Voice of the CFO: Where Are All the Next-Gen Billing and Forecasting Tools?

As a longtime chief financial officer (CFO), Kiran Hebbar, CFO at Alloy, said there are two sorts of tools he’s been looking for, and for which he sees great opportunities.

First, a tool for consumption-based billing.

“I personally believe that there’s a billion-dollar company to be built there, but there are no good solutions out,” Hebbar told PYMNTS.

The second opportunity is for a new generation of forecasting tools.

“The next generation of forecasting tools that will help us give visibility on where revenue is headed has to take into account big data, [artificial intelligence (AI)], machine learning, work with consumption-based models to figure out where revenue is growing and so on and so forth,” Hebbar said.

Handling Operational Challenges

These would help with the many operational challenges that come along with being the CFO of a rapidly growing company.

“It varies day to day,” Hebbar told PYMNTS when asked about the factors that take up most of his time. “When I’m not in fundraising mode, it’s the pure operational stuff.”

That includes tackling issues related to scaling the company’s billing solutions (Alloy has a consumption-based billing model); forecasting revenue, cash and expenses and what sort of actions the company should take; and go-to-market issues, such as determining if the company has the right amount of sales capacity to hit its targets and whether it should be hiring more or less.

Sustainable Growth

Hebbar joined Alloy in June 2021 with a background that included scaling high-growth software companies and a decade of venture investing experience. At Alloy, a firm that specializes in identity verification and fraud solutions, he is tasked with leading the finance functions and helping to scale the business.

Interviewed for the PYMNTS series “A Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO,” Hebbar said neither he nor Alloy’s management team, founders or board members believe in “growth at all costs.”

“It’s more of a sustainable growth,” Hebbar said. “So, we have good growth numbers while we are keeping an eye on how much are we burning, are we investing in the right areas, and so on and so forth.”

The metric Alloy uses is the Rule of 40, finding the right combination of growth and profitability. Having done that analysis, the company found that it sees a lot of growth, but not growth at all costs, so it is still hiring.

Competing for Talent

“The talent market is unbelievably strong — in other words, to get good talent, you still have to compete,” Hebbar said. “So, we are selectively bringing in the right types of people — keeping the bar very high — but we are still hiring.”

Alloy currently has 286 employees and about 75% are based in New York. The company is friendly to remote, Hebbar said, but finds that employees do want to come into the office.

“What people miss is that in-community feeling of coming together, working on problems together — especially in product and engineering where it makes a huge difference to put people in a room and to help them brainstorm and come up with creative solutions,” Hebbar said.

Determining the Real Focus Areas

In addition to focusing on sustainable growth, Alloy is looking across the business to determine where it should prioritize. For Alloy, international is a huge opportunity, so it is going in that direction.

Beyond that, many banks and FinTechs are being attacked by fraudsters, which is adding to the demand for fraud solutions. Some companies have said they are scaling down their plans to go public because of the frequency of fraud attacks.

“We are in the position to see all of that and to solve fraud as experts through a combination of the tools that we bring to the table as well as best practices that we have insight on,” Hebbar said.

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