Macrina Kgil, a five-time CFO who has seen many changes reshape finance roles over her decades-long career, is eyeing yet another one that could emerge this year: stablecoin accounting standards.
Specifically, she is hopeful the Financial Accounting Standards Board, as part of a high-profile technical project that was approved last fall, will decide to classify stablecoins as cash or cash equivalents rather than as intangible assets as they are now treated by many companies.
Kgil, who helped take the blockchain-native consumer lender Figure Technology Solutions public last fall, thinks it only makes sense to treat stablecoins as cash. She has been frustrated by the lack of clarity in the current standards for some time, recalling how she repeatedly questioned her accountants at a previous company that held the stablecoin Tether about the accounting treatment of the assets.
“We had huge debate on that, multiple times because there was no guidance and it was ambiguous so we didn’t know what the right accounting would be for it,” Kgil said in a recent interview. “I’m very happy the FASB is looking to clarify this because it will just make it more consistent across the board.”
At Figure, Kgil will have front row seat to any changes in the standards on the digital asset regarding generally accepted accounting principles: Last July, Figure Technology merged with Figure Markets, which previously launched an interest-bearing transferable stablecoin native to the public blockchain named $YLDS that is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Figure, which had a market value of nearly $8.7 billion as of the market close Monday, has been developing new products but one of its core offerings are consumer loans, specifically home equity loans or HELOCs.
Since its founding in 2018, Figure Technology has developed to position itself as a marketplace for the consumer loans which it holds on the blockchain and then resells. Blockchain technology has both enabled buyers of its loans to see the data behind them and assess them more quickly and enabled borrowers to get their loans more quickly.
“What we’ve made easier is our HELOCs can be closed as fast as five days or on average ten days while the industry average is 45 days,” Kgil said.
Kgil holds a bachelor’s in engineering at Seoul National University. She pivoted to become a CPA and began her career at the Big Four firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she worked in auditing and helped take companies public, including the private equity giant Fortress Investment Group. She jumped to Fortress in 2008 where she served in an advisory capacity on acquisitions and capital market transactions. From 2013 to 2015 she was CFO of Springleaf Financial Services, now One Main Financial, and later served as CFO of Blockchain.com from 2018 to 2022, according to her LinkedIn account.
Looking back, Kgil acknowledges that even though more accounting standards are needed, working in blockchain now compared to even just a few years ago has become easier as more people in finance are familiar with it.
“I think it’s much easier today,” Kgil said. “Back then there was no guidance, no regulatory clarity of what needed to be done and the technology was very nascent.”
