Taking over as CFO for a company you already work for has to feel a bit like starting high school when your middle school was connected to the same campus. Yes, there are familiar faces. Yes, the classrooms look the same. Yet suddenly, everything feels different.

But don’t take it from us. Take it from the freshly minted CFO of Airbnb, Ellie Mertz, who had already been with the company for a little over a decade when she stepped into the top finance seat in March 2024.

“I feel like, 11 years in, I’ve been training for this role for that entire decade-plus,” Mertz told CFO Brew. Unlike a freshman waddling around a campus that merely looks familiar, she says she felt “extremely prepared” when it came to institutional knowledge and an understanding of “the business model, the financials, the organization.”

Still, she needed to do her metaphorical homework, and the most important preparation, in her eyes, took the form of the relationships she’d already been cultivating for years.

Keep reading.—NP

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Indirect spend represents a considerable chunk of revenue—around 10%, according to Deloitte, though some sources put it much higher—so it’s a prime opportunity for savings. David Pennino, CEO, director, and founder of procurement services software company LogicSource, spoke with CFO Brew about ways CFOs can keep better tabs on indirect spend, and ways for them to trim costs.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What are some ways that companies could improve the process by which they examine their indirect spend?

I meet CFOs for a living because our buyer is always the CFO. One of the most common things that they’ll tell me privately is they get asked to sign things a lot but they have no idea what they are. [Indirect spend] is a huge opportunity area for them to not only reduce costs, but also reduce risk.

So CFOs are maybe only seeing the 10,000-foot view of indirect spend and not getting granular enough?

Think about a household. Most folks know what their mortgages are. Most know what their car payment is. The death by a thousand cuts is the credit card bill and the Amazon bill. Indirect spend is like that for CFOs. There’s thousands of transactions, thousands of suppliers. It’s hard for them to get their arms around.

For more on cutting indirect spend, click here.—CV

Yes, the role of the finance leader is much different than it once was. But the evolution is not over, according to a vast majority of CFOs surveyed by Sage.

The software developer polled more than 1,200 finance leaders globally and found that 96% of CFOs said they expect finance roles in their organization to change over the next three years, and nearly nine in 10 reported that their role as CFO is different now than it was just a year ago.

Once “traditionally anchored in daily finance and budget management,” the survey’s authors wrote, “successful CFOs now have broader, more strategic roles encompassing company-wide decision-making and innovation.”

With all that change comes high anxiety: Four in five survey respondents said they are worried about the future of their role.

The CFO’s remit. As Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben once said: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Sage found that CFOs were indeed responsible for a whole lot.

Click here to see what CFOs think the role will look like in the future.—AZ

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