Nearly a year into his CFO role at Reltio, James Redfern still feels like he’s catching up. “I’ve made some progress, but I’m definitely not where I… need to get,” he tells us. That steep learning curve was exactly what drew him to the company.
Redfern didn’t find the Reltio opportunity through recruiters. Instead, it surfaced during a casual conversation with a mentor. “I was actually looking at something else,” he recalls. “And he said, ‘Oh, if you’re looking… I’m on the board of a company that’s looking for a CFO.’” That kind of personal connection—what Redfern calls “psychic safety”—has guided his last two career moves. It’s less about who you know casually, he tells us, and more about “people you actually have worked with.”
At Reltio, Redfern stepped out of his comfort zone. After years in application-layer software companies like Workday and PayScale, he shifted into deep IT infrastructure. Reltio’s platform ensures enterprise data is clean and consistent across systems—a need made more urgent by the rise of AI. “You need a reliable, unified view of your data,” he explains. “One customer equals one customer—not three different customers in three different systems.”
With 190 customers and $160 million in annual recurring revenue, Reltio works with some of the world’s largest enterprises. The company’s mission, Redfern tells us, is to replace legacy systems like Informatica and IBM with cloud-native data unification at scale.
For Redfern, the attraction wasn’t the title. It was the challenge. “This is the kind of journey I committed myself to,” he says.
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CFOTL: After five years at PayScale, you joined Reltio in 2024. Tell us about the company and what attracted you to the role.
Redfern: Reltio’s a fantastic company, and joining it was really about shifting into a different corner of the software industry. At both PayScale and Workday, I was in the application layer—selling to HR people, where the value proposition was visible and tangible.
Reltio, on the other hand, plays deep in the IT infrastructure layer. Our mission is to help enterprises ensure their data—spread across dozens of systems—is clean, accurate, and consistent. We’re working with some of the world’s largest companies. Despite having only around 190 customers, our annual recurring revenue is about $160 million. These are big, enterprise-scale deals.
Read MoreThe simplest way I describe it is: if Workday is your system of record for HR, and Salesforce is your system of record for customers, then Reltio is what helps ensure the data flowing between all these systems is clean, matched, and reconciled. Because in reality, most enterprises don’t have a single vendor stack. So, you might have a customer in one database who’s listed differently in another, and we make sure they’re treated as the same person across systems.
It’s all cloud-native, it’s fast, and it scales. Our technology replaces the last generation of solutions—think Informatica, IBM, TIBCO. You probably saw Salesforce recently bought Informatica. We see that as a validation of what we’re doing. It confirms that clean, trusted data is foundational—especially as companies roll out their AI capabilities.
We’re confident the value of what we do will only grow as AI adoption accelerates. Because if you feed dirty data into an AI model, you’re going to get bad outcomes. You need a reliable, unified view of your data. That’s where we come in.
I’ll be honest—this was a completely new space for me. In my past roles, I knew the competitive landscape inside and out. With Reltio, it’s been a learning curve. I’m about eight months in, and while I’ve made progress, I still have more to learn. But that’s what I signed up for. This is the kind of challenge I enjoy.
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