CFO THOUGHT LEADER

• 1144: Rewiring Finance for AI, Data, and Business Impact | Michael Bourque, CFO & EVP, , Convera

  Jack Welch’s binder hit the floor before Michael Bourque had time to react. At just 23, he sat in a Honeywell acquisition review meeting as the “keeper of the numbers,” rifling through a binder he knew didn’t contain the EPS detail Welch demanded. When the answer didn’t come, Welch “swept his binder off the table, threw it across the room, and got up and left,” Bourque tells us. The moment stayed with him—not only the need to anticipate every question, but the feeling of “how I was treated,” a lesson he carried forward.That early scene captures the intensity of Bourque’s 15 years at GE, where he rotated every four months on the corporate audit staff, learned to understand a business model quickly, and moved across countries from Mexico to Italy to Canada. He tells us those experiences became “a massive accelerator” but also showed him what he did not want: senior lives “lived 90 days at a time.”Leaving GE led him into Ocwen, where regulatory pressure mounted immediately. Advisers warned him to “run for the hills,” yet he stayed, tracking cash daily and absorbing public blows from the New York DFS. The experience, he tells us, taught him “how to navigate a crisis and try to keep your cool.”At LendingHome (later Kiavi), he applied that calm to redesign the business around two customer cohorts—first-timers and professionals doing “eight or more” flips a year—and anchored decisions in unit economics. That discipline would shape his leadership at Convera, where he now steers a global payments network and pushes teams to adopt AI tools that “help them… get clarity on that next operational step.”

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• Discipline at the Heart of Innovation - A Planning Aces Episode

  In this episode of Planning Aces, we spotlight FP&A insights from three CFOs leading innovation with discipline: Chris Sands (InvoiceCloud), Steve Sutter (Celigo), and Niels Boon (Cint). Each shares how finance is shaping AI, go-to-market models, and data-driven transformation without losing rigor. From building an “AI Ops” function and embedding finance in sales strategy, to piloting AI tools in small, staged experiments, these leaders treat innovation as a managed process. Our resident thought leader joins to connect the dots, emphasizing structure, clear metrics, and portfolio thinking as the new essentials of FP&A.We’re excited to welcome author and former CFO Glenn Hopper into the co-host seat. Glenn joins us as our resident thought leader, bringing a deep well of experience at the intersection of finance, technology, and AI. We’re thrilled to have his voice and perspective guiding this next chapter of Planning Aces.Chris Sands leans into organizational design, reallocating talent into a formal AI Ops team and emphasizing change champions.Steve Sutter focuses on commercial mechanics, tying FP&A to sales economics, talent mix, and scale-up guardrails.Niels Boon emphasizes risk-staged innovation, using small pilots for operational wins while ring-fencing bold synthetic-data bets as long-horizon R&D.

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• 1143: Building a Transformation-Ready Finance Function | Troy Anderson, CFO, Kelly Services

  When Troy Anderson accepted the CFO seat at Kelly Services in 2024, he stepped into an organization that, as he tells us, “had done a number of acquisitions … and really invested in the business.” The legacy staffing firm had spent nearly $1 billion to expand its reach but had yet to fully integrate those pieces. Anderson’s mission: align a global operation that had grown faster than its systems.It was a familiar challenge. Across three decades and multiple industries, Anderson has made a career of steering companies through transformation. At Universal Technical Institute, he led a finance overhaul that supported a business which, he tells us, “more than doubled the company.” Before that, as a senior finance leader at Xerox and its services spinoff Conduent, he helped raise $2 billion in debt and “build out the public company infrastructure … from scratch.” That experience, preceded by an investor-relations rotation where he worked directly with Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and CFO Kathy Mikells, became “the game changer” that propelled him toward the CFO office.Now, at Kelly, Anderson is guiding a transformation “on both sides of the ledger … organizational and technology.” He’s integrating recent acquisitions, modernizing finance systems, and preparing the company for the cyclical realities of a staffing industry he describes as “in decline for about two years now.”His approach reflects a pattern consistent throughout his career: when others see complexity, Anderson sees structure waiting to be built—and an opportunity to apply every lesson learned from the transformations that came before.

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• 1142: From Webcomics to Wall Street: Inside a Storytelling Powerhouse | David Lee, COO & CFO, WEBTOON

  When David Lee joined PG&E in San Francisco, the company was collapsing under the weight of California’s first energy crisis. “These utility veterans kind of got us into this,” the new CFO told him, handing him an unusual assignment: act as an “anti-CFO.” Lee spent his days testing every forecast and financing plan, proposing contrarian options like a preferred-equity line from KKR. The exercise, he tells us, forced him to “think independently” and learn how to guide a public company in deep trouble.That moment crystallized a pattern in Lee’s career—a willingness to enter complex situations and rethink accepted wisdom. From his start at Leo Burnett Company, where he learned to “walk in the shoes of the consumer,” to his nine-year transformation tour at Del Monte and later Best Buy’s celebrated “Renew Blue” turnaround, he has sought environments that reward original thought over routine expertise.Today, as global COO and CFO of Webtoon, Lee applies the same mindset to a different kind of transformation—the business of storytelling. He tells us the platform connects 24 million creators to 156 million readers each month, growing its English-language audience 19 percent year over year. Yet he draws a bright line around technology’s role: “Human storytellers are the best storytellers.” AI, in his view, should fight piracy and improve discovery, not replace creativity.Across every chapter, from crisis utilities to digital comics, Lee’s philosophy remains constant—progress begins when finance leaders question assumptions and listen long enough to see possibilities others overlook.

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• 1141: The Long Game of Resilient Finance Leadership | Erik Wissig, CFO, SureCo

  When Erik Wissig recalls his early years as a founder, one moment still stands out. The team had met its growth goals and earned their bonuses—but the company’s cash flow hadn’t caught up. “You need the cash to make those payments,” he tells us. That hard-won lesson reshaped how Wissig approached finance from that day forward: plan ahead, balance ambition with liquidity, and bring the wider leadership team into that awareness.Before that turning point, Wissig had spent a decade in investment banking, advising hundreds of middle-market companies on transactions. Eventually, the advisor wanted to build. In 2013, he co-founded Hixme to give employers a new way to fund individual health insurance—an idea born from the Affordable Care Act’s reshaping of the market. When regulatory realities slowed progress, Wissig stayed the course. Hixme’s platform and team were acquired by SureCo in 2020, where he now serves as CFO and COO.At SureCo, Wissig’s banking discipline meets an operator’s pragmatism. He focuses on two levers—raising revenue per customer and scaling efficiencies—and on hiring into his weaknesses, surrounding himself with strong CPAs. His leadership style mirrors his philosophy on failure: persistence is progress. “If the game is still being played, then you haven’t failed,” he tells us.Twelve years into his pursuit of the ICHRA model, Wissig remains motivated by one conviction: lasting change in healthcare begins by putting individuals—not institutions—at the center of the system.

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