Entersekt CFO Celebrates Privileged Position Of Finance Team

Finance leaders dashed to digitization in the early days of the pandemic — not only as a means of promoting business continuity amid work-from-home requirements but also as a means of accelerating modernization plans that in many cases had already been in place. For all of its drawbacks, the crisis did present forward-looking chief financial officers with a prime opportunity to overcome the inertia against change that can keep businesses stuck on paper under normal circumstances.

When Erica Woods stepped in as group CFO of the mobile authentication FinTech Entersekt last September, the company had already found its footing in a remote work environment, managing workflows and even embracing digitization in various aspects of the back office. But digitization in and of itself doesn’t necessarily deliver much value. Rather, Woods said she had higher-level goals in mind to continue driving digitization in the financial back office.

“The biggest effect of COVID is the uncertainty that it raises,” she told PYMNTS. “Even though we were already a little bit into the pandemic, I really wanted to gear up the finance team to focus on that uncertainty.” Bracing for the unknown helped Woods strategize how she led technology adoption for Entersekt moving forward. The goal isn’t simply to automate, she explained, but to use data to drive the company forward. 

A Mutual Understanding

While there wasn’t much friction when it came to migrating the workforce remotely, any change in workflow can meet resistance. Embracing cloud-based accounting, as well as automated accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) tools, helped promote a more digital environment for the firm, but implementing these solutions also required effort to encourage team members to think differently.

“It’s also around mindset, and asking: How do we optimize our processes? What are we doing efficiently and what are we not doing efficiently? And what can we actually do a little bit smarter?” said Woods.

The result was establishing a team member dedicated especially to revenue and AR in order to optimize those functions in a way that automation alone cannot. This collaborative effort expanded to Entersekt’s business partners, with AR and AP digitization requiring conversations with customers and vendors to ensure that everyone was on the same page.

“They’re used to us having conversations and saying, ‘Hey, let’s make this efficient for us, and also for you,’” noted Woods, adding that “a lot of our vendors, a lot of our banking clients, are really on a digitization journey, so there’s a mutual level of understanding.”

Position Of Privilege

While driving digitization ahead is important, Woods had broader priorities in mind that guided the way she adopted technologies and optimized workflows. Coming into the position of CFO, she noted that cash management and cash forecasting became critical objectives to manage continued market uncertainty. As a result, any digitization efforts had to support those broader objectives, often through the generation of valuable data.

“To digitize business is to make sure that you’re automating the things that should be automated, to ensure that tools and systems can do better than us, and to make sure we’re analyzing the data,” she said, noting that she spearheaded an aggressive cash preservation effort to “drive a culture of frugality” within the enterprise.

Amid that effort to manage volatility and build up cash reserves, Woods said any digitization efforts that created data silos in the back office actually created some risk. As such, embracing automation in a way that could generate actionable data for more accurate forecasts and financial analysis became imperative.

The data aggregation effort underpinned the ability for the CFO to elevate her position as finance lead within the organization — not only for the finance team, but for the enterprise as a whole. Operating at the intersection of troves of valuable data puts the CFO in a position to leverage insights that other members of the C-suite may not have access to, but it’s a position that will only add value so long as the finance lead can deploy meaningful analysis of that information.

Through analytics and visualization tools, the CFO has the opportunity to gather information across finance, operations, sales, payments and more, and make sense of that data to enable the rest of the business leadership team to guide decision-making.

“Finance is in such a privileged position,” said Woods. “We’re pretty much the only division in the business where you are exposed to this convergence of data that the rest of the organization doesn’t necessarily have … as a CFO, what’s really key to keep in mind is that it’s not about what finance can do with the data — it’s really around what the business can do with the data.”