PYMNTS-MonitorEdge-May-2024

Tech, Data Play Larger Role as CFOs Prep for Uncertain Future

CFO Voices: Modernizing Back-Office Operations

At any growth-stage company, there’s a lot of change happening.

For chief financial officers (CFOs), that means managing day-to-day change while keeping strategic growth as their North Star, Honor Technology CFO Andrew Steinberg told PYMNTS.

“I know where we want to be by the end of the year, I want to know what we want to look like by the end of next year, and here are the 20 initiatives that me and my finance team are working with the rest of the organization to make sure happens so that we do look, feel and operate a certain way,” Steinberg said.

Scaling Up

Steinberg joined Honor Technology in August, bringing nearly two decades of experience in financial and operations roles in tech and healthcare.

The company had acquired a rival, Home Instead, and was in the middle of integrating its operations into its existing business of providing technology solutions, operational support and caregivers to home care agencies that care for aging adults across the United States.

In his role as CFO, Steinberg is now working to drive Honor Technology’s financial strategy, optimize its financial reporting, enable growth of its platform and provide guidance on new opportunities.

Interviewed for the PYMNTS series “A Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO,” Steinberg said that the things on his agenda include improving automation, reporting and data analytics.

“At its core, Honor is a machine-learning, data-driven company,” he said. “We are matching care providers to care recipients at scale in the most efficient way possible, and we are the largest and most tech-advanced company doing so. So, how do we continue to build out our systems in a way that we can continue to scale the business?”

Fostering Collaboration

Steinberg aims to streamline its tech stack of 20 different vendors so that all the tools — payment processing, invoicing, expense management, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and forecasting — are best aligned to inform the company’s decision-making.

Honor Technology went remote-first during the pandemic, but it’s looking to build out its real estate footprint in areas where there are clusters of employees so that there’s a place where they can gather and collaborate.

Steinberg said the company’s human resources (HR) platform, regular engagement surveys and offsites help foster teamwork.

“We want to make sure that everyone at the company is fully engaged, that teams are efficient, and that we don’t suffer the same sort of quiet quitting that a number of firms are facing right now.”

Positioning for the Future

While no company is immune to macroeconomic conditions, Honor Technology has been growing within the $83 billion market for activities of daily living (ADL) support networks, which is underserved, highly fragmented and getting a lot of attention from companies like CVS and Amazon, Steinberg said.

“There’s a lot of attention in this space, and it is changing quite rapidly, and we feel like we are the best positioned for the future and the scaling of this market,” Steinberg said, adding that Honor is the largest player in the space.

Honor Technology’s platform gives care professionals a lot of agency in terms of choosing the jobs they want and the hours they work. The company also provides benefits, like 401(k) matching, that are also not uniformly available to all caregivers. 

As a result, Steinberg said, Honor Technology has an “incredible” Net Promoter Score (NPS) among care professionals and some of the highest retention rates.

“We are just seeing an incredible amount of opportunity in the market,” Steinberg said. “I think as a finance organization, it’s collecting that data, turning it into real-time analytics, being able to tell a really strong equity story — that is what we’re doing over the next year.”

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PYMNTS-MonitorEdge-May-2024