Afterpay CFO Drives Operational Excellence Through Back-Office Modernization

Over the course of recent years, the chief financial officer has begun to settle into a newfound strategic role within the enterprise. As a member of the coveted C-suite, the chief financial officer is no longer just a number-cruncher but a vital leader of the organization that can steer their company towards growth.

The last 12 months have showcased just how imperative it is for CFOs to place digitization at the forefront of those growth strategies. For Laura Nadler, migrating away from paper became mission-critical mere weeks after she stepped into the role of CFO at Afterpay’s North America operations. As a company with a digital-first business model, Afterpay drives electronic payments adoption for online merchants and their shoppers — and that front-office data, it turns out, can be extremely useful in the back office.

“Our product is digital-first, and we have that data,” Nadler recently told PYMNTS. “It’s critical to make sure it can actually flow across the technical ecosystem.”

Digitizing data is step one. But for the CFO, it’s only the beginning of delivering value to the enterprise in the form of automation, intelligent forecasting and back-office modernization.

Steps Ahead

There were plenty of organizations that were thrown into chaos amid sudden remote working requirements. Luckily, Afterpay wasn’t one of them, and Nadler highlighted the company’s relatively advanced digital workflows.

Taking advantage of customer-driven data from the company’s product offering became crucial in the early weeks of the pandemic, allowing the firm to understand shifting consumer spending patterns that would ultimately drive the firm’s own financial roadmap. She said the key to navigating market uncertainty was wielding real-time data for contingency and scenario planning as well as investment strategy.

“Data visualization is also really important, because as you have more and more data, being able to absorb it and use it becomes critical,” she said, noting that it’s not enough for finance teams to be able to merely access information. Focusing on the metrics upon which business leaders could take action became essential.

Taking Data To The Next Level

Even the most digitally advanced organizations still discovered opportunities for improvement amid the coronavirus crisis. While Afterpay was largely digitized, nixing the remaining paper in the back office also became an important piece of supporting a remote workforce, as did encouraging vendors and partners to embrace ACH payments over checks.

There were “pretty straightforward” conversations with suppliers and business partners about migrating away from paper, Nadler noted, adding that the pandemic has lifted the veil on the benefits of digitizing B2B payments and accelerated educational efforts for many firms in today’s ecosystem. Adoption of tools similarly supported nudging the digitization needle ahead even further, allowing Nadler to access even more electronic data from which to derive forecasts and actionable insights.

As the company continues to press forward in that modernization effort, Nadler said she is examining ways to take that electronic data to the next level.

“We still have a ways to go in terms of automation and making our processes scalable,” she explained. “We have the foundation in place, but there is a lot more we’re looking at as we develop our digital roadmap in terms of leveraging newer technologies like blockchain or robotic process automation.”

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a particularly attractive technology, she said, pointing to its ability to not only support automation of back-office workflows but derive even more valuable data to strengthen the accuracy of forecasts.

Prioritizing Growth

While CFOs are undoubtedly leaders in this back-office transformation, they are also collaborators with their finance teams and the rest of the C-suite. As such, Nadler said they must navigate varying desires among business leaders and strike a balance between improving existing workflows and driving growth. Ultimately, the two go hand-in-hand.

“Often, there’s such a focus on growth and adding capabilities that you need to help people see that fixing, automating and scaling your processes is foundational to driving the kind of growth that you want in the business,” she said.

Since the initial shock of sudden work-from-home requirements creating friction in processes like on-boarding new hires or accounts payable, Afterpay has settled into its new normal of remote collaboration and digital data. Many of those changes are likely here to stay, said Nadler, even when professionals do return to the office.

That’s because the organization has embraced the competitive advantage of this modernization push. Digitization breeds data, which drives automation and robust forecasting, which supports growth. This transformation is a “competitive advantage,” said Nadler, and as CFO, it’s imperative to lift the veil on how operational excellence can help the organization get to where it wants to go.

“CFOs can serve as role models and champions and shape the impact that [technology] has within their own organizations,” she said. “We can bring our own strategic lens and our operational skills to helping our business partners. We can use our metrics and dashboards to shine a light on progress.”