Until the late 2010s, a midmarket business—one with at least $3 million in revenue and 10 to 250 employees—wasn’t the sort of customer that Intuit, which owns QuickBooks, went after, according to Sandeep Aujla, who became its CFO in 2023. But in 2017, Aujla, then the SVP of Intuit’s small business unit, began monthly deep dives into user data and uncovered a group of customers who had been quitting QuickBooks.

“We had exceptionally strong retention rates across the business,” Aujla told CFO Brew, “but we were seeing some customers who were…achieving great breakthrough success who were choosing to leave us and make a massive leap” to large enterprise resource planning platforms like NetSuite or Sage. “They were basically paying anywhere from 7x to 10x more,” he said, to make the move to the new platforms.

The group that Aujla had assembled for the deep dives started looking into why. At these 90-minute meetings with financial planning and analysis, data scientists, and the product team—“I used to call them, with great affection, my geek-out sessions,” Aujla said—“what we were realizing is there were just a few core functionalities that they were leaving for.” With that knowledge, Intuit made a strategic decision to move into the middle market.

Michael Lopez, a change management consultant and former managing director at KPMG and EY, likened the move to large tech companies that expand on their core offerings. The largest platform companies, he said—Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple—succeed because “they’re able to rapidly apply [their core capabilities] to something new without having to reinvent everything. They can leverage something that they’re already good at and shift it a little bit to do something else that they also would be good at.”

Click here for more on how Intuit expanded its midmarket customer base.—GD

It’s 2025, and fintech companies have their eyes on the future and are hoping for regulatory clarity.

“A lot of the major names in the digital asset industry are US-based companies—US-based companies that have been asking for regulation,” Ashley Scott, senior director of global policy and government affairs at Circle, a stablecoin platform, said at a CES panel focused on America’s fintech future on January 8 in Las Vegas.

“I think it’s a bit of an anomaly to find an industry in its infancy that has actively sought out lawmakers to be regulated,” Scott added.

“The reason why the industry has been asking for regulation needs to be said out loud. It’s just the basic idea that if you give us rules, we will follow them,” Robin Cook, Coinbase’s legislative counsel, added. “We are an industry that, at its core, is a group of computer programmers and builders. And if there are rules that can be coded into protocols, that can be coded into platforms, there are ways to make sure that compliance can happen.”

There’s an urgency to this regulation and compliance, according to Lindsay Fraser, a senior policy associate at Uniswap Labs. “If we continue to wait…more and more companies will move outside of the US, and so I think establishing that framework will prove that the US is committed to fostering a safe and predictable environment for digital asset development,” she said.

For more on what the crypto industry is looking for out of regulations in 2025, click here.—NP

Ever fall short of someone’s expectations? Chances are, your organization might be doing just that when it comes to pay transparency, according to a new survey from consulting firm Mercer.

The survey, which was conducted last spring and includes responses from 1,160 participants representing 1,144 companies headquartered in 45 countries, found that “pay transparency is quickly becoming a basic requirement for organizations across the world.” Companies feel pressure from both regulators and the workforce to be up-front about how much they’re compensating employees, Mercer noted.

The results illuminate this trend: Three-quarters of respondents said compliance was a “key driver” for their organization’s pay transparency strategy. Most respondents also said that job candidates (69%) and/or employees (58%) expect pay transparency. Employees ranked “fair pay” as the second-biggest reason they stay with their company, behind only job security. That’s up from fourth place in 2022, according to the report.

Yet just 32% of organizations indicated they were prepared “to meet global transparency requirements,” Mercer noted. Only 19% of US-based companies said they’ve already implemented a pay transparency strategy, yet the country tracked ahead of the 13% of companies globally that indicated the same.

Click here to continue reading.—AZ