When Scott Blackley was asked in kindergarten what he wanted to be when he grew up, his answer was surprisingly clear: “I want to be an auditor.” This early ambition was no coincidence; his father was a partner at KPMG, and young Blackley grew up around the firm’s offices, imagining himself one day sitting at a big desk, overseeing important work. True to his dream, he eventually ended up following in his father’s footsteps to become a partner at KPMG and invest a dozen career years there.
Despite achieving his childhood goal and carrying on the family legacy, though, Blackley eventually found himself at a crossroads. “It was a tough decision to leave KPMG,” he recalls, “but some of the experiences that I had had involving other people’s business problems had made me want to own them myself.” This realization marked a turning point in his career that fueled his desire to take on more responsibility and solve problems on a firsthand basis.
Read MoreSuch motivation eventually led Blackley to Oscar Health, where he stepped into the CFO role during a pivotal moment. Reflecting on his early days at the company, Blackley observes, “When I joined, one of the things that I walked in the door with was a commitment to myself that I was going to be thoughtful about taking the time to understand the situation and then decisive about making decisions.” Consequently, within 90 days, he would end up reorganizing the finance function to separate FP&A from the controller’s office and hiring a new leader to build a more structured finance organization—one capable of supporting Oscar Health’s ambitious plans for growth and transformation. –Jack Sweeney jb
“Your talent bar isn’t high enough. Make sure that you build a culture that attracts consistently curious people who are willing to speak their mind.” –Scott Blackley, CFO, Oscar Health
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CFOTL: Tell us about Oscar Health … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Blackley: Oscar Health is a very late-stage start-up, being 12 years old and having IPO’d in 2021. I joined immediately thereafter, within days. We’re a technology company that does health insurance, and recently we have built out an entire tech infrastructure that optimizes how health insurance can operate.
We are one of the few firms—perhaps the only one—that has built a cloud-native, end-to-end, full-stack tech environment for all components of health insurance. We did this while knowing that we had to grow at a rapid pace to basically scale up—because health insurance is a scale business. It’s thin margins with high capital requirements, so you really need to be large to ever be profitable, which is where we find ourselves right now. We expect 2024 to be the first year in which we will be profitable throughout all 12 months. This is a huge milestone for us, and I’m very proud to be one of the leaders in finance who is helping to drive these outcomes for our company.
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