for Cleriqa, built to connect both sides.
The first version was built around a simple belief: finance insight is only useful if the numbers can be trusted.
Built by Onwards Capita, Cleriqa combines the judgment of a veteran CFO with predictive analysis and agentic infrastructure. The result is a platform that turns messy accounting data into trusted liquidity insight, action plans, and scenario decisions for SMEs, while helping accounting firms expand advisory revenue and protect margins.
Why it exists
Not to replace accountants.
Not to replace CFOs.
Not to add another dashboard.
But to turn accounting data into trusted decisions and to make those decisions available before cash pressure becomes a crisis.
The founders
Frédéric Vérin brings the CFO operating lens. Rahul Balaraman brings the technical engine. Together, they built Cleriqa around a practical question: what if every SME could access the kind of liquidity guidance normally reserved for companies with a senior CFO?
Frédéric Vérin is the founder of Onwards Capita and co-founder of Cleriqa. He is a CFO operator with more than 22 years of finance leadership experience across Southeast Asia and Europe, including cash management, working capital, fundraising, M&A, restructuring, and finance transformation.
Before building Cleriqa, Frédéric worked with SMEs, scale-ups, and complex operating businesses where financial reports often existed but did not answer the most urgent operating questions: how much cash is really available, what is changing, what risk is coming next, and what action should be taken now.
His experience includes leading finance functions, managing liquidity under pressure, supporting equity and debt fundraising, executing M&A transactions, and building operating finance systems across multi-country environments. This CFO operating background shaped Cleriqa's core belief: finance insight only matters when the numbers can be trusted and converted into decisions.
At Cleriqa, Frédéric leads the finance logic, liquidity advisory framework, partner strategy, and commercial model. His role is to ensure the platform produces outputs that are useful to business owners, finance teams, accounting firms, lenders, and investors — not just technically correct reports.
