In this Planning Aces episode, Jack Sweeney and co-host Brett Knowles spotlight three CFOs who are advancing their organizations' FP&A capabilities through thoughtful AI adoption. Andrea Hecht of CSAA Insurance discusses aligning generative AI with enterprise strategy and efficiency. Matthias Steinberg of MindBridge explores combining machine learning and LLMs in finance workflows. Brian Hogeland of Packer Fastener highlights how AI training and grassroots adoption can foster a tech-forward ...
Jun 27, 2025•41 min
When the Silicon Valley Bank crisis erupted in early 2023, Larry Roseman was already well-acquainted with market upheaval. A member of the CFO class appointed around 2020—just as the pandemic began—Roseman had weathered previous storms. He began his career amid the dot-com collapse, then advanced through the 2008 financial crisis. “Scar tissue helps,” he tells us. So when he landed in Palm Springs for a tennis tournament and learned SVB was in freefall—taking all of Thumbtack’s cash with it—his ...
Jun 25, 2025•44 min
Back in 2003, when a recruiter lined up Kent Hoskins for a finance interview at Boosey & Hawkes, he came prepared to discuss guitar manufacturing. Instead, the executive immediately began quizzing him on music royalties—the recruiter had apparently misunderstood the brief. Hoskins didn’t get the job—at first. But two days later, he got a call: the selected candidate had quit after just 24 hours. Hoskins stepped in. That twist marked a pivotal entry into the world of music IP—one that would s...
Jun 22, 2025•1 hr 2 min
What sets John Rettig’s CFO journey apart from most is not just its length—spanning more than two decades—but its unusual symmetry. His CFO career roughly divides into two decade-long tenures: first helping scale a digital advertising firm from $15 million to $250 million in revenue, and now serving as CFO of Bill, where he’s helped lead the company from startup to public market success. When Rettig joined Bill, the company had just $13 million in revenue and a modest employee base. What drew hi...
Jun 18, 2025•48 min
During his decade at Google, Tim Ritters worked at the intersection of product and finance, helping to launch financial systems in collaboration with engineering, marketing, and product teams. The role gave him early exposure to cross-functional work and large-scale data environments. “Day one, you’re working cross-functionally,” Ritters tells us. He adds that this mindset became foundational to his approach going forward. When Ritters joined Gong in 2019, he says the company had already begun c...
Jun 15, 2025•40 min
It’s no secret CFOs frequently exit soon after a major acquisition—especially when a larger enterprise takes the reins. But Rene Ho stayed. Ho had been CFO of Taulia, a working capital fintech, when it was still an independent company. After helping lead the firm through its acquisition by SAP, he chose to stay on, guiding the company through integration while preserving what made Taulia unique. It’s a reality Ho doesn’t resist—instead, he works to make those connections scalable. That mindset r...
Jun 11, 2025•48 min
As Cardinal Health nears its second anniversary since the company’s first investor day under CFO Aaron Alt’s leadership, steady progress has been made in its ambitious transformation. Alt reflects on the company’s trajectory since his appointment, saying, “We’ve deployed several billion dollars in acquisitions to drive our strategy.” This shift highlights the company’s focus on specialty distribution and related services—areas Alt tells us offer higher margins and greater growth potential than t...
Jun 08, 2025•38 min
In this episode of Planning Aces, co-hosts Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles spotlight the FP&A strategies and AI adoption journeys of three CFOs—Gillian Munson (Vimeo), Dan Fletcher (Planful), and Chad Gold (FullStory). Each finance leader discusses how AI is reshaping their planning processes, from accelerating automation and revenue generation to transforming cross-functional collaboration. Brett introduces a framework for evaluating AI ROI across three dimensions: operating cost reduction, ...
Jun 06, 2025•44 min
When Matthias Steinberg entered the CFO office at MindBridge in 2022, the audit files displayed on his laptop were already being processed by the company’s own AI. KPMG, he adds, was using the same platform to automate journal‑entry testing—work “traditionally done manual.” That shift marked “a big step toward continuous audit,” Steinberg tells us. The platform, he explains, monitors “all relevant financial flows” for two audiences. External audit firms—including “a number of the top 100 in Nort...
Jun 04, 2025•58 min
When Andrea Hecht walks into a finance meeting, she’s not preparing for earnings calls or shareholder Q&A. Instead, her focus is inward—on aligning every financial decision with a mission that begins and ends with AAA members. CSAA Insurance, where Hecht serves as CFO, operates in 23 states and the District of Columbia. It’s not publicly traded. “We’re technically owned by our policyholders,” Hecht tells us, noting that CSAA distributes almost exclusively through AAA clubs to AAA members. Th...
Jun 01, 2025•48 min
When Tom Egan walks a homeowner through the math—“If your house is worth a million dollars and you owe five hundred thousand,” he says—the traditional options surface quickly: load the balance sheet with a costly home‑equity loan or sell and hope you can find somewhere new to live. That binary choice, he explains, is exactly what Hometap set out to upend. The company’s flagship home‑equity investment lets owners “access the liquidity in their home without having to sell or take on debt,” Egan te...
May 28, 2025•1 hr
Imagine an accounts‑receivable clerk clicking through four different systems just to finish one routine task. Chad Gold sees that bottleneck instantly. Fullstory’s newly launched Workforce product maps every mouse‑stroke of such employee journeys, then surfaces friction points so companies can “make them more productive, so they can do even more value‑added things,” Gold tells us. The scene encapsulates the finance leader’s thesis: data depth wins. “The companies that have the capabilities to ca...
May 25, 2025•50 min
Broadcasting from Planful’s Perform 25 conference in Miami, CFO Thought Leader presents frontline finance insights in an on‑location special. CEO Grant Halloran rejects the narrative that generative AI replaces people; instead he calls it the only viable antidote to a looming three‑million‑professional accounting shortage and collapsing CPA pipeline. Halloran outlines a 30‑second, company‑wide forecasting experience that lifts productivity without swelling headcount. CFO Dan Fletcher echoes the ...
May 23, 2025•55 min
When a restaurant’s weekly salmon order suddenly spikes in price, Emma Whelan wants chefs adjusting menus the next morning—not tallying losses a month later. “The system will alert them if the price of salmon (has) gone up unexpectedly,” she tells us, describing MarginEdge’s real‑time cost engine. It is a small but telling vignette from Whelan’s first months as CFO, and it captures the company’s wider ambition: “MarginEdge wants to create a world where restaurant operators can focus on great foo...
May 21, 2025•54 min
When Peloton’s stock debuted in 2019, CFO Jill Woodworth believed the playbook was air‑tight. She had shifted fiscal calendars, re‑segmented reporting and shaped statements that “tell a story,” she tells us. Then COVID hit. Orders “flew nine‑fold overnight,” marketing was switched off, and customer focus narrowed to a single metric: getting bikes from order to doorstep. Wait times ballooned to “four or five months,” but earlier bets—a vertically integrated Taiwanese factory and Peloton‑owned del...
May 18, 2025•1 hr 4 min
For nearly ten years, Kevin Ingram knocked on S&P’s door, arguing that FM’s A‑plus rating undervalued its balance sheet. Other agencies, such as Fitch, already had the mutual insurer at AA. Each visit, Ingram presented fresh data; each time, the agency hesitated, wary of revising a long‑standing mark. Last summer, six months after FM dropped “Global” from its name, S&P finally moved, lifting the company to AA‑minus—a hard‑won validation. Throughout the campaign, Ingram stressed a core be...
May 14, 2025•42 min
When Gillian Munson pictures a Vimeo customer, she doesn’t start with a filmmaker, she imagines an insurance company or a corner grocery store owner uploading a training clip into Vimeo’s ever thirsty player, and hitting publish without ever surrendering control—or ad space—to a third‑party network. That simple embed workflow, she tells us, explains why “eight of the ten largest healthcare companies” and a widening roster of retailers, insurers and media giants now trust Vimeo to keep their foot...
May 11, 2025•49 min
This Planning Aces episode explores how finance leaders navigate volatility without drifting into political cross‑currents like tariffs. Prologis CFO Tim Arndt explains why e‑commerce triples warehouse demand and how real‑estate strategies must adapt. Genworth CFO Jerome Upton shows how disciplined leverage and balanced product exposure turn rate uncertainty into opportunity while guarding against inflationary claim spikes. Flexport CFO Stuart Leung reveals the weekly two‑hour operating cadence ...
May 09, 2025•43 min
Bea Ordonez still recalls the whirlwind of her first CFO post: a raw fintech start‑up where, in two short years, she recruited “over a hundred people,” built the processes they would follow and decided what kind of culture would bind them, she tells us. Immersing herself in every workflow taught her that finance leadership begins on the frontline—listening, questioning, then turning messy reality into structure. That builder’s reflex shapes her playbook at Payoneer today. After a decade as a glo...
May 07, 2025•47 min
Back in the 1990s, Dilip Upmanyu sat in a room filled with servers as he pieced together a homegrown database of costs and SKUs. His employer at the time couldn’t tell which products paid the bills; by dawn, the young financial analyst could. That improvised profitability model, he tells us, still informs his investment mindset today. Upmanyu never mistook rows of numbers for the whole story. Later joining IBM, he moved from product analytics to revenue accounting in a single year, then voluntee...
May 04, 2025•42 min
A little more than decade ago, Travis Page was hauling gear off a tour bus, criss-crossing the country with indie bands. One late night, sweat-soaked and exhausted, he noticed fans waiting in the rain simply to glimpse their favourite artist. Passion like that ought to power a business , he thought. That backstage epiphany still guides him as CFO of Crunchyroll, the world’s largest anime platform. After the music industry’s 2007 crash, Page hit reset—trading road cases for a Wharton MBA and, soo...
Apr 30, 2025•36 min
It was Friday the 13th in March of 2020, and Steven Miller was staring at a suddenly irrelevant budget. Hours earlier Warby Parker had shuttered every one of its 280 stores to protect employees and customers. “Remember that plan we just approved?” he asked the leadership team. “Forget it.” In its place he introduced PAR—Pause, Adjust, Redeploy—a framework that let finance review cash daily, pivot marketing dollars to booming e-commerce, and preserve innovation spend while the world locked down. ...
Apr 27, 2025•47 min
It was a morning commute Chris Greiner had made hundreds of times before. Living in old Shanghai and working in the city’s sleek business district, Greiner’s daily drive to the Jin Mao Tower often stretched well beyond an hour. But on this particular day, his driver told him they’d arrive in just 30 minutes. Puzzled but intrigued, Greiner went along—only to discover the traffic patterns had shifted. “They repainted the lines,” the driver told him with a grin. The same bridge, same road—just used...
Apr 23, 2025•39 min
Jerome Upton still remembers the silence that descends just before a game begins. As captain of his college team, he’d scan the huddle, gauge nerves, and ask, “What does winning look like today?” “That’s where I learned the power of shared goals,” Upton tells us. Years later, the Genworth Financial CFO opens staff meetings similarly—then hands teammates room to execute. The first bold play of his career came soon after graduation. At a small insurer, Upton stunned mentors by jumping to KPMG. “I ...
Apr 20, 2025•47 min
t was sixty days into his new role when Brian McClintock tells us he realized the company’s monthly “profit” was actually a million-dollar loss. As the CFO reviewed the financials, he discovered that each rosy figure concealed a troubling truth. For many executives, panic might have followed. Instead, McClintock’s response underscored a key principle: remain calm and stay focused on data-driven solutions. As he dug deeper, a misalignment of actual costs and revenue assumptions emerged, revealing...
Apr 16, 2025•45 min
It was a first meeting Naeem Ishaq tells us he’ll never forget: stepping into the Chief Product Officer’s office at Salesforce, he began pitching a bold new pricing model. Yet the officer cut him off, bluntly telling him to “figure out the (numbers) first, then we can talk strategy.” Ishaq admits he had inherited something of a mess when it came to the data. Despite the tough feedback, however, he refused to give up. He dove deeper—verifying metrics, updating budgets, and clarifying every detail...
Apr 13, 2025•53 min
“It wouldn’t surprise me. No, it would be exciting.” That was Adam Ante’s initial response when asked if five years from now, he could imagine himself still in the C-suite—but not as a CFO. The comment seemed to linger in the air, hinting at a deeper current in his career journey. Ante, who had led Paycor through an IPO, a pandemic, and most recently, a $4.1 billion sale to Paychex, wasn’t just closing out a CFO chapter—he may have been opening something entirely new. While he later softened the...
Apr 06, 2025•43 min
Host Erik Zhou sits down with Amber Papp, VP of Finance at Scentbird to explore the unique challenges of accounting in the e-commerce space. From managing a massive inventory of over 700 fragrances to navigating rapid growth and making smart automation decisions, Amber shares firsthand insights on what it takes to keep financial operations running smoothly at a high-growth, subscription-based company. Amber and Erik also dig into relevant themes like the role of AI in accounting, balancing effic...
Apr 04, 2025•45 min
Fresh out of a hedge fund analyst role, Erik Rothschild walked into an interview at a Chicago-based trading firm and did something unexpected—he pitched actual trade ideas to the portfolio manager across the table. That bold move earned him a spot on the team, and eventually, a portfolio of his own. “That whole experience taught me how to assess decisions through the lens of an investment,” Rothschild tells us. It’s a mindset that has quietly shaped every leadership decision he’s made since. Rot...
Apr 02, 2025•44 min
It was a late-night meeting room lit by the glow of Excel spreadsheets and half-empty coffee cups. Brian Carolan, then a rising finance leader, looked around the table and saw not just fellow accountants and analysts but a collection of people relying on him to bridge data and strategy. In that moment, he felt the weight of a CFO’s responsibility keenly. “Finance is never only about numbers,” Carolan tells us. “It’s about connecting the dots for everyone in the room.” Years earlier, he had trade...
Mar 30, 2025•42 min
