Alexandra Betesh
Chief Customer Officer, Visual Lease, a maker of accounting and lease management software based in Woodbridge, New Jersey.
So why are you here today? What’d you come looking for?
I came to learn to see what the finance persona that we interact with so much is really learning for their next year, what their focuses are, what their challenges could be, to make sure that I can better understand them and better speak to them with our product, our services, things like that.
When you talk to people in finance and accounting, what are they asking for, what’s the vibe out there when it comes to technology?
Everyone’s trying to cut costs right now, and so we’re hearing that loud and clear. How do we help them save money and not just help them with their lease accounting, which is one simple task that’s very repeatable, but how do they actually become more strategic with the portfolio and then save money by being more strategic and by operating a little bit better.
What’s your indispensable piece of technology? What’s the thing you can’t do without?
Excel. Excel and PowerPoint. I’m a Microsoft girl all the way. I was actually in a session right now about AI and thinking about how with Copilot or with some of these products, they can use any system that is based in Excel, and leverage all of that data with or without integration, which is interesting. I’m just kind of seeing how that could work.
So they’re basically going to have to pry Excel out of your cold dead hands?
Yeah, Excel will never go anywhere, in my opinion. One of the best pieces of software ever designed and built. I’m just interested to hear some of these things that are happening with Copilot.
Daymond John
Businessman and investor; founder, Shark Group; founder and CEO, FUBU. Best known for his work as an investor on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank. He was a keynote speaker at the event.
When entrepreneurs are coming to you and they’re talking about technology, what are they asking you most of the time? What do they wish it was doing for them?
There’s two things. First of all, there’s the forward facing streamlining of their social, creating content, scraping, who’s seeing it, not seeing it, giving them an algorithm on how to grow. And then the rest is usually processes. Like, how does this talk to that, plug into this, plug into that, where do I get a dashboard? How can I look at a dashboard and see everything moving in my company?
What’s the one thing you wish tech was doing these days that you don’t see it doing?
I think small and medium businesses don’t have [enough access to] credit. You can get credit on Credit Karma for yourself personally, you can go right now and get a car off a lot in two seconds. But technology hasn’t taken the friction out for small and medium businesses who want to grow and have access to credit.
And for you personally, what’s your indispensable piece of technology?
I couldn’t live without FaceTime. I literally just wouldn’t work because I want to see my little girl. It’s that connectivity.
How are CEOs and entrepreneurs feeling about the year to come? What do you tell them about what to do?
They’re confused. The hardest problem is still sourcing finance, but more important talent. The talent right now, their wages are not growing as fast as the interest rates and the quality of life are. There’s a lot of emotions in them and they’re trying to find out how do they really, really nurture culture and growth at the same time as the bottom line.
Best piece of advice you give them?
Invest in two, three, four really good leaders.
Lauren Pearl
A New York-based fractional CFO. “I work with lots of different small businesses and startups to do their financial management.”
Why’d you come today? What are you looking for at this event?
New technologies to see what’s best in class for my clients as they grow and scale. Also to meet other CFOs. I’m actually planning to meet one CFO in my network who’s also here today. So it’s a great place to meet and talk with him too.
When you do get together with other CFOs, what’s the first thing that comes up these days?
The changing startup environment and the funding environment; how a lot of investors are asking us to do a lot more with a lot less, the budget is shrinking and we have to be conservative and we have to think about profits, but also we’re expected to scale and we really need to get some significant returns. So that pressure, how to manage that, how to manage cash flow in the face of that.
What’s your indispensable piece of tech for work?
I’m a Google girl. I use a lot of G-Suite tools in my work. In the past four years, I’ve worked with more than 150 startups through teaching at NYU, my own practice and through advisory. So we need to be able to speak the same language very quickly. A lot of startups, that’s where they start: Low cost tools that are really powerful. Then, as they grow, they grow from there.
If you could wave a magic wand over tech, around finance and accounting right now, what would you have all this stuff do for you?
I’ve seen a lot of automation tools recently going after solving the shortage of CPAs in the industry. That group is shrinking, fewer folks are going into that as a profession and they’re aging out as well. I’ve spoken with a couple of very cool startups that I advise who are looking to automate that entire thing using a lot of AI tech. I think it’s really smart because the pain points just continue going to continue to get worse.
What’s the best finance and accounting joke you know?
[Laughing] The best joke? I don’t think I know any jokes about finance and accounting because finance and accounting people just aren’t funny.
Glen Turell
CFO, Broadway Licensing Global, New York. The company buys and licenses the rights to more than 8,000 Broadway shows.
So why are you here today? What are you looking for?
Tech Solutions. I joined a company about a year ago that was four companies that were consolidated. All had different systems. A lot of them were antiquated. We’re looking to streamline everything.
What’s your favorite tech in your shop right now? What do you love? What’s indispensable?
I’m really enjoying Avalara because this company that I worked with never did sales tax correctly and the capabilities they have to get down to the jurisdictional level and sort of automate things is really helpful.
If you could wave a wand at all these nice tech folks out here what would you have them do?
My business is a little unique. There’s not a right back office system that can handle royalties. And with royalties, I mean, proper revenue recognition, rights management, there’s not a tool that actually does all of that. If I could have a magic wand, we’d, we’d have that solution that you can just install.
Niyati Chhaya
Co-founder, Hyperbots, a provider of finance AI automation systems based in Delaware and Banglore, India.
AI is so hot these days. When people run into you and you tell them what you do, what do they want?
They want it to work and solve their problems, right? They essentially want to see productivity gain. They want to see efficiency and they want to see accuracy. They don’t want frustration.
What do you wish AI could do for you?
For me, I think it’ll be pretty cool if AI started helping us take strategy decisions. Go a little beyond human humanlike behavior. Right now we are at a point where we can build humanlike AI if we do it right. But can it do more thinking? That’d be really good.
You run a business. If you could wave a wand at all the tech out there, what would you have it do?
Solve all the problems, so everyone focuses on decision making, which is more strategy level versus a lot of repetitive tasks, a lot of daily grunt [work]. If AI is able to help in taking decisions like, “Hey, this is a great vendor, this is a great discount opportunity. Hey, this is how you can save your cash.” Those kind of things.
How far away are we from that?
A couple of years?
Stephan Ruiz
Former U.S. CFO and Head of Operations, World Economic Forum; Now co-founder of a private equity and venture capital fund to be deployed in the Middle East.
What are you here for? What are you looking for today?
I was looking to better understand the impact of AI on what we do in corporate finance in general, as well as in the investment world, especially in private equity.
What’s tech lacking right now that you’re hoping tech will do for companies?
It’s not like it’s lacking anything, but we’re just trying to improve the ways of working and make operations more efficient and get to the data more easily. And also adapt basically the data to the audience. To move away from static dashboards, for example, to more dynamic dashboards, depending on who is actually looking at this data.
What do you think the state of AI is right now versus what you would like to see it be?
For me, it’s not necessarily a big buzz because I’ve been working on that for the last six years at least. But now it’s more like the spreading of it or the deployment of the technology so that it’s used by all the teams and not just by a few people within the company. That’s the big thing. My view is more like the personalization of the use of this data. Not necessarily the data, but it’s more how you consume the data.
Brad Lassiter
CEO, Last Tech, a New-York based IT services provider for companies in the financial industry.
What are you here looking for today? Why’d you come?
We’re looking to connect with other vendors in the industry that service our clients, and just kind of to find out the state of the industry and keep up to date on what’s going on and see how we can add value.
What’s your favorite piece of tech that you have in your stack right now?
For us, it, it’s got to be a an IT services specific platform called ConnectWise. It kind of glues all of our other pieces together. Helps us to manage our workflows, both our help desk and our projects and plugging-in invoicing, billing to the other dozens and dozens of services and systems that, that we manage.
If you could wave a wand over technology, what’s the thing you would have it do right now?
I think it would be to simplify and consolidate information. Really helping business leaders focus on their aims, their goals, getting the information at the fingertips to help them make the right decision.
How close do you think that is?
I think it’s going to be an ongoing battle. I don’t think it’s ever a one-click solution. You find the right partners to help you do as much as you can. It’s always about ROI. You gotta make sure that they’re delivering more than you’re paying.
Michael Gorman
Professor of finance and analytics, Sacred Heart University. “I teach in the analytics, the FinTech program and the finance program. I’ve been there about a decade.”
What are you here looking for today?
I’m curious about the things that I should be teaching my students for the next two to three years. I’m using this as a way to try and improve my curriculum and our course offerings and those sorts of things.
When students are thinking about technology these days, what’s their expectation about what technology is going to do for them?
They’re a little bit uncertain about what companies are going to expect from them in terms of the technological abilities and their awareness of the solutions that are out there. It seems to be assumed that they’re digital natives, but that doesn’t mean they’re familiar with all the tools that we’re using. There’s definitely some trepidation.
Do they cheat with AI?
The way we administer tests and assignments is definitely shifting in the world of AI. It’s not that some professors have gone all the way back to the old Blue Books, but a lot of us, especially in the technical disciplines, you have to assume that they’re using it and teach them to use it. It’s just a tool that’s ubiquitous, and so they’re going to be expected to use it when they get out into the workforce. I take the approach of “if you use it poorly, it’s going to show in your final product.” We’re trying to help them build skills around the tool rather than hide it.
What’s the one indispensable piece of technology in your life and work right now?
I actually just started to use Notebook LM from Google. It’s as an AI tool. It does an amazing job of making little podcasts out of resources that I send it. You can run a model on a very restricted source of input. So I can tell it I just want to go over a 10K, it’ll develop a podcast and I can listen to it on the way to work, so I’m immediately up to speed and I can go back and double check things, but it saves so much time rather than have to start from scratch and read a 500-page document.
Priscilla Everhart
Chief Business Officer, Unbound ED / CORE Learning, a New York based provider of professional learning support for teachers and districts across the U.S.
Why’d you come here today? What are you looking for?
I came here today looking for ways to leverage AI to eliminate rudimentary tasks within the company to help streamline our tech stack and make sure that our experts can spend their time on things that matter most, which is helping to truly look at the growth trajectory of the company in a way that is data informed and data driven.
What’s your indispensable piece of tech in your stack right now?
I don’t have one right now. I look at all of the 50-plus products we have and they all have bits and pieces of it, but they all require a little bit more nuance than I think we should have to, to be very data driven and able to respond on our feet to the evolving ed tech market. In terms of analysis of data, I would say between exports in QuickBooks and reports in QuickBooks and my own Excel building files and my teams, that’s the best I got right now.
If you could wave a magic wand over tech right now what would you have it do?
Build as many API connectivity possibilities as [can be] in a way that of course doesn’t erode their margins, but truly allows for companies to build insightful decisions and drive the future.
Do you have a finance and accounting joke?
[Laughing] No. I suck.
Kyle Eisenman
Controller, The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, based in New York.
Why’d you come out today?
We are looking for a new ERP and wanted to see what the landscape looks like right now, trying to get a sense of what else to incorporate, what else to be looking for as we move forward.
What’s the indispensable part of your tech stack right now?
It’s our ERP, it’s currently GP [Great Plains] 2015, which we need to update. Our CRM, I guess. Salesforce is also pretty integral to our sales function.
Are you looking forward to an ERP update?
It’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s a manual clunky system. We don’t like our vendor, we don’t like anything about it. So it’s time.
What’s the thing that you’d love to see all this great tech do for you right now?
Automate the easy stuff. AP I think is step one, but we’re actually using one of the vendors here to offshore it. I think that’s the easiest win. Probably the FP&A piece on top of that. Reporting, getting it out to our various departments and chapters is a days-long process at the end of the month.
Do you have a good finance and accounting joke?
Shoot. [Long pause] No, I can’t think of one. [Long pause.] No, sorry, I’m, I’m blowing it.
Dan Woltman
Vice President of Membership and Corporate Partnerships, Society for Defense Financial Management. “We are a nonprofit based in Alexandria, Virginia. We represent 14,000 plus professionals in the defense, financial management industry. That’s uniform military, civilian government and private sector.”
Why’d you come today? What are you looking for?
We have 85 plus corporate members and so I’m here to learn and meet new companies to see if they’re interested in partnering with the federal government and what value they can bring to the financial management profession for the defense industry.
When talk to your members what’s the big challenge?
Technology modernizing systems automation, AI and talent management. Finding folks with the new generation skill sets to manage all these technology and initiatives and filling those positions.
What’s your essential piece of technology to help you do your job?
Me and my team, we don’t tell my boss, we like using ChatGPT to simplify things for us. We do a lot of outreach, meeting agendas and letter writing, so that really helps things move forward quickly.
How’s your relationship with ChatGPT these days? Are you guys doing well together?
Absolutely. It’s a great tool.
Do you say please and thank you?
We do.
Ahikam Kaufmam
Founder and CEO, Safebooks, a Tel Aviv and San Francisco based developer of advanced accounting technology associated with financial data governance and automation. Safebooks was part of the pitch stage competition at the event.
Why’d you come out today? What are you looking for?
We got selected to participate, but otherwise I would come because coming here you can see all the market in a single flow. Super interesting.
What’s your favorite piece of technology in your own shop that you find indispensable?
Everything around AI is very, very interesting. And it’s complicated because unlike other areas of technology in corporate finance, the data is very sensitive. Most companies will not allow you to train a model based on other companies. You need to figure out how to train a model based on that company only. That’s something we’ve developed and I think it’s very interesting.
As a CEO, what’s the one wish you have about technology right now that could help you out?
I’d like to hope that we can trust AI better to a level where it’s mistake proof. The office of the CFO today hasn’t dramatically changed over the last 20 years. You have more systems, but it’s still a lot of manual work, unlike other places where stuff has been very much automated. So that’s something that I think we’re going to witness changing in the office of the CFO over the next five years.