Wise CFO Resigns to Focus on Healing After Bike Crash

The chief financial officer of money transfer firm Wise is stepping down following a bicycle accident last year.

Matthew Briers, who has served as the British company’s CFO for eight years, announced he is leaving his job Monday (May 22), the latest in a string of recent finance chief resignations in the FinTech world.

“Wise will likely have many CFOs in its first century, and this is simply me starting the process of handing over the reins to the next one,” Briers said in the announcement. “But some of you may know that a year ago I returned back to work at Wise after a quite horrible accident where I went under the wheels of a bus, and so, with this in mind, my focus will shift to making a full recovery.”

He added that he will remain in his role into the new year as Wise looks for a new CFO, with its search due to begin immediately.

“Matt joined us at the time when only around 500,000 people had used Wise, and we were losing money,” Wise CEO Kristo Käärmann said in the announcement. “He helped us scale up into a global service that today 16 million people and businesses around the world know they can count on. I will always be grateful that Matt decided to jump on and build this rocket ship with us. His contributions will continue to shape Wise for years to come.”

Briers’ announcement follows the resignation earlier this month of Revolut CFO Mikko Salovaara, who stepped down May 11 due to personal reasons.

In March, PayPal CFO Blake Jorgensen resigned six months after taking medical leave.

The departures are happening amid what PYMNTS has described as “an ongoing changing of the CFO guard,” with companies like Visa, Intuit and Payoneer all saying farewell to their finance chiefs.

In many cases, these departures involve longtime leaders making way for “younger and frequently digital-first colleagues,” PYMNTS wrote, as the digital resources available to CFOs continue to transform the role.

“I’ve compared being a CFO to the idea of a navigator on a plane…,” Jerry Fadden, CFO at direct-to-consumer (D2C) insurance provider Kin, told PYMNTS in an interview, for example. “You’re constantly making adjustments and covering a broad array of … operational issues…”

PYMNTS research found that more than 90% of CFOs expect a global recession this year, leading them to invest more in upgrading their digital payments infrastructure.