Insights: How modern finance teams can win the next 10 years

Retail investment in the UK is the lowest in the G7. According to the Bank of England, there is over £280 billion sitting in UK accounts earning no interest. Something has to change. Financial firms in the UK must look at making investing accessible, contextual and trusted through everyday platforms. That means bringing investment journeys to the point of need, alongside spending, saving and budgeting. And within platforms that already play a meaningful role in customer's lives. We dive into this and more in our latest report, taking advantage of the embedding investing opportunity produced in association with Seckel. Download your copy today at alumnifest.com/embedded-investing. Hello and welcome to FinTech Insider Insights from 11FS. I'm your host, Benjamin Ensor. Like many things, business finance never stands still. It's continually evolving. Over the past decade, expectations on finance teams have steadily increased, and the tools and processes supporting them have had to change too. In this episode, in partnership with PLEO, we'll explore some of the challenges that have emerged as finances evolved, including what's really keeping CFOs up at night, and look at practical ways the businesses can prepare for what comes next. As ever, I'm joined by a great panel of guests to help unpack all of this. First of all, we have a very welcome return to the podcast for Yeppe Rindham, co-founder and chief executive officer of PLEO. It's really great to have you with this. For listeners who may be not aware, can you tell us a little bit more about PLEO and why you started the company? Absolutely, and great to be back at this show. Actually, before starting PLEO, I was a CFO myself just for a little while, and we started PLEO out of pain because I felt it to be incredibly cumbersome to run a finance function of a growing company. When it came to enabling the workforce to buy whatever they needed to be productive in their work, for the finance function, what that looked like was just figuring out how to set them up with the way to purchase stuff. I was sharing my company card around the office back then. We had no insights into what people were buying. The data came in with a very substantial delay in form of manual receipts when that even happened. 14, 30, 45 days later. It couldn't be reconciled with our budgets. It was super manual to entry these things into our accounting system and so forth. Then as an employee, it was the same sort of frustration because often you would have to pay out of pocket. I think we all can recognize the task of keeping on to a receipt and building an expense report. 10 years in, I have never heard a person enjoying that. There was a lot of frustration on the employee side as well. All in all, started out of frustration with the question. What if you created one product that sold for that? What if you had a product where finance folks easily could enable the workforce, see what was going on in real time, controlling all of the purchases, getting the data in with a high degree of automation or a way to follow up on missing data, fully connected into your accounting processes? What if employees were enabled with a company card or a way to pay an invoice? What if they didn't have to think about the receipts if they didn't have to think about the concept of an expense report? All in all, that's the founding story of Plio. That's a lot of history in a minute or two. Fantastic. Thank you. Many a great company has a fantastic founding story and founded out of pain and a search for a better way forward. We also have another FinTech inside of return for Sorrent West Longning, who is Chief Financial Officer at Plio. Welcome back to the show, Sorrent. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your role at Plio? What does a CFO in a company for CFOs do? Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me. I've been with Plio a little more than one and a half years as a CFO and have spent the last 10 years as a CFO of both very large listed companies and also smaller, fast scaling companies. So I tried quite a few things during that period. I've also held persistence outside of the finance area as a regional manager, etc. So I also know that sometime some of the pain that YEP is alluding to from the business side of things. But inside Plio, I'm responsible today for finance. I'm responsible for our legal function, our compliance, risk management, and fin crime. And I'm responsible for procurement and strategy and industrial relations, basically. So I'm a pretty broad set of disciplines that I'm resuming the responsibility for. And if you should move away from the functional side of it and maybe cater more to what sort of like the focus of the role, I would say it's very much about driving performance. It's about driving efficiency. It's about ensuring compliance and then lifting the general maturity of the company of Plio, you know, it is a 10 year old company. So there's still work to be done in that area. Interesting work. Well, welcome back. And we also have a warm welcome back to Megan Cooper, Chief Executive Officer at KWIT. It's always great to have you on the podcast, Megan. Can you remind our listeners a little bit about who you are and what KWIT does, please? Yeah, absolutely. So my background has been all fintech. So I'm an American by trade. I came from San Francisco about a decade ago to help start Starling Bank. And then was at bark, which is the two products of their leading on digital and consumer. And now I'm the founder and CEO, KWIT, which is a AI driven wealth management platform. So using agent to AI to rethink financial decision making. Amazing. Fantastic. Well, welcome to all three of you. And thank you so much for joining. So in the first half of this podcast, we're going to use some of the research and insights from from the team at Plio in fact to look into how business finance and spend management has changed over the past 10 years or so. I think start with one of the most striking findings, which is that Plio's research found that in 2023, 98% of respondents said that the role of the CFO had changed. Sorry, and can you tell our listeners a little bit about well, how is the chain the role of the CFO change? Surely the CFO was always in charge of finance and they're still in charge of finance. What's changed? What are some of the big things that you've seen change over the years? Yeah, so both what I've experienced myself, but also what I hear from CFO colleagues send us very much around first, you know, the level of uncertainty and also the frequency change frequency has gone up. What has happened over the last five, six years with court with inflation, high due political uncertainty, duty in the world, whatever has really been significant. And then we'll say as a second point, I think the breadth of the role and the demands have also gone up. There is a lot higher expectation in terms of the breadth of your involvement and also you can say your business involvement over the more traditional finance disciplines. And then finally, I would say technology is also an item. Technology is really developing at a more rapid pace, not least with the AI really playing a more prominent role over the last couple of years. So, yeah, that's what I see and also what I hear many of my colleagues talk to. And you can say there is really a need and a one from CFO to engage in all of these breadth of different topics, you know, spending more time with the business. You know, bringing really strong data for that foundation into business strategy shaping, do more scenario planning, supporting investment decisions and what have you. But the reality is that many of my colleagues, they do spend quite a lot of time also on the more rudimentary task. You know, Jason received as she ever was saying, consolidating data to create the overviews and, you know, just doing the cash status or reporting all these kind of requirements. So, I think, you know, that journey, the breadth versus what reality also is really speaks to the importance of unlocking more time for all those new demands. Yeah, I'm really interested to hear your views as well on sort of what was driving that shift as I'm listening to Sora and I'm thinking, you know, which is worse, the sort of the pace of technological change in the way that's changing markets or the geopolitics or tariffs and Brexit and all that kind of stuff. So, it depends what company you're in and what sector you're in, but there's a lot of uncertainty now, right? Certainly a lot of uncertainty. And I think the for us, what we've seen is the finance leaders, they're really capable and they should really sit in what we refer to as the strategic cockpit of the business, you know, helping the leadership team look forward, steer the business and and enable the business to have a business impact. And I think a lot of finance leaders also feel that that's what they're accountable for. Now, the reality has been and to some extent still there's a certain is also alluding to that they're still applying a lot of attention on historical matters on on manual tasks that should be automated. And, and you could say that's essentially that's our mission with with player is to say, hey, we want to bring the finance leader from all of that into the cockpit so they can help enable the business. Now, what happens in the cockpit right now and it's sort of what you're steering towards is of course, it's an environment where business has been under more pressure, the economics and the climate has been more difficult the last three, four years than previously. So matters like cost, profitable grows, these types of things are more important. The technology agenda, we see actually finance play a massive role in enabling data centricity tooling and AI. Both you could say proving the business cases, assigning the budgets, but certainly also in many cases it's in the scope of the CFO to be head of procurement and legal and so on. So what are the legal frameworks around enabling such technologies in the business, I think finance plays a really big role. And we also see the finance profiles are becoming more tech savvy somehow. We see CFOs that are actually a lot more curious and capable of technologies of assessing the right tools, understanding the importance of connectivity between the tools, depth of integrations and these types of things. So I guess the key word is turning finance into a real strategic force that ensures business impact. Thank you. I suppose as everyone becomes more familiar with technologies, everyone uses technology more and more in their lives, you'd expect finance professionals just like everyone else to be increasingly adept with technology. And of course, you get younger generations coming in with even more enthusiasm. Megan, as you listen to this as a sort of chief executive building a startup, still in relatively early stages, how sort of central is finance to some of the decision making that you're doing today. And actually, we don't really know very much about your setup. Do you have a finance director? Do you have a CFO? Imagine you don't have a CFO yet. How much of the finance role are you currently doing as a chief executive and how much are you relying on your finance team to do for you with you? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we don't have a CFO yet. Though I will say it's becoming increasingly common for early stage startups to have fractional CFOs. So that will probably be a direction we move first. But I think, I mean, as a founder, you're already owning decisions that the CFO will later formalize. So it seems, you know, like runway versus growth, you're hiring versus burn, build versus by having to really dig into the unit economics. That's part of the fundraising process that you go through really looking in your annual revenue, looking at things like L2D, the CAC rage show, and being able to be really crystal clear on, you know, the bottom one that your business is driving. And so I think the kind of muscle that early CFOs, of course, have to build is around that finance function and understanding that it's not just about numbers, but also about the trade offs that you have to make is part of that. I think I am lucky though, and that I come from working in finance. So even though I'm working in a technology startup, it is a financial technology startup, and I've spent my career in making. And so one of our advisors is the CFO just coincidentally. And so surrounding yourself with smart and talented people early on, it's always, you know, very helpful, of course. So you have an advantage that many many startup founders don't don't have indeed. So, so we've talked about the sort of the greater volatility in business cycle, certainly over the past few years, some these post pandemic, or so certainly for the last five, six years. Sorry, we talked a little bit about, sort of we touched on technology. I mean, our finance teams actually any better equipped to deal with some of that volatility, or is it just actually once you've lived through things like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and so you kind of just get used to planning for the unexpected and kind of trying to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Are there tools that are helping people, or people just learning how to deal with it? I think that's a good question. I think you better learn to deal with it. You can say otherwise you gradually become more and more irrelevant, you can say, right? But I think it's a really good question, because on one hand you have better tools available today, also AI enabled tool and better opportunities to leverage that. On the other hand, I mean, on the balance demands have gone up as we discussed uncertainty volatility has gone on, and I would say on the on the balance between that, I think demands have actually gone up faster than you can say the capabilities and tools have gone up if I was to make a call on that balance. So I think net net there are more pressure on finance leader, you know, you have the feeling that more things keep getting added, but few things are taking off the plate. And I think that's also what we see in our surveys. I mean, in the survey that we did back in 2023, nearly half of the finance leaders felt they had a clear view of things, but already in 24. That dropped to just around 29%. So so quite significant drop in that feeling. And and I do believe that that comes from from that pressure of, you know, faster cycle, higher expectations and and and the finance seems still learning how to really leverage the new tools and an AI in particular to to help them stay ahead of the code basically. So so on so on balance, I think the the finance teams they feel on the more pressure now. Megan, you you must be finding yourself faced with decisions where you have imperfect information just like many to financial officer and so on where you. You might have a guess about how much demand you have you might have a guess about how many employees you're going to need or capacity you're going to need, but you must have to make quite a few decisions within perfect information. Do you have a sort of way of doing that, you know, how do you how do you think about it when you know you have to take a decision and you don't know you can sit there with analysis paralysis or you can take a decision, how do you sort of deal with that. Yeah, I'll say I think coming from a background working in tech and product you just sort of accept uncertainty as a permanent and waiting for too much data and too much clarity can sometimes be a bit handicapping. So I think coming from that background with, you know, just accepting uncertainty as a permanent and how to work within that environment is useful for times when there's a lot of volatility in the market. As a founder though, my perspective is that you use finance to bound risk rather than to eliminate it completely and that's the kind of best that you can do. I do think that there's, you know, the point that you make that, you know, you don't want to wait for certainty because then you get into a decision freeze. But also to the point that Seren was making those increasing tools specifically around AI that could really help us to make strategic decisions. So a lot of what my company does is so we're building this sort of like a CFO via API but for finance. But one of the areas that we look at is things like daily liquidity and compliance for like a banks finance function. So that's something where we can take data from all these different data sets and be able to put it into the recording requirement. And that's quite nice because it's clean data at something that's quite manual. You can very quickly take something and delegate it to an AI agent drive a lot of value. But I think the thing that's really just now starting to build that's quite interesting is longer term financial strategic decision making that AI can help to apply on. So for example, if we rewind back a few years to the SBB collapse part of it was they had too many hold to maturity bonds and made sense in the current economic climate and with the current interest rates when they took those out. However, when the market change and interest rates drops all the sudden that created pressure on the bank then you had people you know obviously like leaving the bank and then all the sudden with the run on the bank that it all just collapse right. But that I remember at the time thinking it was quite fast and because in the UK and London among you know banking visas. Not a common topic of conversation but we would frequently reflect on the flat that were in the late phase of an expanding credit cycle and we expected it to contract back. There's certain things about the economy that's quite cyclical that just tends to follow patterns and that happened to be one of them that was reasonably well identified and so I just thought it was interesting. That had that been programmed in algorithmically for that particular team to be able to kind of see what pressure SBB would have been under with that contraction. And perhaps they could have you know reshifted things a bit earlier to keep things a bit steady for longer and so that's why I think AI is brilliant it's really good at pattern detection and prediction. And so for something like that being infused to a CFO suite to be able to look at market styles and economic trends like things like inflation unemployment. How these different data points correlate together you can see where you might be in the volatile market right now but kind of where the trend will be over the next two to three of period. And that can help inform decision making so I mean I think yeah it's only going to be getting easier over time as we have better tools to help us make some of those forecasting decisions. Thank you. Megan just used the term decision freeze and you have that term in the report. Can you just very quickly just say what is what is decision freeze to somebody who's not heard that term before what is a decision freeze. Yeah so I think what I sense and what we also seen in our report is that the amount of data that can be generated the the amount of the perspectives that you can apply and the data is really gone up quite significantly with new technology. And that's that's one of the things that is leading to a certain you can call it analysis paralysis you know there's simply just so much data available and often it requires quite a lot of work to bring it together across many different data sources right. So I think that's that's where we see finance leaders often struggle and this is this is where you know some of the tools that that Megan is referring to something that can really bring data together across many different sources and really bring insights through that can be super super valuable and help overcome some of the you can say the feeling of being overwhelmed in the finance arena. Yeah because I love that example you just gave Megan of how AI might have been used to help Silicon Valley bank avoid some other problems you know had they been using AI to sort of anticipate things they might have been able to act. Are you you seeing other companies or finance directors and CFOs starting to deploy AI in various different ways potentially trying to anticipate things or to help them with decision making or even just automating some of those routine tasks you were talking about at the beginning of you know just chasing the invoices or managing expenses you starting to see AI being used more widely for just help CFOs just be more effective. 100% now I would say though that obviously the CFOs we speak with they they often have an agenda already just by speaking with us. They they want to be automating things they want to use technology to save time they want to use data to steer them going forward so maybe there's a little bit of a bias towards the more advanced CFOs but certainly yes. And we see it we see it across finance but really across the entirety of of the of the business internally in play as well so so so so certain and I we were with our senior leaders this this week and we were discussing a quite I would say quite complex area around costable success churn but related to our efforts in cost and support. And instead of having a data scientist and several analysts to try to derive conclusions here we had accumulated all of our data from our 45,000 customers and all of our support tickets into one data lake and agent on top and it was absolutely incredible the insights you could get out of that agent in terms of combining findings from support tickets to churn behavior to to what are the most relevant investments we should make in product to have the most impact on our customers and reduced tickets and so on. Huge productivity gain and and making us so much sharper than we would have been before. That's that's so so interesting. So let's so we just talked about AI maybe we just sort of flip across to the to the other side. Sorry and I think one of the things that sort of comes through it in in the research you've done is is the sort of pressure on the individual and you know people talking about sort of dealing with a lot of stress sleepless nights and so on and obviously that that takes a toll is that maybe changing who wants to be in finance is encouraging finance directors to move into being wanting to be chief executives instead you know sit in Megan's chair. What's the sort of human impact of this kind of stress. And yeah I think you're into something at least I've noticed over the last you know five 10 years I've seen more people with sort of like more of a consultant data mindset business strategy mindset moving into into finance to actually become CFO also in line with the trend of you know the demand and the the breath of involvement increasing. So I think that's definitely something that that I've seen and noticed and if I look to sort of like what are the profiles that I think will increase over time within finance I think it comes very much down to you know three types of things that would be in high and high demand one is you know really dates especially someone who can help unfold all the knowledge that most company have somewhere. But it needs to be turned out from various systems and into concrete actions as also the example yet yep it was talking about I think it's someone who are really being able to combine finance knowledge but but really work with the business to help unfold decision making and and support them on a daily basis of this what you call the real having this partnership mentality and business acumen. And then of course there will still be need for these really deep specialist competence like within specialized text or treasurer what you can imagine but I think there will be a trend towards more those you know three profiles as opposed to you can say more maybe a more traditional finance background and I think you know the ones that will more more find them that way into the CFO site will be the ones who can combine. Things across East three things and particular one on on the business inside and data part really really interesting. Okay well on that note let's take a quick pause here and we will be back after the break. Hey folks David Breer here CEO of 11 FS here's something you might not know about me I get a lot of people trying to impersonate me online fake profiles scam emails the lot and a big part of that comes from data brokers hundreds of them quietly collecting and selling your personal information your phone number email home address job title all out there and all fueling identity theft scam calls and spam if you've ever searched your own name online hands up who hasn't you know how exposed you really are that's why we've partnered with in Cogni they contact 230 plus data brokers and tell them to delete your information properly and legally under gdpr and ccpa doing it yourself would take hundreds of hours in Cogni automates the whole thing and keeps working with repeat removal requests if your data reappears I tried it and within days saw brokers deleting my data you can even protect your family members to fintech insider listeners get 60% off an annual plan just head to in Cogni dot com slash fintech insider and use code fintech insider and yes it's risk free with a 30 day money back guarantee you'll find the link in the description. Welcome back in the second half we're looking ahead to what the next 10 years could look like for finance teams. So yeah pay let's bring you in if you're a finance professional listening to this and what what should you be doing to try and sort of combat this decision overload the rising pressure you know the sort of uncertainty what are what are some of the things that you think finance leaders really need to focus on over the next few years. Well, well, first of all, I would say if you haven't done it yet, you need a really strong foundation so that you actually have the capacity to absorb the teams and steal the business and with the foundation again I'm coming back to don't spend your time looking back what don't spend your time processing things and chasing things. Get the right tooling in place make sure that everything is in real time runs like very smoothly and gives you predictability going forward now then you know it's obviously about catching the subjects and I think they are just in the past few years there are some important big shocks if you which or subjects that as a CFO you need to steal the business for us it has been moving from a growth at all cost mindset where we were just going to. Heavy on growth to actually being a lot more balanced around growth and profitability coming back to some of the things Megan also said ensuring that there's a lot of health around the business we bring on board but also that we drive efficiency so in the past three three four years we have triple revenue but we've done it on the same size of organization very important role for the CFO to be able to drive and enable that efficiency. Another example very relevant for for Fintech is the interest rate environment. Here we came from a zero interest environment to a steep hike towards three four percent and then you know declining again many things including us are very exposed to interest rates in a good and bad way how do you enable the business to both benefit from that in the growth agenda but also ensure that you're not relying too much on something that you eventually won't be able to control. So but you know for each business these strategic subjects are different so it's a matter of grasping them and then immediately steering the business accordingly Megan do you agree with your case analysis on sort of what really matters for the next 10 years if you have any sort of builds on that or any disagreements no I mean I think that really makes a lot of sense I think the only things I would add is the over the next 10 years. I'll be sandy deep in AI so I'm quite bullish on how that will change every industry but I do think that what we'll also see is more of what the company stayed the same size while the annual revenue grew I think that will become more common in part because we'll have AI doing more work within corporate teams and so you don't need to scale as quickly as you possibly did previously I think that will become true for more companies as we see AI being proliferated and. Adopted more aggressively I do think as well that with early stage teams they typically see that. There's like the I think just what you mentioned earlier that like immaturity around a finance function I think that will actually probably change over the next 10 years as the tools that we have developed to increase maturity where you can just adopt them and have a stronger. Financial arm within your company sooner than previously we had historically so all in all I agree I just see a lot of acceleration with technology for what we do and how we can do it and how we can grow our business. Thank you. Sir, can you, this is maybe an unfair question but can you give us an example of how sort of Plio is sort of responding to some of these things I mean can you share I just some examples of things you've done internally Plio where you've you've sort of changed what you're doing or stopped doing some things or maybe examples from sort of your client base more widely. Can you give us some examples of how your sort of finance function is shifting or changing yeah so maybe I'll start with a very low practical example. If you will I mean one of the things we we did linking also up to the Plio product was that we simply just stopped you can say the traditional manager approval flow when it comes to expenses and and why do we feel comfortable about that. That's because we have built these AI enable spend guidelines into into the Plio tool so you know users will know real life if they spend it outside the guidelines so we help drive the right behavior from the outside. Then also you can say the information availability both at the decision time but also in a very very quick follow up to the right persons is something meets an intervention of some salt is is just available at that means you can sort of like take away quite a bit steps for you know you can say the all the business managers around Plio but also in the finance area so so that's just a very low practical example of something that you can remove. And that time you spend there you can you can fuel into doing more advanced off from on data management more intelligence in the business or supporting the business. So as as the finance function becomes sort of more sophisticated more strategic as you get sort of better data better tools better decision making and the finance function spending maybe you know less time chasing up invoices less time chasing late pairs less time approving invoices as you say. A more time thinking about future risks thinking about what to invest in and so on. Yeah, what is some of the benefits or pay off for businesses as as their finance function sort of becomes more capable becomes more strategic what does that unlock what does that how what are the advantages for the wider business I mean is it just you know finance directors less stress the CFO less stress and that's great. But are there what are the benefits of the business as a whole yeah I think I think one of the areas is I think it clears your lens it's right as a leadership team it allows you to make better decisions both strategically and say from profitability perspective as well. As as we talk a little bit about before it it allows more efficiency not only in the finance function with the example that so I get but like really across the business. And again it's not to say that finance necessarily are taking all of the efficiency decisions such I think it's more like creating the framework ensuring the business leaders in general are accountable that they are. It enabled with the change process in their area whether that is. Tooling or the other or the budgets and they are subsequently held accountable. So I think all in all we we see the finance function as both that place that kind of like clears the visibility but also like keeps us all on track and brings accountability to the business. It's nice. I was struck by something you said earlier you said you you might think about a fractional CFO and whether you do or doing to Kaywood is it or not the point I think the more interesting point is think about businesses like your scale ups and so on thinking about when's the right point to bring in a CFO what does that person do and so is you think about what you might do it. At Kaywood or what might happen in other businesses like yours what do you sort of need in place before you sort of bring in a CFO and what's the attraction of of maybe a fractional CFO. Yeah so I think I hadn't previously considered a CFO or a fractional CFO until starting the company and then it's just one of those things we're talking with a lot of other startup founders and hearing what they do and how they do it and I. It came to my attention how calm and that was as a starting point and how recommended it was by venture capital which I found quite surprising I think the main thing is when you're a really small early stage startup the benefit is people come in know that your early stage and the risk and you have to be you know that creates a certain framework for how you make financial decisions but as you grow mature. I really see the CFO is you know a copilot not so much as a gatekeeper it's someone who's you know owning the decision quality and not just the controls but some of them who will help us decide faster and not just safer it's someone who's going to come in and put a lot of maturity and process around it help to handle the complexity as the organization grows. But I think for K what in particular as we grow the thing that I'm quite excited about is how we can use agenda AI within that function increasingly within our own corporation as the spine of the function itself I think. I made a really good point though around how the CFO is effect effectively creating you know the structure and framework it's not so much around gatekeeping but about helping better decisions to be made and so I think the reality is that for any company that's growing you're just looking at these inflection points. Where your scale and your demands in your complexity create new requirements and the talents on your team and on your hiring and so that's kind of what we're analyzing is to when we get to those inflection points and need that kind of fullness of the CFO who's full time on the team to be in in seat with us. I love that analogy of a copilot I think that's that's really interesting sorry what do you think of that are you seeing players clients sort of empowering their finance teams you know pushing their you know the finance directors or CFOs into that kind of copilot seat I mean it never seems like an equal relationship between a CEO and a CFO but I like that copilot analogy is that just me or do you think there's something more to. No I definitely I see my personally I see my finest role as being Jeppe's wingman or copilot if you if you will and I think that's also what you know finance leader in general aspire to and also what we hear from from our customer base and I will say my experience now haven't been in quite a few companies and I have also. So work with many different companies I do believe that there is a quite strong correlation between you know the quality of a finance team they are capabilities and the CFO and then also the old wall performance of of a company now I'm not going to say that the causality only runs one way but but but I do think that the correlation is quite clear and and I think that it's a sign of maturity for business when you when you get to that state as opposed to being sort of. Like okay now going to ex one set but you are really part of shaping the agenda because the CEO can be sort of like this neutral non biased and and bring sort of like the right facts into into the decision making so so that's where I really see that. So you come to life in in the cool pilot and part of what you are touching upon the end when you. Yeah, we've talked a lot about AI and the role of AI in the finance, particularly Megan you've been very articulate in some of the ways you see it changing things. Does that mean over time that companies have slightly fewer people in their finance functions because actually you know some of the sort of more routine mundane work that maybe needed to be done 10 15 20 years ago. Doesn't need to be done and therefore they need fewer people and you can maybe scale up without having to grow the finance function. Or does it actually mean that no you can invest in a sort of more strategic finance function identifying new opportunities for growth and really just running the business much more effectively. I mean everyone's always asking you what does that mean for jobs but so I suppose I'm just asking a very crude and basic question but. Where do you think this this pans out as AI just enable more people to just get more stuff done I mean what does it what do you think we end up. I think that's really good question and I think honestly it's really really hard to predict but there is there is absolutely no doubt that there will be much less people needed to deal with. The same things were dealing with today. Now the million dollar question is will be dealing with exponentially more going forward because of AI because it just constantly drives up the pace. And that's where I'm a little bit more in doubt because and coming back to the you could say there how do we empower found it finance and so on. I think there's there's no doubt that being a CEO and a company is a lot more demanding because everything is moving much much faster than it used to do. And it's absolutely impossible to keep grasp of everything so you need a lot more support. So that's why the finance team has been invited into the cockpit and they're having a very material role. Now whether the change is going to go on so fast and the competitive environment is going to move so fast that it's actually just going to need more people in finance that can just process a lot more stuff. I think it's very hard to predict. It really really is but it's a really interesting question because I think we're always sort of getting down to here is is how how do the individuals who work in finance had a finance professionals themselves evolve. I mean, yep, you were really interesting earlier when you were talking about how you know you're coming across more and more sort of really strategic CFOs are really thinking about the role of technology of the role of AI. Megan, it's very clear that you know not only your first fractional CFO but your first full time CFO is going to have to be someone who's absolutely embrace technology AI and is really pushing the envelope on their use of tech. Maybe I'll come to you first Megan is is that how you see the finance function evolving much like probably many other professions that financial professionals are just going to have to get ever smarter about technology particularly AI. How to use that to make themselves and their functions more effective. Yeah, absolutely. I think we will definitely be using AI and in every function to make it more effective but including the CFO suite. I think the finance department stands to benefit a lot from AI because it tends to work in areas where you have clean data feeds, you have clear rules. There's clear outcomes that you're looking to achieve those types of areas tend to work really well for a gen to AI right now. So and also from a regulatory standpoint to within the world of banking there's very clear rules for what happens and how it does so those types of build work really well for a gen to AI. So I do think teams will tend to get smaller over time but will also have human counterparts will all be so you have to steward even the parts that we delegate to AI. And I think the part that will be surprising is how sort of what I was mentioning to earlier was SVB but how it will also end up being a tool used increasingly by CFOs to make things like capital allocation decisions and longer term strategic decisions that currently is less used by AI. I think when gen AI and some of the larger large language models like chat to be tea and jive and iron claw first started really maturing in the market. The first thought within the world of finance was it's going to be brilliant and maybe it can give good financial advice both internally and externally but the part where it can't yet compete with humans is on empathy on emotional intelligence and whenever you have a market downturn and you're in that moment of stress can it actually need that need to as like a private banker or wealth manager or an internal you know human team could do. And the answer originally was no it couldn't and I think what's really fascinating is that now we've shifted to a different place where like actually chat to be tea in particular is phenomenally emotionally intelligent but so emotionally intelligent that people are getting a bit attached. And then it's caused a safety concern within open AI and they've had to put in all these guard rails and then you have protests around you know people wanting open AI to just let them have a human relationship with their AI. And it's a fascinating world and I think the next prediction that will get to just as we kind of mispredicted the emotional intelligence of lm's is I think. We then kind of mispredicted its ability to do the strategic work and I think that's the area that will next see where it will be increasingly a part of the finance function will of course be able to really help with those junior roles and some of the like. We need to implement automation were throughout teams yeah across companies but within banking and finance included but then increasingly more strategic and actually being maybe a co pilot to the CFO as well. Thank you so into wrap us up do you have any tips for. Don't you younger finance professionals listening to this ambitious financial professionals or frankly senior finance professionals listening to this about what they can and should do at a personal level sort of keep up and make sure that they are you know wanted as that co pilot an individual level what can you wrap us up with what do you think people need to do. Yeah so first reflection would be you know we talked about how can we empower finance I would say flip that question around how do you empower. Because it's really up to you as a finance deeper to shape your role and I think the more you can the more you can be data savvy the more you can be shaping new technology and the more that you can really be you can say. The sparing part not that the business naturally turns toward I think the higher likelihood you have to succeed and you know how do you get there I mean technology and using technology both to get rid of all the tedious things but also use technology to to help you do the dazzling thing I think that's that's that's the advice that I will give. Fantastic unfortunately that's all we have got time for so that's going to wrap up today's discussion from really really good advice from all three of you this has been fantastic. For those of you listeners this isn't the last you'll hear from us and plio in March will be back with another episode exploring embedded finance and how cash management is changing for modern businesses. So do keep an eye out for that one but I'm getting ahead of myself because I haven't thanked today's fantastic guests thank you all three of you being brilliant. Where can people find out a little bit more about you and your companies and ladies first Megan where can people find out a little bit more about you and about kwood. Yeah absolutely you can find out more about both me and kwood on linkedin or on our website kwood diet. Where can people find out more about you and about clear same source go to my LinkedIn profile I frequently speak about growing plio and go to our website plio dot IO. And so and obviously we know now how to find out about clear but perhaps you can in addition to telling us about you you can tell us where people can find more of some of that research that we were talking about earlier. Yeah that is indeed also available on the clear website so another good reason to to go there and where can people find you. Yeah that's on on linkedin very traditional same as both Megan and yeah. Wonderful and the same for me Benjamin and so on linkedin well thank you all so much for listening if you like to what you've heard please do follow our podcast do recommend it to your friends and colleagues. If you want to join the conversation just seek us out on social media you can search for 11FS or FinTech insider or you can email us a podcast at 11FS dot com. So thank you so much again to my three guests and thank you all for listening and goodbye. Through 2025 we saw brands from every corner of financial services take their user experiences to the next level from personalization and investment to AI chat bots and crypto. End users are more empowered than ever when it comes to managing their money and we expect that trend to continue through 2026 if you're interested in keeping up with the latest product trends feature releases and UX insights from brands like monzo, Revolut styling new bank and more than 11FS pulse is the tool for you benchmark your product against the very best by analyzing over 20,000 user experiences from more than 850 global brands each hand picked and analyzed in depth by product specialist find out more at 11FS dot com slash pulse.