The Future of Finance is Listening

CFO

588: FinTech Goes Beyond the Paycheck | Brian Whalen, CFO, Branch

Back in 2008, when auction giant eBay acquired Bill Me Later (BML), a Maryland-based payment credit company, Brian Whalen and his BML colleagues breathed a sigh of relief. “We had just enough liquidity and options to give us the runway to sell to eBay and PayPal, so—from a learning perspective—it was really about asking the…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:30:36)
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582: Fortifying Your FP&A Footing | Robert Richards, CFO, Centauri

Recalling a meeting that took place years ago at an industry conference, CFO Robert Richards remembers that the East Coast sales executive’s face suddenly dropped. At the time, Richards was more or less his company’s de facto CFO after the company’s finance leader had departed in the wake of the firm defaulting on certain loans.…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:56:12)
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580: Finding Your Groove Inside the CFO’s Evolving Role | Laura Onopchenko, CFO, NerdWallet

It was still early in Laura Onopchenko’s finance career when she removed “Chief Financial Officer” from the list of leadership roles that she aspired to someday hold. “I very specifically made the call that I did not want to be a CFO,” recalls Onopchenko, who says that at the time the decision seemed all the…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:45:32)
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579: When Your Two Worlds Become One | Shari Freedman, Room to Read

At several points during the early years of her finance career, a tug-of-war was seemingly under way between the professional and personal worlds of Room to Read CFO Shari Freedman. Back in the early 1990s, Freedman was running a homeless shelter in New York City while at the same time boarding flights for a string…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:54:09)
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577: Rethinking Sales Productivity | Carolyn Koehn, CFO, Boomi

When finance leader Carolyn Koehn looks back on her career to identify the experiences that she feels best prepared her for a CFO role, she shares a candid observation: “I went to places no one else wanted to go.” Such was the case in the late 1990s, when she moved to Bogotá, Colombia, for Nortel…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:32:18)
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575: Using Openness to Achieve Greater Employee Engagement | Anup Singh, CFO, Illumio

Among the more novel approaches that CFO Anup Singh has recently used to help advance a more open working environment at Illumio, of Sunnyvale, California, was the creation of a channel inside the instant messaging application Slack through which employees can access Illumio’s finance leader by tagging their queries with an unassuming “#CFO ask me…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:44:36)
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574: The Age of the Real-Time CFO | Mike Ellis, CFO, Flywire

Knowing that Mike Ellis has been the CFO of several growth companies, we can’t help but ask him about his tour of duty at the Massachusetts Port Authority, where the experienced finance executive served as controller from 2006 to 2009. Although the Port Authority is not exactly the type of employer that you would expect…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:36:36)
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572: Measuring the Efficiencies of Customer Acquisition | David Burt, CFO, ServiceTitan

Years from now, when finance leader David Burt is reminiscing about his varied career chapters, you might imagine a captivated listener politely interrupting the veteran CFO with the question, “Excuse me, but what exactly was your profession?” This is a query perhaps more likely to be asked of veteran CFOs than other seasoned business leaders,…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:50:06)
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569: Growing Your Team’s Knowledge Base | Raj Dani, CFO, Ping Identity

Back in the early 1990s, with both feet firmly planted on an auditing career path inside Price Waterhouse’s Tampa, Florida, office, Raj Dani decided to take a detour into the accounting house’s M&A advisory practice. Over the next few years, the one-time auditor began providing deal-makers with financial and operational due diligence on their future…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:34:57)
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567: Mining Opportunity Between Growth & Risk | Kevin Jacobson, CFO, LogicGate

Step inside CFO Kevin Jacobson’s office at LogicGate, and there’s little question that you’ll think you’ve entered a realm where growth and risk are often two sides of the same coin. In fact, LogicGate’s fast path to achieving “product market fit” was no doubt shortened by early customers who today wield a similar growth/risk mind-set.…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:36:13)
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566: Building Your P&L Culture | Scot Parnell, CFO, DailyPay, Inc.

We are nearly at the end of our interview with Scot Parnell when we ask him to explain what led him to accept the CFO position at DailyPay, a company with a pioneering technology inside the human capital management realm. This is a question that we had asked a little earlier in the interview, but…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:31:38)
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565: A Fintech Unicorn Burnishes its Risk Management Brand | Michael Tannenbaum, CFO, Brex, Inc.

Upon being named CFO of Brex, Inc., in 2017, Michael Tannenbaum joined a realm of accomplished finance executives whose average age is 20 years greater than his. This is not the first time that Tannenbaum has advanced beyond his professional years, so the label of “whiz kid” has long since lost a little of its…
Listen to the Episode Below (00:36:33)
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