The Excellence-Driven CFO: Navigating AI, Talent, and Transformation

Megan - 00:00:19: Today, my guest is Darren Heffernan, Chief Executive Officer for Trintech. Darren joined Trintech in 2001 and has held a number of strategic and corporate development roles during his tenure, including CFO and most recently, President and COO. Driving numerous acquisitions and expansions into new markets, Darren has been instrumental in leading Trintech's growth strategy as both a public and private company. His extensive experience, inclusive leadership approach, and deep industry knowledge have positioned him to steward Trintech's focus on operational excellence and commitment to client services, partnerships, and growth. A passion for technological excellence and a drive for superior performance are embedded in his DNA. Darren has spent over 30 years in finance and operational roles, driving innovation, and is a fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, and has previously sat on the Financial Executives International's Committee on Finance and IT. Darren, thank you very much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Darren - 00:01:57: Megan, it's great to join you. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Megan - 00:02:00: Yeah, I'm excited about this one. Today, we're going to be talking about adapting leadership incentives for the new generation of the Office of Finance and the C-Suite. And Darren, I'm looking forward to learning about you and your experiences and more about this topic. So let's jump right in. Yeah, let's go, Ferb. So Darren, you've had a remarkable career transitioning through various leadership roles across finance and operations. Can you walk us through your career and then maybe give us some insight into what initially sparked your passion for financial leadership?

Darren - 00:02:32: Sure, Megan. Yeah, I guess it probably started back when I was in high school. Honestly, accounting was by far my favorite subject, along with all manner of sports. So I always knew at a very, when I was 14, 15, I kind of wanted to be an accountant. So how sad is that? And then from an educational perspective, I wanted to make sure that I fostered that, right? So I grew up in Ireland. I knew- I kind of wanted to be a Chartered Accountant, and I set out my stall to do that. And I was really fortunate that I qualified as a chartered certified accountant, pretty young at 23, 24. And then it started me into my, in advance of that, I started to my working career and I started off in Auditing, which Auditing gives you just such a base level of knowledge for accounting. It provides valuable learning experience for me. And then I went to different companies and I went into different countries. So I moved around a lot and I did different finance roles. And my last kind of before I joined Trintech was for General Electric. I ran those process for one of the European Equipment Finance businesses. So one of GE Capital's businesses. And I learned how difficult it is closing books and what a manual process it is. And I also learned that really, I love the operation side things. So when I got a chance to join Trintech, I joined as VP responsible for FP&A, which is a completely different mindset for me. And I love interacting with the different aspects of the business to find out what was going on. So software was a new area for me. I love finding out the product, what goes into it and what goes into the ideas behind it. I love thinking about the marketing and how you were after that. And so then ultimately, I became CFO of Trintech very much with a background of operational execution and not a strong controllership side, which is why I always had a lot of strong controllers underneath me. But I love the interactive business strategy and understanding what was driving us to grow and looking at acquisition and things like that. Then it was natural for me, I felt, to move into the kind of President and chief operating officer role, just to expand that knowledge and really to let a, I would say, a far better CFO take over than me. And I definitely got that. And ultimately, two years ago, I took over as CEO. And that was when you can really kind of execute on your vision of how you want business to grow. So it's really ironic that I entered the Trintech because we automate financial processes. So everything can do with reconciliations, compliance, journal entries that interact ERP systems. And when I think back to what I worked at General Electric, it was perfect. I wish we could implement that too, especially on the high volume manual reconciliation around leasing, just business we were in at the time. So you could probably say, like, I'm really passionate about finance. I love finance. I love where industry has gone. I love the fact that AI at the advent, that there's multiple iterations of AI, what it is today, whether it's machine learning and things of that nature. But yeah, I already got a bit longer. That's my kind of experience today, where I've landed today.

Megan - 00:05:53: And you, throughout your career, had the luxury of seeing some of the things on the operations side. So how important do you think it is for finance professionals today to rotate through some sort of operations role within their career?

Darren - 00:06:09: It's something I just really highly encourage, right? And I think the new advent of leadership and even people coming out of college and things like that, they assume that a lot of things are going to be automated, right? Like, they're certainly not doing what I did back in the day, which was manually reconciling transactions with two pieces of paper and you're flipping through and you're ticking and tying between both of them. Like, those days are definitely gone. So I highly encourage people in our finance team, but also across other departments, go look at the root cause of everything that's causing your challenges today and see how you can change the source. And so the only way you could really do that in the finance department is by figuring that out, interacting with people in different departments. Because the one thing I learned during, like, not that I didn't know before, but COVID really highlighted for me that finance is at the heartbeat of every single organization. So the better the input is to the finance department, the better you can go through it and ultimately the better output that you provide. So it's a big cultural thing for me to make sure that all of our teams actually route themselves through that.

Megan - 00:07:20: And before we switch gears and get into incentives, let's just talk a minute about AI and automation. Very hot topics of today. Where do you think they are heading and how is it going to evolve the office of the CFO?

Darren - 00:07:37: I think the first thing I would say is I don't think AI is going to take your job. But I do think that people who understand AI, understand tools and understand how it works, they could potentially take your job. So for me in finance, look, ultimately, compliance is going to dictate that we will have to sign off on everything that's out there. Like you will never, I think, have a fully automated system that allows no human intervention in the process of ultimately releasing numbers to the street or to your private stakeholders. So, but that's not saying like, I think we can get so much more efficient in everything that we do. And that's a big part of what we're developing our product roadmap in Trintech. Like how can we make sure that people avoid doing all the manual things that they've been so used to? How can we make sure that when we're thinking about product roadmap, that we're thinking of things like simple things like posting a journal entry, for example. Like we've worked on part of our solution, which is eliminating if it takes nine minutes on average to post a journal entry to your ERP system. We have figured out a way to get that down to one minute. And depending on the volume of transactions, you can actually go through. One of our longstanding, really large customers thinks they can save about 50,000 a month through implementing our new functionality on journal entry. And that to me is like one part of one piece of a solution of our products that is only going to become way more common in every aspect of what technology brings to the office of the CFO. So, so that's funny, but we're trying to, we're bringing in talent. We want to know their motivation, their knowledge of systems, as much as we want to know about their accounting knowledge. And what is their level of investigative ability and things that they want to look at? How curious are they about AI? That's a big part of it. I think it will play. We're only in its infancy. We have a long journey to go, but everything that I see on it, we had previous advent, whether it's machine learning or robotic process automation RPA. These were pre-generational things on AI. And yes, it's going to be a game changer, I think. But ultimately, I don't think that's the end of finance per se or the end of the duties that people have to do. I just think they'll be doing them a different way. And one of the ways that I look at it, and I ask our teams all the time, like just providing data to us is not really that, is that not that interesting. But if you could turn that data into intelligence, that's where the game changer is. And then if you can incorporate AI into that, you'll be able to turn that data into intelligence just far more quickly than we've ever been able to do before. And I think that's actually a massive game changer for us, not just in finance, but across all factors of our company.

Megan - 00:10:28: And I'm just curious, but when you look at your average new customer, what percentage of everything that can be automated do you find that most companies have automated? Is it still pretty nascent? Is it pretty immature? Or are you finding that most companies have automated most everything they can?

Darren - 00:10:48: No, I still think it's pretty immature, right? Or I think it's immature from a silo perspective. Like they're doing it in specific areas, but it's not being done as part of an overall strategic value proposition across the company of integrating all these tools. And I think as you get more into the integration tools that are out there, you get more into DAZ, which is data and software. You'll see, you're really going to see game changers in how all companies are doing it. The larger companies, there's no doubt, Megan, have looked at this, have tackled this, have had data science on their payroll for many years. But midsize companies, they're still starting off. They're still in the infancy of that journey. And they have to be like one important thing I just point out about AI, right, is we're now at the stage where we've got two challenges as regards to talent, right? One is we have the lowest amount of graduates ever coming out of our educational institutions with finance degrees. That's the first problem. The second problem is we have the most CPAs retiring or accountants retiring globally. And so the only way we're going to be able to fix this from a productivity perspective is by embracing technology. And AI is going to be a big part of that. Like the accountants of today don't want to do what I did years ago. They don't want to work a lot of hours all the time on doing mundane, boring tasks. They want to be involved in the exciting things about developing a business, focus on the strategy and adding value, learning from their leaders, learning from their peers, really understanding the business. And I think in a lot of ways, accounting is really a jumpstart to somewhere else in the business, like it was for me. It's my passion, it's my jumpstart to get into operations and ultimately to be the CEO of this great company, Trintech. But like it all started with understanding what finance is the heartbeat of everything we do.

Megan - 00:12:42: And let's switch gears now and talk about leadership incentives. So the leadership incentives that worked in the past likely don't resonate with the younger generation of CFOs and executives today. So in your experience, what types of incentives or leadership structures do you find most effective in motivating younger generations?

Darren - 00:13:04: I think there is elements of it that are definitely attractive, right? Like people will always look at salary bonuses, equity, things of that nature, right? But what I find with the younger talent is that it's really is how quick they want to get up the ladder. And like what we try and focus on is when people come into our business, try to understand like, where do you want to be? Where do you want to be in two years? Where do you want to be in five years? Where do you want to be in 10 years? Some of the questions they don't want to be answered to, but at least getting a feel for where they want to go, gives us an idea of what we should invest into them as regards the tools that we're going to do, the training they're going to go through, the mentorship programs that they're going to go through. So that to me makes a big part of the incentive side is making sure they can see that Trintech can provide a real career path for them in whatever area they actually want to go. And if they don't know where they want to go, we have a kind of a program to help them figure that out through. Our Executive Team are all mentors to a large amount of our employees. We do employee surveys, eNPS all the time. We do customer surveys, sorry, employee surveys every year. It gives them a chance to really tell us what's going on and where they want to be. So career advancement is a big part. Work-life balance is massive. I think I said it earlier, but when I went into the accounting profession, I knew weekends were going to be off limits when it was the end of a month. I knew holidays were off limits. The youth of today, for want of a better word, just don't accept that. And you know what? They're dead right. I think I was the one that was a bit foolish back in the day when I wasn't alone. And they just look at it from a completely different perspective. And I think that's actually really positive. When they're working, when they're off, they want to enjoy life. So you've got to make sure when you build that into any incentive programs that you set for people. But ultimately, it's about building a culture that people want to work in as well. That's so important to make sure that they feel they've got a home, no matter what their background is, that they feel that this is a big place that they can foster their career and drive themselves forward for personal and professional gain.

Megan - 00:15:14: And you mentioned having had experience at GE, which is pretty famous for their leadership development program and their rotational programs. Have you implemented anything like that at Trintech?

Darren - 00:15:26: I don't know if I've been as bold as kind of some of the GE initiatives. But then a lot of the GE initiatives were, they were cultural aspects, right? Like there was a famous one where I was there when Jack Welch was the leader, and his idea was at the bottom 10%. For example, it should leave every year. For me, on a performance basis, it's about setting the culture to know that if you perform to the best of your ability, which is in line with the expectations that have been set, you will develop a career inside Trintech. Or what I tell our employees all the time is, and I say this repeatedly on our in-the-know meetings, like at least once a quarter, you'll hear me say this, is that, look, if you're building a company with a specific culture for high performance and driven by data, it's not for everybody. If this is not something that you are passionate about, if you don't believe in our mission, in our values of what we're trying to do, you shouldn't work here. I truly believe that people should come into work every day motivated by their sense of purpose and hope of what they're going to achieve for that day, for that week. And if over a consistent period of time, you're struggling, right? In my mind, you shouldn't put yourself through that. It's not the right place for you. You should figure out what makes you happy. Life is too short. So go do something that makes you happy. And I'll help you do that. I've told them I've offered our HR staff to people if they want to help for different careers, if it's not for them. So I'd like to think that's maybe part of the kind of GE, because GE definitely did, and I think currently still do, like care about people. But it's going to tell you a funny story, Megan. One of the reasons I joined Trintech is the year end for GE was the end of December. So there was no such thing as taking time off pre the holidays or during the holidays or anything like that. And when I was interviewing for, to come to Trintech, their year end, our year end is January. So like, do you believe that was one of my motivating factors to go? You mean to say that I can be off over the holiday period? The answer was yes. I said, okay, that is definitely a big factor of why I chose to do something completely different. And that, I think, is a precursor to even a lot of the questions we get asked today by the younger generation coming into the workforce. It's not quite the exact same, but it is things like that. Okay, how much time do I get off? What am I able to do? What do you expect to work? Our answer, our standard answer is really about we will set you to task, we will set you, but you're in control of your own destiny. We just accept. We expect productivity.

Megan - 00:18:07: Yeah, I agree. I think 40 hours is a lot of time to be doing something that you don't enjoy or absolutely love.

Darren - 00:18:16: Yeah. Life's too short. Like why would you want to do something you don't enjoy doing? Like I'm sure you enjoy your job, right? You get to talk to people all the time and get different views about different topics. Like that must be fascinating for you because no day is ever the same, right? Like, and mine, mine is the same, but my day now I will plan on doing whatever it is, 10 things every day in the morning. I'll come in and I'll go, I might get to none of them because something else is after is going on. And that's the exciting part. And probably honestly, why I've stayed so long at Trintech, because every year has just been different than every challenge that being put in front of me is something that's just really excited me. And that's what I actually hope we can do is set those set those goals, set those expectations. And a young person is looking for a career that can come to Trintech and know that this is something that they can have longevity in their career and be challenged multiple different roles. And like, it's amazing when I think of our employee base, how many have moved through multiple different departments and even people who have left and then have come back. Like we've got a bunch of boomerangs that have come back and saying, you know what, I didn't realize what we had here. I think of us, we need to do a better job of kind of explaining to our employee base of kind of the good things that we have. And then also the challenges that we have, because like nowhere's perfect. We have our challenges the same as everybody else.

Megan - 00:19:44: And the role of CFOs has evolved from traditional financial management to more strategic business leadership. So how do you ensure that your leadership incentives align with both your financial performance in any given quarter and the long term strategic vision of the company?

Darren - 00:20:01: Yeah, I don't know if we're different than anybody else. Right. But like all of our Executive Team, for example, are all measured financially as in dollars they receive for bonuses are measured on the exact same thing. So they don't have different financial incentives to perform different to the goals of the financial goals of the company. What they do have different, obviously, is the goals as their respective functions. But they're all set as collaborative goals that they culturally have to work with each other. Look, the most important part for me when I put a team together, including our CFOs, just making sure that you've got a team that wants to work together, that can gel personally together, that just has the same passion for the end goal, whatever that end goal may be. And that we measure ourselves like all on KPIs. Like I think I said earlier, we are a very data-driven organization. So whether we're looking at new products, marketing, leads, campaigns, sales cycles, even all the normal KPIs associated with the finance department. And we look at them all. We measure them all. We look at them as a team. We talk about how we can help each other. We look at our NPS, our customer NPS. We drill it together as a team to see how can any of our functions change it if it needs to be or double down on it if it looks good. So that to me is probably one of the key things. And obviously looking at things on the long term. Like you have to have for your Executive Team and particularly your CFO longer term goals as well to make sure that people are not thinking of it in a short term way. Because short term is no good for anybody when you're trying to build longevity and go after the goals of the company.

Megan - 00:21:53: And you touched on this a bit, but cross-functional collaboration has become increasingly important. So have you had to adapt incentives at all to foster a culture of collaboration? Or how is it like I versus team?

Darren - 00:22:09: I don't know if I would say like incentives as in financial incentives. Like we've got like quarterly awards that we give out based on our values, right? And those are definitely weighted towards people who have cross-collaboration between teams. And they're like, they're generous incentives for everybody in the company to go after. I do think that you can't achieve, in my mind, and this is probably based on my experience of making sure I understood all different areas across the business. I don't believe that I could do my job to the best of my ability if I didn't have that. So we culturally try and drive that into everyone in our company. Like go spend time understanding like why are customers calling our support desk? What's causing that? What's the solution that our support members are telling? Like listen to a business developer person on the phone trying to attract a new prospect. Even if you're in finance, like this will help you understand what drives the various people in the company on so that you can ultimately achieve your objectives, right? And again, across our business, like as I said, our bonus plan for everybody is financially set on our financial goals. But the execution of your tasks determine how much you get paid on the back of that. So you kind of have to really collaborate with people across the business to really achieve your goals. And we have deliberately set it that way.

Megan - 00:23:36: And the next generation of leaders in finance is more tech savvy and data driven. So how do you incentivize the finance team to not just manage costs and revenue, but actively use data to inform decision making and even drive innovation?

Darren - 00:23:50: That's a great point. I love it because one of the things that I've always been a big believer on is like, you got to try some, right? Like, just don't be afraid to fail. Like, I guarantee I've made enough mistakes in my career over my lifetime. And, but I've worked with some great leaders where they built a, an environment where it's allowed me to make some mistakes. And that's what we try to do, like, especially with our finance leaders, right? Like I want them to try new tools. I want to make them available to them that if we believe, if they believe it can make them more productive, go try it. Like there's so much technology out there now in the office of the CFO. Like we actively encourage, go sign up for a POC, go get a temporary license, go see if it makes a difference to your life. Like whether it's Spark Copilot, Co-Pilot, just go try it, right? Like see what difference it makes to you. We run that through our security team. He's the custodian. The leader there is the custodian of what tools come into the business. Once they go through that person and his team, make sure that the security perspective, it's all signed off. We're actually, we really do encourage that. We've got our main platforms, whether it's ERP or FP&A or Close Manager. We use our own software. But there's a lot of other things that we highly encourage them to just really experiment and see where it takes them. So I love the curiosity aspect of bringing new talent into our company and providing an partner for existing people. Because we've got a lot of people who've been there for a long time. I just want to make sure that they know it's safe to try something different and don't always, don't have that attitude of the answer to the question being, well, why is it done that way? Well, it's done that way because it's always been done that way. Challenge yourself. Get your colleagues to challenge yourself. And actually, earlier today, I was on a different meeting. I said to somebody, you know what? I said, stop sending out that report because they've been sending out this report for so long, right? I said, stop sending out. And in about a month, go back and see who asked you for the report. So I want people not to do things because they've always done these things and embrace the tools to make them more productive. It makes their jobs easier, make their lives easier. Ultimately, it's more fun.

Megan - 00:26:05: Yeah, I completely agree. And the younger generation is driven by purpose and values, whereas maybe 20, 30 years ago, that was really not even a thing. So how do you adjust leadership incentives to reflect the shift, ensuring alignment with the company's culture, sustainability goals and corporate social responsibility initiatives? These are all terms that were not I'm not even sure they existed when I started my career 25 years ago.

Darren - 00:26:31: No, they definitely didn't. With my, I'm probably the same. I'm probably a bit before you, but they definitely didn't exist. Right. Or if they did exist, nobody really paid any attention to them. But like we've got strong kind of DEI initiatives inside Trintech, right? Like we don't measure or set ourselves goals that X amount of people have asserted back. But we're very aware of it. And we want people to be who they want to be. And we've set up like a lot of, we call ERGs, which are Employee Resource Groups. And like 35% of our employees actually participate in these Employee Resource Groups. And they could be anything from BIPOC, which is called Black, Indigenous and All Peoples of Color and Allies. There's pride groups that are in there. There's women of Trintech that are in there. There's different abilities of Trintech, such as if you're Neurodiverse or learning difficulties. Like there's all different groups that we allow people to be part of. And you can actually suggest if you want to set up a new ERG group, you can set it up. We've seen that's really attractive to people that attract talent. It's a big deal for them, right? And we monitor this by like twice a year, we do eNPS. We make sure, is our Employee Net Promoter Score going the right way? Do people enjoy working in Trintech? Are we providing the right environment? We do employee surveys. Once a year, we ask like specific questions based on a multitude of different things, but includes respect, includes attitude for different values. Like that's the one thing that I kind of pride ourselves on, right? Just be yourself. It goes back to what I said earlier on. You need to be in an environment where you're happy to be in the environment and you feel that you can get the most out of yourself. And if we don't provide that for you, like for yourself, not only for us, you should look elsewhere where you can find it somewhere else. So we try to do the best we absolutely can for incentivizing people coming in and providing an environment where they just want to work here. So we do a pretty good job. I've been really pleased. Like our talent are amazing. Our business is continuing to grow. And I'm signing a lot of clients all the time. Trintech is just a great place to work. I give that full credit down to the employees because they're the ones that are driving.

Megan - 00:28:53: Yeah, although leadership has a huge role in that as well.

Darren - 00:28:56: It does. It definitely does. But like you constantly, I think, have to check yourself as a leader to make sure we said earlier, what was good yesterday may not be good tomorrow or good today. So you constantly just have to make sure that you're looking at the way you're running things, you're looking at the culture you're building. And is it the right area for you? Is it right in today's environment? And once you keep asking yourself that question, like it's like running a closed process. That's what we do. You're never fully going to automate the closed process because you're always looking for additional things to do. And it's like running a company. You're never going to be perfect. If you ever think you're perfect, that's probably the time you're going to go backwards.

Megan - 00:29:38: Yeah. And last question, but what trend should current and aspiring CFOs be prepared for to effectively lead and motivate their teams in an increasingly complex and data-driven business environment?

Darren - 00:29:51: Yeah. So we've talked about AI, right? So I won't go back on that again. But that is just a massive one that AI to automate the routine task is going to attract talent. You need it to survive in the environment we currently live in because the talent is just not there compared to where it was like five, 10 years ago. That's really important, right? I would say, you know, cultivating a digital first mindset. Digital transformation isn't optional. You have to own it. You have to promote it. You have to encourage it. You have to reward it. You have to hire people that have that capacity and that thinking and that methodology. And their mindset. I would also say, look, finance today is as much about telling a storyline related to the data as it is about anything else. So make sure you have them. The trend is definitely going to go that way. Make sure you're teaching people that. Prioritize employee engagement development. You work so hard at trying to bring new talent into the company. If you don't prioritize that, you're not going to retain them. And that's problematic. Make your employees also very aware of the regulatory part that they live in because it's changing all the time, right? It'll change on the back of multiple things. It could be like new administrations as we're going through right now. But you have to be on top of it and see how does it affect you and how is it going to affect your business in the future? And then kind of the last one I'll leave you with is just like cybersecurity and risk management are just such massive areas. It's been one of the biggest areas of investment for us as a SaaS company. I don't think that will change. I think it will only become bigger. But as it quite rightly should be, the data we have been given and trusted and given responsibility for is too important for it to ever be at risk. So that's a big area as a trend that I would say we've got to make sure we're constantly on top of.

Megan - 00:31:44: Darren, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Darren - 00:31:46: No problem, Megan. Really enjoyed it.

Megan - 00:31:48: Yeah, I really enjoyed speaking with you. And thank you so much for finding the time to be here with us today to share your experience and knowledge. And I wish you and Trintech all the best.

Darren - 00:31:57: Thank you so much, Megan. Talk to you soon.

Megan - 00:31:59: Yep. And to our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.