What CFOs care about right now. Plus: Stripe’s chief revenue officer on a $1 trillion milestone, Reddit to IPO, and more

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This month, I had the pleasure of attending The Wall Street Journal’s CFO Network Summit here in New York. CFOs from dozens of companies — alongside other industry leaders — gathered together to share their perspectives on some of the hottest topics.?

What was immediately clear is that the role of the CFO has a lot of moving parts — more so than even just a few years ago. Their roles have expanded not just since the onset of the pandemic, but as the finance chiefs take on more responsibilities like operations, as one example.?

The role has expanded to such a degree that during the summit, BlackRock CFO Martin Small addressed the fact that he could potentially succeed CEO Larry Fink one day.?

He would be part of a growing trend. Globally, the number of CFOs being named CEOs is on the rise . About one-third of FTSE 100 CEOs served as CFOs during their careers, up from 21% in 2019. In the U.S. last year, 8.4% of vacant CEO roles among the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies were filled by CFOs.?

In May of last year, it was reported that BlackRock’s Fink had a list of five potential successors — which included Smalls along with the firm’s global commercial business head, its COO, the head of the Asia Pacific business and the head of ETFs and indexing products.?

Despite the possibility, Small — who started in the legal department of BlackRock in 2006 — says he is focused on his own job and isn’t preparing to move into the corner office just yet.?

The Numbers

Naturally, CFOs are paying attention to the numbers, including economic data such as inflation, unemployment rates and interest rates.?

CFOs like Gen’s Natalie Derse and Oddity’s Lindsay Drucker Mann talked about how their companies are preparing for higher for longer interest rates. Both of their companies have debt on their balance sheets and will continue to be impacted by the rates.?

Meanwhile, JPMorgan’s Bori Cox , CFO of consumer and community banking, spoke about? consumer resiliency, saying how spending is healthy, yet “people are certainly starting to change and modify some of their spending behavior in the margin.”

AI

Also top of mind for many CFOs is the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI).?

ServiceNow CFO Gina Mastantuono said during a panel: “There’s not one CFO or CEO that I talk to that is not really leaning into what gen AI can do for their business.”?

Similarly, Adobe CFO Dan Durn talked about how AI is infiltrating his company. For instance, Durn shared how Adobe recently held a hackathon to generate ideas for ways in which AI can help the company operate more efficiently. Of the 100-plus entries, five were selected to move forward.?

Still, despite most CFO speakers at the conference diving head first into AI, CFOs like Claus Aagaard at Mars said AI isn’t his No. 1 priority; he’s relying on employees within his company with more expertise on the subject.?

For more coverage of the summit, check out the CFO Journal’s piece here . And you can view videos of the event here .

Stripe made waves this past week when the payments processing giant announced that it had topped $1 trillion in payments volume in 2023. Stripe chief revenue officer Eileen O’Mara chatted with The Finance Files about the milestone and what’s next.?

FF: The big number to come out of Stripe’s 2023 annual letter was that it topped $1 trillion in payments volume. What do you attribute that growth to?

EO: We have been in this space and in this industry for quite some time. So, I know the trillion dollars got a reaction. We’ve been serving users and companies all over the world for 13 years. It’s not really an overnight success in many ways. And I think our strategy obviously is really playing out well for us — that's very much putting users at the center of everything we do, we're a user first company. While we started really supporting some of the startups who have become very big and material companies, we've been really delivering this kind of back-end technology and infrastructure for companies for some time now. And so that's been a play, and not only do we serve startups, we serve enterprises, and they’re now a significant part of our business model — with over 100 companies now, we handle over $1 billion in payments annually for them. And obviously we're seeing enterprises really coming of age in terms of driving a huge amount of transformation within their business. They're adopting a lot of the traits and characteristics you'd have seen from a smaller agile startup company. So everything from your upstarts and your startups, all the way to your very large enterprise company. Some of those are, of course, noted in the annual letter, companies like Ford who chose Stripe to help scale its e-commerce capabilities and to do it really fast from initial purchase and all the way through to their aftermarket service. And Hertz, clearly they've done an amazing transformation, and they're unifying the majority of their in-person and online payments around the world, and they're doing that on Stripe. So these are use cases and users we've been working on for the last number of years. And we're really seeing the momentum in that enterprise space. And obviously, that's helping fuel their growth, which is most important to us and obviously supports our growth as well.

FF: Does this position Stripe any closer or further away from an IPO ?

EO: I have no information or knowledge on an IPO, as you can imagine.?

FF: In the past few months alone, Stripe announced partnerships with Hertz , French retailer La Redoute , Eventbrite and Best Buy . How significant are these partnership opportunities to Stripe’s business??

EO: Obviously, for us, it's a significant opportunity for us to support them, but also to grow our market share. It's pretty significant, because when you think about just the scale of enterprises around the world and how they're going through their own transformation, that puts us right at the center of that transformation. In many ways, we think we're a catalyst for that. So our view is that we want to be able to serve all users, wherever they want to be served. While we don’t give specifics or numbers by customer, we think this is just the start. I really think the use cases are really evolving, because we’re seeing enterprises that are also transforming how they go to market.?

Zara, as an example, chose us to be the payments partner when it launched its pre-owned clothing marketplace. That was a business model they didn’t have, and as they thought about the circular economy and how they wanted to support that — but also have a direct relationship with consumers, they did that on Stripe. Another example is Le Maine, the French newspaper and iconic brand, which is hundreds of years old. Their new business model was around launching a digital newspaper for English speakers, which they hadn’t done before, and they chose Stripe for that. Enterprises are now transforming their business models, and at the heart of that, is owning the relationship with the user — including the flow of money and the flow of payments, and that’s where we see it really is a supporter of their growth.?

FF: Stripe continues to partner with major companies. Is there any concern about businesses tightening their budgets, or even consumer spending slowing?

EO: We see our position and how we are differentiated in the market is two-fold. We want to be a growth driver for companies as they build new business models, like some of whatI just described, and the other to be a cost-optimization center. And we've really well-positioned ourselves in being a very credible partner to any company.?

Some of the use cases that we've shared, where we're really driving up lift on authorization rates for companies, are pretty material — in some cases, putting up to 10% on their bottom line. So we play in those two vectors. And I think that's really important. We want to be a business partner for these organizations

Plus, it's important for small businesses, obviously, that they can ensure that they can serve their customers anywhere, anytime. It's very important obviously for large volume users, as well, to have reliability on the platform. I often think it's like when you get on a bus or you get on a plane, you want to get off the other side safely. And that's the case with Stripe — we are always on, and that's incredibly valuable to companies, and we play that infrastructure up to a role as a critical partner and a critical service to them.

FF: Long term, how are you thinking about Stripe’s growth?

EO: Stripe users are super ambitious, and we're trying to meet that ambition by serving them. They're outward-looking, and they're global, and they're across all verticals and all sectors. I think that uniquely places us because we've got such scale in the market. And what I mean by that is that our solutions serve users across every vertical, like some of the examples that I've shared with you — from automotive to retail to media to shipping —? these trailblazing users across every vertical, and we're at the center of a very trusted partnership. We are really building for the long-term. These are partnerships and relationships that we want to be in for multiple decades in the future.

Reddit is finally a public company — the build-up over the past week has been intense. First, the 18-year-old company unveiled an amended S-1 filing with basic financials, and disclosed that it has more than 260 million active weekly users and more than 100,000 active communities called “subreddits,” though it’s still not profitable. Reuters then reported that Reddit’s public debut on the NYSE was four to five times oversubscribed — indicating its valuation could be around $6.5 billion. Soon after, Reddit disclosed an FTC inquiry over its sale, licensing and sharing of user-generated content for training AI models. Reddit also received a court ruling that wasn’t in its favor; a New York state judge said the company, along with YouTube, must face lawsuits that claim they enabled the racially motivated mass shooting where 10 people were killed at a Buffalo, New York grocery store. And then early Tuesday, it was reported that Reddit was put on blast when it received a letter from Nokia, which alleged that the social platform infringed on some of its patents. “As we face increasing competition and become increasingly high profile, the possibility of receiving more intellectual property claims against us grows,” Reddit said in a statement. Shares were priced at $34 Thursday — on the higher end of its expected range.

2/3

Women are leaving Goldman’s top ranks in droves. About two-thirds of the women who were partners in late 2018 have either exited the company, or no longer hold that title. For comparison, the number for men is under 50%, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The latest high-profile female executive at Goldman to leave is Stephanie Cohen, a 25-year Goldman veteran who announced this week she’s leaving the investment firm for a role at tech company Cloudflare. “Advancing women into our most senior ranks is an area where we have not accomplished our goals,” Goldman CEO David Solomon told The Journal.

Let’s travel back to 2009, shall we? In March of that year, the late Bernie Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 criminal counts in one of the biggest financial frauds of all time. “I always knew this day would come,” Madoff told the court. Madoff was charged with stealing billions of dollars from his investment clients in the massive Ponzi scheme. Madoff passed away in prison on April 14, 2021.

Here’s the latest column for Finance Chief Fridays. Recently, Upwork CFO Erica Gessert spoke with me about how she relies on freelancers in her finance department and how excited she is for Upwork’s role in the AI revolution.

Here’s a snippet from that convo:

??? Aside from AI, what are some other investments the company has made recently?

We’ve got an incredibly healthy balance sheet right now. We have super cheap debt, and I have no desire to touch it with the interest rate where it is. We’ve been focused on making sure we can run our business and produce growth, regardless of the macroenvironment. No. 1 is investing a tremendous amount in AI capabilities. We’ve also been investing in ads on our platform. Every marketplace out there — Instacart, Amazon, all of them — have a really robust ads product. We’ve been growing our ads product over time. One of the most important ones is called Boosted Proposals, which enables our users — for a very small fee — to boost their proposals so clients see them at the top of the list. It gives the freelancer a much higher chance of getting the job.

To read the full interview, check it out here .

The leap from the CFO seat to that of the CEO is happening more often these days. That can be attributed to the expanding responsibilities for the C-suite finance leaders.

Do you think CFOs make a natural fit to succeed the CEO? Why or why not?

Join the conversation in the comments below.

Stay tuned for the next edition of The Finance Files , a newsletter from LinkedIn News. What stories, trends or conversations have recently stood out to you in finance and the economy? Comment below.

Lastly, we’ve launched Finance Chief Fridays . Check it out, and feel free to send me your ideas for CFOs you’d like to see interviewed.