Figure CFO faces an IPO messaging challenge

It’s been a busy first couple of years for Macrina Kgil as CFO of Figure Technology Solutions.

Kgil joined Figure, a blockchain-native financial services firm, in December 2024, and got straight to work preparing an initial public offering. In September 2025, the month of its launch, Figure’s shares reached the $40 range on NASDAQ.

So, you know, she’s really eased into her role.

“Of course, I covered the foundational work that needs to be done by the CFO to be able to get a company ready to be public,” Kgil told CFO Brew. This wasn’t her first IPO, as she previously helped take consumer lender Springleaf Financial public in 2013.

But the Figure IPO was different, she said, in that it presented a potential messaging challenge: walking investors through Figure’s business model and helping them understand the business opportunities ahead of it. Figure partners with lenders to originate loans, then uses blockchain technology to tokenize the loans and sell them to third parties or securitization vehicles.

“Those were all novel concepts that we were talking to investors about,” she noted.

Rather than dig into all the intricacies with investors, Kgil said she “spent a lot of time thinking about what the KPIs would look like in a fast growing company,” and where the company would be three and five years down the line, and then making sure the metrics were easy to understand.

Easier said than done, when she was speaking with investors of varying specialties.

Formulating the message. Figure plays in the financial services sandbox, but it’s a technology company at its core, according to Kgil. “Investors and analysts were actually coming from both sides of the house,” she said. The tech-focused investors weren’t familiar with the financial services side of the business, while financial investors weren’t well versed in the technology aspects.

For example, for financial investors, Figure Kgil focused on the capital side. “Figure started as an origination company, which is more balance-sheet intensive, and there’s a lot more debt to be used if you own the loans versus if you move to a capital market infrastructure,” Kgil said. “The debt interest expense disappears, and so we focused on that capital side for the financial investor.”

Kgil cited two things that helped craft those messages to investors. The first was demonstrating how the product worked—by both collaborating with lending partners and then distributing those loan products on its capital marketplace. Figure showed “the unit economics at each stage, which any investor can understand…if you go through the steps,” Kgil said.

The second was keeping the finances simple and easily understandable. They focused on just a few KPIs that investors easily understood, including “volume going through our marketplace…and how that is going to continue to build into our profitability, adjusted EBITDA, and its margin.”

“Those were the conversations we really focused on, and that helped us get through to the end,” Kgil said.

Looking ahead. Post-IPO, Kgil has plenty to keep her busy. The company announced in June it was buying Kiavi, in a uniquely structured $717 million deal that CFO Brew recently detailed.

Kgil, who leads Figure’s corporate development team, said the company is open to doing more deals in the future if the timing and the acquisition target makes sense—although they are focused on closing the Kiavi acquisition right now.

“If there is the right target out there that makes sense for us, and it’s in the right profile, then of course we’ll take a look at it and make sure that we are thinking about the right fit in the future,” she said.