The unconventional path to the CFO seat

On paper, I don’t look like an obvious choice to run the Finance and Corporate Development functions at a global payments and financial infrastructure business. My path to this seat runs through roles in strategy consulting, business operations, general management, and private equity, not the accounting and controllership track that many CFOs come up in.

That path has given me a different perspective on a function going through its biggest shift since the arrival of the spreadsheet. Finance is in the midst of transforming from a department whose primary functions are controlling spend and reporting on performance into one whose aims are to enable and accelerate growth.

Learning in the field

There are plenty of examples of commercial CFOs. Ling Hai at Mastercard is about to take over as CFO, having previously led its APAC and EMEA businesses. Outgoing CFO Sachin Mehra is headed the other way, moving into a new Chief Business Officer role. Ravi Inukonda went from engineering to VC to CFO at DoorDash.

My own career started at Bain & Company, where I worked on strategy across London, Mumbai, and Melbourne. What I learned at Bain was how to think about the drivers of business performance, how to test hypotheses with limited data, and how much harder it is to execute on a three-year strategy than it is to write one. I was fortunate to work across functions and industries and to see a variety of successful (and some not so successful) business models in action.

My first foray into fintech was at GoCardless, where I built the BizOps and Strategy function, leading FP&A, fundraising, and special projects. In parallel, I led international expansion, building teams and businesses across Western Europe, ANZ, and North America. Every new market launch competed for capital, talent, and an ever-diminishing sliver of management attention. I learned some important lessons about how hard it is to estimate when you’ll find product market fit. I later scaled the global Small Business segment and was responsible for the company’s largest commercial partnerships and over 70,000 SME customers transacting on the platform every month.

Owning every problem

I joined Airwallex in 2022 as Executive General Manager, EMEA. At that time, we were an unknown quantity: an APAC-first business trying to break into one of the most competitive and dynamic fintech ecosystems in the world. We had a great team, but we hadn’t yet figured out where our strongest right to win was, or what that would require from GTM and product.

One of the areas we landed on was online travel. Online travel agencies (OTAs) book hotels, transport, and experiences for their clients. Using banks to pay those suppliers securely and quickly across multiple countries and currencies is expensive and unreliable. My team realised that Airwallex’s Issuing product could solve those problems: it allowed OTAs to issue single-use cards in multiple currencies and debit directly from a multi-currency wallet that could be funded by collections in those same currencies. From there it was about finding our first customers, ensuring that we delighted them, and then amplifying their success across the rest of the market. We replicated that model by use case and market across the UK, Europe, Israel and the Middle East.

Jack Zhang, our co-founder and CEO, built the EMEA EGM role in an unusual way. Most of the time, GMs are regional heads of sales, with loose responsibility for cross-functional teams in their markets. My role was a truly cross-functional, executive-level position. While I was accountable for my region’s number, I was also on the hook for key licensing and regulatory matters, product requirements, partnerships, and ultimately customer outcomes. When Jack had a question about EMEA, I had to have the answer. That level of ownership enabled me to understand the business that finance serves in a way that I couldn’t have before.

Most recently, I was part of the leadership team at Bain Capital's Tech Opportunities fund, investing in growing technology businesses across the UK and Europe. Core to our underwriting was the belief that businesses create shareholder value by building for the long term. Achieving that goal requires both effective capital allocation and persistent, high quality management execution. High performing private equity CFOs play a critical role in both areas, shaping what happens next in their businesses and not just explaining the delta vs. underwriting for the previous quarter.

Finance is stepping into a bigger role

My view is that finance has to get the fundamentals right. Accurate reporting, sensible capital allocation, risk managed properly. Those stay non-negotiable. But the expectation now is doing them with a fraction of the time they used to take. The capacity that frees up goes towards building trust with regulators, partners, and customers, supporting the hard commercial calls, and being useful to every function in the business.

Business leaders don't need finance sitting on the sidelines. They need it in the room while decisions are being made, with a clear view of the numbers, the trade-offs, and the long-term implications.

That's the finance function I've come back to build: one that keeps the fundamentals right, but is equally accountable for helping the business make better decisions and grow faster.

Airwallex is out to move a serious share of the world's money, and finance has real work to do in getting us there.