New CFO job, same mission: leverage customer data

Workforce payment platform Branch’s new CFO, Matt Peterson, said that what attracted him most to the company was not having to choose between “high growth and operational discipline,” because the company has both.

“Now I can come in and leverage my experience, and the pattern recognition that I’ve had at past usage-based businesses, and really help them get to that next stage of growth,” Peterson said.

He came to Branch after three+ years as CFO of gifting and rewards platform Snappy. Peterson has also advised on several IPO launches, including of cloud computing service Fastly in 2019.

Besides having the best of both worlds at Branch, which was founded in 2015, Peterson also said it has a good foundation that’s ready to scale. Amid his first few days, Peterson told CFO Brew about his approach, and what CFOs should think about when entering a new company.

Organize the data. Peterson said that at usage-based businesses like Branch, CFOs need to deeply focus on the company’s definition of a customer, and understand their behaviors. To do that, he said, businesses should ideally house all customer data under one roof, as in a data warehouse, making it easier to find and compare data points.

The second piece of the puzzle, Peterson said, is managing the data by reinforcing it with relevant internal and external data sets and information.

“Meaning, I don’t want to do data enrichment in my accounting system, and I don’t want to do data enrichment in Salesforce,” he said.

“Then you have a single source of truth that you can then use to augment, not only just for your finance team, but that’s what really helps GTM, product, marketing, et cetera, because we’re all looking at everything through the same lens.”

Follow the roadmap. “What makes a good CFO? The table stakes answer is ‘protect cash,’” Peterson said.

But he also believes a successful CFO is one who can align the product plans with the cash plans, and who can “do the basics very, very well, almost religiously.”

“A good CFO has done their job if you can align a financial plan to the product roadmap. Everything comes back down to that roadmap: the timing of the release, the timing of telling the story externally in the market with beta, when to get training and enablement ready for sales and go to market, when to add that to their quotas. How are we going to model and account for it? If you can do that well, the rest should take care of itself,” Peterson said.

Efficiency is a “huge focus.” There’s a lot of AI noise that finance pros have to navigate these days, he told us.

Sticking to the basics—“How fast are we closing the books? At what point does it not matter if we’re any faster?”—is a good way for CFOs and other finance workers to stay the course.

But he also said he uses AI as a way to cut down on the more menial parts—“I call it chores, almost, like the daily grind work that we need to do”—of his and his employees’ work.

“If you’re using FloQast to automate your reconciliations and your matching, that alone can take your close down by half a week, if not more. We’re actually building our own AI bots that do our journal entries that we would otherwise do manually every single day,” Peterson said.

“Then when you think about efficiency and production, that’s been a huge focus area for me in the first 90 days here, where I already have highly talented people and I want to enable them with tools that will 3x or 4x that productivity…what that unlocks is, my team can spend more time analyzing, thinking, recommending, running a strategy, versus just doing.”