Six months after taking a health-related leave of absence, PayPal’s CFO is stepping down.
Blake Jorgensen, who became the company’s chief financial officer last year, resigned from that position Tuesday (March 7), PayPal said in a news release.
The company had announced in September that Jorgensen would be taking medical leave, with Gabrielle Rabinovitch becoming the company’s acting finance chief. PayPal said in the release that Rabinovitch will continue in that role.
Jorgensen, who has served as CFO for companies that include Yahoo, Electronic Arts and Levi Strauss, became PayPal’s finance chief in August.
His departure comes amid what PYMNTS deemed this week as “an ongoing changing of the CFO guard” at companies that include — so far this year — Visa, Payoneer and Intuit.
In many cases, these departures involve longtime leaders making way for “younger and frequently digital-first colleagues,” PYMNTS wrote, as the digital resources available to CFOs continue to transform the role.
“I feel like I’m a big sounding board, not only for the CEO but also the rest of the team,” Leslie Daniel, who became CFO of Genera earlier this year, told PYMNTS. “We really work together. There’s a lot of decisions to be made about what we’re doing.”
As economic uncertainty has companies increasingly looking inward and adjusting operations, the role of the finance chief as a strategic leader has become more and more pronounced.
Kevin Held, CFO at Hazeltree, told PYMNTS in an interview earlier this the year that “finance and accounting teams have become much more of a business partner…”
“I’ve compared being a CFO to the idea of a navigator on a plane,” Jerry Fadden, CFO at direct-to-consumer (D2C) insurance provider Kin, told PYMNTS in a separate interview. “… You’re constantly making adjustments and covering a broad array of … operational issues.”
Meanwhile, corporate CFOs are reportedly spending less time in their roles as their responsibilities move beyond finance. It’s a trend that’s due to a change in corporate structure and an evolution of the job of chief financial officer beyond the “bean counter” role.
“What we’re seeing more now is that the pressures and responsibilities of the CFO have become more and more, and they’ve really become a key part of that C-suite decision-making party,” Gina Gutzeit, whose FTI Consulting monitors CFO job tenure, said. “I think that responsibility has become sort of a catalyst where if they don’t like the direction of the company or they don’t see eye-to-eye with the CEO, that might lead to turnover.”
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