Every morning, Kim Snyder's inbox filled with more than 20 reports. Loans arrived in one email. Deposits in another. Past-due accounts, general-ledger activity, and the rest followed in their own attachments, each a small administrative dare. Snyder was the chief financial officer of Valley Bank, a publicly traded community bank in Roanoke, Virginia. She was expected to find the useful fact, decide what it meant, and act. Some days, she did not manage to open every file.
This was not a shortage of data. It was a surplus without a map. The bank had the numbers, but the numbers were scattered across systems and delivered as static snapshots. A decision could be waiting inside the 17th attachment while the working day carried on without it. Snyder once teased her CEO about the imagined button that would summon a fresh board report on demand: there was no magic button.
Years later, she would build something close to one. KlariVis, the company she founded in 2019, integrates information from a financial institution's core and ancillary systems and turns it into accessible dashboards and reports. The software is the visible result. The more interesting story begins with what happened after Snyder lost the job she loved, and why she refused to leave its problems behind.
The job ended. The attachment remained.
Snyder started her career at KPMG as a certified public accountant. She later served as vice president of finance at The Egg Factory, a startup, before spending 10 years at Valley Bank. By the time the Roanoke institution was sold in 2015, she was its executive vice president and CFO. She had nearly 10 months to help make the transaction work. Preparation did not soften the ending.
On June 30, 2015, she walked out for the last time. Most colleagues had already secured their next positions. Snyder had not. Her own account of that day is unusually plain: she was heartbroken. She cared about the team, the bank's mission, and the local businesses it financed. Corporate transactions are neat on a closing checklist. Affection rarely is.
“Banks were drowning in data but starving for insight.”Kim Snyder, reflecting on the problem that led to KlariVis
Her response was not to stage a grand escape from banking. She started KBS Results, a boutique consultancy serving financial institutions, and brought in people she had worked with before. The firm eventually worked with more than 35 institutions. More than 60 percent of its clients returned for multiple engagements. That repeat business offered Snyder something more valuable than reassurance: a broad view of recurring pain.
Across different banks, core systems, and management teams, the same problem kept resurfacing. Staff spent hours extracting, cleaning, reconciling, and reshaping data in spreadsheets. The work supported strategy, risk management, incentive plans, and board reporting. Yet the information often arrived too slowly to change the decision in front of a banker. Consultancy had given Snyder a larger sample size. Her old inbox was an industry condition.
KPMG supplied the accounting discipline. A startup finance role added operating experience.
The CFO seat made fragmented reporting a daily, practical problem.
Consulting across dozens of institutions confirmed that the problem repeated.
The recurring service problem became a product company.
The platform entered the market only weeks before the pandemic.
A product brief disguised as drudgery
KlariVis grew out of work nobody would put on a conference badge: cleaning fields, joining exports, rebuilding reports, checking whether numbers balanced. Its premise was that a bank should not need an analyst expedition every time a leader asks who its most valuable clients are, where deposits are moving, or whether loans are being priced as intended.
The distinction matters. Snyder has never argued that spreadsheets themselves are wicked. Her objection is to manual effort that introduces errors and delays action. Automation can standardize the facts; people still have to interpret them. Her later advice to executives captures the balance neatly: ask for the story, not only the data. Then maintain a consistent reporting structure so the storyteller cannot quietly choose only the convenient numbers.
That mixture of accounting caution and operator impatience is the thread through Snyder's work. She knows why banks protect information tightly. She also knows that data locked so securely that nobody can use it has ceased to be an operating asset. The goal is not a prettier chart. It is an earlier conversation: coach a lender on pricing today rather than after month-end, notice a deposit relationship weakening before it leaves, or correct an inaccurate risk report before it reaches the board.
KlariVis launched in the first quarter of 2020, just weeks before the pandemic rearranged daily life and forced community banks into urgent new work. Paycheck Protection Program loans became lifelines for local businesses. The young company had to support clients, raise capital, and prove its usefulness while ordinary sales assumptions dissolved. A tidy origin myth would place adversity before launch. Snyder received hers as part of the onboarding.
Roanoke is part of the architecture
The founding team shared history at Valley Bank, and Snyder has kept that continuity close. KlariVis moved into a larger office in downtown Roanoke as it grew. She has described a hire-local-first approach, while many of the company's investors come from the Roanoke-Blacksburg region. The platform serves institutions across the country, but its operating culture was assembled from relationships made in one banking community.
That local grounding resembles the clients KlariVis serves. Community banks compete on knowledge that is difficult to centralize: which owner kept paying employees through a poor season, which family has banked locally for generations, which development will change a neighborhood. Snyder's argument is that modern data can reinforce those relationships. A complete view of a customer lets a banker respond with context rather than instinct alone.
By January 2024, KlariVis had raised an $11 million Series B. In 2025, Inc. named Snyder to its Female Founders 500, crediting the platform's reach among more than 100 institutions. Virginia Business recognized her in its C-Suite Awards and reported that the company had doubled revenue and customer count year over year. In August 2026, KlariVis announced more than 150 implementations and its third consecutive appearance on the Inc. 5000.
Snyder's preferred leadership advice helps explain how she talks about that growth: “Hire up.” She urges leaders to surround themselves with people who challenge assumptions, complement weaknesses, and make it unlikely that the founder is the smartest person in every room. It is a useful antidote to founder mythology. The company is built by former bankers, plural, and its credibility depends on collective memory of the work.
The next report is about AI
In 2026, Snyder's public agenda widened from business intelligence to the data foundations underneath artificial intelligence, fraud detection, stablecoins, and customer retention. The topics sound futuristic beside those old emailed attachments, but her test remains practical. Can a bank find, trust, and use the relevant information before the moment passes?
She has pushed back on the comforting belief that an institution must first make every record pristine. Waiting for clean data can become a permanent alibi. Governance, correction, and ownership emerge through the work. A default birth date of January 1, 1900 may produce a fictional 126-year-old customer in a system. The answer is not to postpone the entire data program. It is to expose the defect, establish who fixes it, and improve the process that allowed it.
Her recent conversations also make a sharper claim about independence. Community institutions cannot afford to treat transaction intelligence as an archive while digital wallets, crypto platforms, and fintech services pull pieces of the customer relationship elsewhere. A local bank may still know the person. It also needs to see the pattern.
“Data should drive decisions, not just fill reports.”Kim Snyder on KlariVis's third consecutive Inc. 5000 appearance
There is warmth outside the operating thesis. Snyder has described herself as family-oriented, a foodie, and an enthusiastic traveler. With her three adult children living in Roanoke, the family developed “Sunday Brunch-day,” gathering at home or a favorite restaurant at least every other week. Her husband calls her a wine snob; she jokes that a glass contains enough calories to justify being selective. It is a wonderfully CFO-like defense of taste: pleasure, subjected to allocation discipline.
The personal and professional stories meet in Roanoke. Snyder lost a local bank, gathered former colleagues, built a local consultancy, and turned its recurring problem into national software. The sequence was neither clean nor inevitable. It was, however, observant. She kept noticing the same irritation until it revealed itself as infrastructure.
The lesson is less romantic than “follow your passion,” and more useful. Pay attention to the work that smart people repeat by hand. Notice the question that takes hours to answer even though everyone agrees it matters. Watch for pain that survives a change of client, system, or title. Snyder's magic button did not appear. She and her team had to build it.