Voice of the CFO: Global Challenges Require Big-Picture Thinking, Local Focus

Global companies are facing macro challenges not seen for decades — war in Europe, inflation and labor challenges.

Rumors of recession on the horizon and highly volatile currency fluctuations driven by interest rate hikes are also in the macro mix.

That puts a lot of relatively novel challenges on the plate of a contemporary chief financial officer (CFO). Combine that with a recent acquisition by a private equity firm, and you have an idea of the role of CFO Laurence Capone. She has served as chief financial officer of the customer relationship management (CRM) platform provider Pipedrive for the past year and shared her perspectives with PYMNTS in a recent interview.

Being Global, Thinking Local

The company’s client base is evenly distributed among North America, Europe and the rest of the world, with each representing a third of the business.

“We monitor every metric that is available from a global standpoint, but with a local market filter as well,” Capone said. “The macro is a little bit different in each of those geographies. In Europe, you’re focusing on the impact of the war on how the dynamic is changing there. In the U.S., we’re looking at the labor market.”

Capone said that while some macro trends are global, they have different impacts regionally. For example, inflation is a worldwide issue, but it impacts Europe differently than the U.S.

Navigating Uncertainty

Pipedrive serves small and midsize businesses (SMBs), so the prospect of recession is of particular concern, because its customers typically don’t have the same resources as larger peers to weather an economic downturn.

But so far, so good, she said.

“The market, from a digitization maturity perspective, is still very much robust and open for us in terms of opportunity, she said. “But I think in this post COVID, perhaps recessionary environment, there’s even more need to digitalize to gain efficiencies. We’re enabling small businesses to grow and so optimize revenue.”

In fact, Pipedrive just passed two big milestones — the 1,000-employee mark and the 100,000-client mark.

FX — a 178-Nation Challenge

One of the CFO’s most important role is to simplify complexity. Capone has done just that when it comes to currency fluctuations.

“Here’s the simple approach in a complex environment. We do business in 178 countries. So, imagine the number of currencies we would have had to deal with. So, the reality is that we mostly do business in two currencies: Euro and U.S. dollar,” Capone said. “You have local countries with different price inflation dimension. So, we try to geolocalize our pricing as much as possible from an FX standpoint, always on two carries.”

A Foundation for Growth

As if all that isn’t enough, Capone said she dedicates the most time and energy to laying a foundation for growth under new ownership.

“It’s really related to where Pipedrive is in its journey. So Pipedrive was acquired about a year and a half ago by Vista Equity Partners. We are really putting on our value creation plan. So, a lot of our conversations are around setting the stage for this journey,” she said.

Managing Risk

One of the principal duties of a CFO is to manage risk — that’s a small word with a big definition. Capone shared her views on risk right now in terms of her daily duties and what she’s doing to manage and mitigate it.

“My focus is on two areas,” Capone said. “First is the macro profile. Managing that involves monitoring it and doing scenario-based planning to try to be ready and as agile as possible for whatever may come.

Second is product and innovations. The focus is on compliance, making sure that we, we hit the mark on our regulatory constraints. I work closely with our [information security] and legal teams on those matters.”

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