“InvoiceCloud is not just payments,” Chris Sands tells us. Sitting inside the company’s finance organization, he sees a platform built to change habits—helping businesses shift customers from paper invoices and mailed checks to fully digital transactions. The success metric, he adds, is simple: “Do more of their customers stop receiving paper invoices, stop mailing in checks, and do both of those things digitally?”
That clear yardstick reflects how Sands thinks about growth. He describes a foundation rooted in existing customers even as the broader economy accelerates toward digital payment adoption. Utilities and insurers remain core markets, yet new verticals, such as consumer finance, beckon. Each expansion, he notes, must rest on data that confirms user behavior is truly changing.
Read MoreInside finance, Sands has built what he calls a Strategic Finance function to mirror that discipline. The group handles special projects and, increasingly, AI initiatives—efforts he says once fell entirely within FP&A. Now they stand on their own “leg of the stool,” amplifying how finance supports innovation.
That mindset extends beyond the department. Sands helped stand up an AI Ops team—an internal SWAT group that guides employees exploring AI tools. Instead of experimenting in isolation, staff can bring use cases to the team for help. For Sands, finance’s role is to stay analytical amid the excitement: “We can add more value … by helping the rest of the org with [AI] and using our finance skill set to understand where the best opportunities to create business value exist.”
CFOTL: The payments space is crowded. What makes InvoiceCloud stand out? What’s distinctive about this business?
Sands: InvoiceCloud isn’t just a payments company—it’s a billing and payments software platform. The formal category is called electronic bill presentment and payment, but essentially, we help businesses with B2C use cases distribute invoices and collect payments digitally.
The company’s been around for more than a decade and has been owned by several well-known private equity firms. What really differentiates us is how we solve our clients’ biggest pain point: driving digital adoption. When customers implement our solution, we measure success by whether their end users stop receiving paper invoices, stop mailing checks, and start doing both digitally.
It’s a strong combination of software and payments, and we believe our offerings are best in class on both fronts. That combination has proven to be a powerful growth engine.
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CFOTL: What are the growth opportunities in the near term for InvoiceCloud?
Sands: The foundation for growth starts within our existing customer base. As digital payment adoption continues across the economy—people paying their utility bills or insurance premiums online, for example—there’s a secular tailwind that drives expansion.
On top of that, we’re signing new customers both within our core verticals, like utilities and insurance, and by moving upmarket in those areas. Beyond that, we see potential in adjacent verticals such as consumer finance, which have similar use cases but remain untapped. The opportunity horizon here is long and exciting for the next several years.
Read MoreCFOTL: Tell us about your finance organization. Have your priorities or structure changed since your first CFO role?
Sands: Structurally, there’s nothing radically different, but there’s one element I have now that I didn’t in my first CFO role—a dedicated strategic finance team. That’s partly a function of scale and partly from what I’ve learned over time about what makes finance teams most effective.
This team focuses on special projects, growth initiatives, and increasingly, our work around AI. In many companies, those efforts sit entirely within FP&A, and that can work fine. But giving strategic finance its own lane within the broader finance function has proven really valuable. It expands the team’s overall impact and ensures we’re deeply connected to where the business is heading.
CFOTL: How is AI influencing how you and your finance team partner with the rest of the organization?
Sands: AI is a huge focus here, as it is across most businesses. I appreciate how you framed the question, because the conversation often centers on AI inside finance. We’re exploring that, but honestly, the strongest AI use cases right now are emerging in engineering, development, customer success, and sales—not necessarily finance.
So our question has become: how do we use our finance skill set to make sure the organization succeeds with AI? That means identifying which functions benefit most, how we can support them, and how to assess the ROI on all these new tools.
To accelerate this, we created an AI Ops team—think of it as an HR business partner model for AI. It’s a cross-functional group that helps people across the company experiment and implement. Instead of employees figuring out AI tools on their own, they can go to this team with a use case and get support.
It’s been a huge accelerator. And finance plays a key role by providing a discerning lens—evaluating where AI can truly create value amid all the noise and vendor pitches. In that way, we add as much value by helping the rest of the business adopt AI effectively as we do by experimenting within finance itself.
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