At the very beginning of our talk with CFO Chermaine Hu, she revealed an irony about the CFO title that we rarely get to expose.
To wit: The very title toward which any executive has invested so many illustrious career years conveys ownership of what might seem to be a less than illustrious role—or at least one requiring little future endeavor.
“I have always struggled with the CFO title,” explains Hu, who notes that the moniker captures only a fraction of what most CFOs actually do.
Read MoreHu’s unexpected comments seemed to be appropriate openers for an executive who doesn’t mind—and in fact prefers—being different from the rest of the pack. Or at least this is just one of several takeaways that we garner from Hu’s early career years.
In fact, it turns out that Hu had an independent streak even before she entered the world of finance. Back in 1998, as she was approaching graduation from the University of Cambridge—job offer from Morgan Stanley already in hand—she decided to take job during Easter break serving ice cream at a local McDonald’s. Recalls Hu: “I felt that I needed some real-world experience.”
Hu’s ice cream stint—while seemingly incongruous with her blooming future as an investment banker (including 14 years with Morgan Stanley)—was just one in a number of surprise chapters found in the narrative of Hu’s past that expose a curious mind and a dedication to continuous learning.
One bookmark in her journey, Hu tells us, still rests between the pages recounting the time that she was blindsided by a “missed promotion” during her investment banking years. Not uncharacteristically, though, Hu was wise enough to allow greater reflection to expose a silver lining.
“You need to have setbacks in life,” she admits, revealing her deep understanding of the growth that comes from facing challenges head-on. – Jack Sweeney
Made Possible By
CFOTL: Tell us about Episode Six …what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Hu: We are a payments technology company that provides infrastructure tech to banks, but usually no one understands what this means because it’s not explained in a way that makes sense. So, in a nutshell, what our company does—and what I’m very focused on—is to solve problems. This is what we do for our customers, who for the most part are banks and financial institutions that offer financial products to consumers and corporates. The biggest problem that these institutions face today is a lack of tools that they can use to actually do what they want to do—which is to provide great innovative products that their customers actually want and need and love.
Read MoreThe reason for this lack of good tools is a function of how the financial technology industry has evolved over time. There are a lot of big guys out there that are really solid companies, but all of their platforms were built back in the ’80s and 90s on mainframes, so all of this is very legacy tech, very heavy industry.
You can understand why, right? Once you have millions of customers and billions of dollars running on your platform, are you really going to change things up? Not really, because the risk is very high. In particular, if your platform was built with the old ways—and obviously, this is the case for almost all legacy systems almost by default—it has missed the fact that technology has evolved so much, even within the past 10 years. The older technologies are also really hard to change, but by not changing their platforms, their owners are not really being risk-averse, right? The companies that are offering these technologies—not to mention the banks and other clients that are using them— don’t want to take a chance that something is going to go wrong with their customers or their regulators or whomever
At the same time, you can allow yourself to be stuck in this mindset for only so long because the offset is that by not changing, you are not innovating—you’re not going to be keeping up with what people actually want now. Imagine a Gen Zer, who’s never been to a bank, ever. Everything is on the phone, everything has an app, everything happens instantly. Imagine that you’re trying to keep up with all of this on an old mainframe legacy platform. Most of the time, the things that happen in this old universe can be characterized by a batch that will be run overnight, to be followed by—two days later—your transaction showing up in your account. This is not acceptable these days.
So, how do we go from being in this risky but also desirably risk-averse and potentially innovative situation to where we can slowly—or maybe even quickly—enable firms burdened with these old-line platforms to catch up with the rest of the world? The answer is that we offer technology and other products that our customers actually want. Thus, what we have built is essentially something that our clients can use to become grounded in new tech once again.
For example, if you have a brand-new product that you’re launching out of the gate, you’ll find that we can help you to understand how small companies and oftentimes banks would be happy to work with you. Sometimes, these are entities with which I have worked for at least a decade. We are able to provide a certain level of comfort, you know? We are not the youngest start-up. We have team members who have had a lot of experience in a number of industries. We can demonstrate the value that our platform brings to the table and how quickly it can help people to deploy new, innovative products with the exact specs and experience that they want.
Once they’ve had this experience of interacting with us, then they feel more confident that they can bring the rest of their business portfolio over onto our platform. We are available to create a valuable solution that enables them to join the modern tech world with almost no risk. By just unplugging from their existing provider and plugging in to us, they can slowly migrate over. At the same time, they can launch new products very quickly.
I think that there’s also another really important aspect of our platform that people really like. Sure, you can launch a new product in 2024 or 2025—and certainly people always want different things, changing products. With our platform, changing features is very easy, very straightforward. With a legacy platform, you’ll probably need to get into the queue for 6 months just to be able to figure out whether they can even do what you want them to do, and then it takes another 6 months before any change could actually happen. For most of our clients, changes are really something that they can pretty much do in real time themselves. If they want, though—for example, if they need a new API created—we can usually implement this very quickly. Essentially, what we’re offering is a new way of doing something that’s been around for a long time: efficiency. Better technology means better experiences for our clients as well as their customers.
jb
“Take a look at what you bring to the table and what is going to drive you forward in your career. From there, find the people who embrace what your values and contributions are and work with them.” –Chermaine Hu, CFO, Episode Six
Episode Six | www.episodesix.com | Austin, TX