Bill CFO talks deliberate skill building in early-career roles

Growing up in the foothills of the Himalayas in rural India, Rohini Jain said she had no exposure to big business or C-suite executives. But throughout her youth, work ethic was a deep value her family held.

“Working hard was the only thing that you could control,” she added.

After gaining her chartered accountancy certification in India, a few years in England at the London School of Economics shaped her perspective and business acumen. She found the “whole big world of corporations…much more interesting than actually practicing as [a] CPA.”

Now, Jain is the CFO of financial services platform Bill, and has worked at some of the world’s most recognizable companies: General Electric, Walmart, eBay, and PayPal. She joined Bill in June 2025, and has since been focused on scaling the business post-IPO.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your experience like after being in London, and then going back to India to apply the skills you learned?

I grew up in a town where it’s very cohesive, and I didn’t even know the people from the South or the West or the East of India. And to straight away leave home, and [the] first time when I got to London was just an amazing growth of who I was, in terms of a person, in terms of the food I liked, or people I associated with, it was just amazing learning to enjoy people, even though they were different.

I think having lived in different places, and worked with GE in very big teams—I had teams from Finland, from Freiburg in Germany, Wuxi in China, Mexico—a lot of diversity on my teams over time, and it just teaches you so much about how to work with diverse thoughts, people, and really extract the best out of all the cultures, and makes you who you are, after a point.

You mentioned GE being a cornerstone to your career. How do those experiences impact the ways you’re leading at Bill?

You will hear a lot that people who grew up in GE, they are intense, are hard drivers, and operational excellence is really important—owning the operations, understanding the business, even from a finance lens. I learned growing up in GE that if you have a GM or a CEO, as a CFO you’re the right-hand person of your leader. If that person is out for a period of time or whatever, you’re a natural slide-in because you’re the only person who sees all the other pieces of the business. Everybody else owns a piece of the portfolio, but you see the whole thing with your CEO.

I think that was ingrained in me very early in terms of really understanding the business, and not just the financial, functional work. And that has enabled me in my career to be able to move across different industries and have that same curiosity to learn the business and rapidly ramp up.

Looking over the span of your career, what are one or two measures that define success for you?

The one that gives me most joy and is most meaningful in the long term for me is to see all the people that have worked with me on my teams, to see them go be successful in other places, and go create the excellence that we did together and replicate it in multiple places. Seeing your teams grow over time is absolutely fantastic.

And then secondly, for me as I have gone through my career, I have been somewhat deliberate about the skill sets that I pick up for each one of the roles that I have done…So just [the] accumulation of skills that could bring me to a point where today, I could take that role up for a public company CFO, that I could do it with confidence, and the fact that, yeah, there will be some things that I still need to learn, but there’s a whole lot that I have accumulated over the last 20 years that I can give back to the role.

Do you have any advice for young women who aspire to be a CFO? What can they do to set themselves apart?

I could tell people, ‘These are the 20 things that I did to become a CFO.’ Those may not be the things that we need for the next 20 years to become CFO, but the one thing that will be a constant is going to be your openness to learning, and flex to the new environment that you may be in.

Secondly, there will be times, especially in a woman’s life, where it’s just easier to stop working and give up your career, than to keep going. There always are, and they’re different for everybody…You have to just work through those hard times, and it gets easier. I promise everybody, it gets easier. I have worked through days and nights, I’ve had quarter closes with my baby in the bucket seat, and I’m trying to calm her down when closing the books. That’s a short period of time, and what I have been amazed at is how much a human being can do in a day. So you learn to peak with it, then it gets easier, and then you find another peak, and then it gets easier.