FP&A's evolution into CFOs' essential strategic asset

Rideshare company Lyft announced insider Michael Brous will be its next finance chief, succeeding Erin Brewer on her planned retirement, according to a Wednesday press release and securities filing. Brewer plans to remain working as an advisor through Dec. 15 to help support the transition, Lyft said.  

Brous, who currently serves as Lyft’s head of Lyft Urban Solutions and safety and community care, will take the San Francisco-based company’s top finance seat effective Sept. 28, according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The CFO transition comes as the San Francisco-based company looks to expand its usage of autonomous vehicles — announcing Wednesday that it now offers driverless rides in Nashville, Tennessee through a partnership with Google’s Waymo. The launch comes about a year after the two first announced their teamup and marks the first city where AV rides are available through both the Waymo and Lyft mobile apps, according to the Wednesday release.

Brous, 39, joined the rideshare company in 2018 through its acquisition of Motivate — the world’s largest “bikeshare” company which operates such brands as Citi Bike, Divvy and Capital Bikeshare, according to a report by CFO Dive sister publication Smart Cities Dive at the time.

Brous, who served as Motivate’s VP of finance, first took the role of head of FP&A for Lyft and has held a variety of roles throughout his subsequent eight years with the company, stepping into his most recent role last November, according to his LinkedIn profile. As CFO, Brous will look to build on the “fantastic foundation” left by Brewer, he said in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn.

Brewer, meanwhile, will be stepping down after three years as CFO — a tenure which included Lyft’s first investor day in 2024 and the expansion of its services to global markets, the departing finance chief highlighted in a LinkedIn post.

“I’m so honored to pass the reins to one of the most respected leaders at Lyft, Michael Brous,” Brewer wrote on LinkedIn. “We’ve worked side by side for years, and I’ve watched him drive impressive growth for Lyft Urban Solutions. He knows this company and this team, and he knows how to get results. I know Lyft will be in great hands.”

In association with the appointment, Brous will receive an annual base salary of $650,000, and will be eligible for an annual cash bonus opportunity equal to 50% of his base pay, according to the SEC filing. Subject to approval by the Board, Brous will also be granted two awards of restricted stock units: One with a grant date value of approximately $775,000, and another with a grant date value of approximately $2 million, the company said.

"As we scale our global platform and grow our AV capabilities, Michael’s financial discipline, operational chops, and deep knowledge of our business and customers make him the perfect choice as our next CFO," CEO David Risher said in a statement included in the release. "He has delivered results again and again — across finance, strategy, growth, and operations. I am excited to partner with him as we execute on our next chapter of growth."

Lyft’s pick of the 39-year old company veteran also comes as the average age of new CFOs when hired fell in the first half of this year to 48.2 years old, CFO Dive previously reported.

Brous will be taking the finance reins as Lyft takes further steps to keep pace with rival Uber in the AV industry. Lyft is now offering driverless rides in two U.S. cities, with its announcement of Waymo rides in Nashville after the rideshare launched a similar service with May Mobility in Atlanta, Georgia last year.

Nashville Lyft users can be matched with a Waymo vehicle at no additional cost, the company said Wednesday — noting that to be eligible for such a service, they must request a route that takes place within a particular service area, which the company expects to expand in the future.

The rollout of the Nashville service comes as Lyft seeks to catch up with rival Uber, which is facing changes in its own relationship with Waymo. The AV provider recently announced plans to offer AV rides through its own mobile application in two cities — Atlanta and Austin, Texas — where Uber previously exclusively offered the service, Bloomberg reported in July.

Uber currently offers AV rides live through its platform in seven cities — expecting to increase to 15 by year’s end, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call on Aug. 5.

Uber has also pledged to spend $10 billion over the company years across equity investments, infrastructure and vehicle offset commitments related to the technology, according to Khosrowshahi.

Others in the automotive space, including electric vehicle maker Rivian and the Elon Musk-led Tesla, have also increased spending on AV technologies, with Uber expecting to purchase 10,000 fully-autonomous robotaxi vehicles from Rivian for its own fleet, CFO Dive previously reported. As spending jumps, however, safety concerns about the technology have also risen.

In February, U.S. lawmakers pressed officials from both Tesla and Waymo about recent software challenges, CBS News reported at the time, while reports of crashes, near-misses and glitches have sprung up alongside the technology’s rollout.

Nashville riders are able to decline a driverless ride or to opt entirely out of the option, Lyft said Wednesday, stating “human drivers will continue to serve riders throughout and around the service area, creating a hybrid network of human-driven and autonomously driven vehicles.”

AI is reshaping Mina Samaan’s budget season in a number of ways this year, including one that runs counter to the technology’s time-saving promises.

The CFO of the California-based lendtech startup BeSmartee, Samaan said he opted to kick off budget planning in May rather than in September or October because he wanted the extra time to gauge the impact of the AI tools everyone is using and get an understanding of their costs. 

“AI made us start earlier, the reason being over the last six to nine months everybody has been on an AI frenzy so there’s a lot of tools that are being used,” Samaan said during a recent interview in Oak Brook, Illinois, after a meeting of The CFO Alliance, a networking group for financial executives. “This has caused us to take a step back and look at the tools we’re spending on.”

The technology is also changing the calculations that are part of the company’s budget projections, because AI enables BeSmartee to develop new functions faster and so it changes previously held assumptions, he said. “Historically maybe you could come out with a feature or two, but now with AI you can come out with four or five,” he said.

While Samaan acknowledges AI is bringing exciting changes to finance teams, he views himself as conservative in terms of his approach to adoption and to tapping AI to help with developing the year’s budget. 

“Our finance organization is using AI and it has been tremendous, but it’s not something I can put my name on blindly,” Samaan said. “I’m helping my team adapt to it but I always tell my team you have to use it as a junior accountant or a junior finance analyst. You have to triple check it and modify it. It can speed up certain areas, however I can’t say I can trust it 100%.” 

Samaan, who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and accounting from the University of Illinois Chicago, has been CFO of BeSmartee for about five years. Previously, he served as head of accounting and FP&A at LawnStarter and his experience also includes three years as an accounting manager at Groupon, according to his LinkedIn profile.   

For the first time this year, his finance team is using Anthropic’s Claude AI plugin to help develop the budget in Excel. Ultimately in coming years, he expects to explore using a full AI budgeting system as long as it offers SOC 2 data privacy safeguards, but he’s moving slowly toward full adoption in the budget process. 

With what he terms a “cautious eye,” Samaan currently uses AI for a number of elements of the budget, including the data capturing, validation and trend analysis aspects of the process. One of AI’s strengths is its ability to quickly understand the data you’re feeding it, so a trend analysis of top 10 customers or a margin analysis that would take a human analyst a day or two can now be done with the help of AI in hours, Samaan said.

“Analysts are prompting what they need to see done versus actually doing the formulas and going in there so they become more validators,” Samaan said.

So far the cost of the AI budget assistance has been manageable. Samaan sets up Claude so that he will get an alert once the bill for its use hits $500. Normally, that would pay for a month or two of use, but he anticipates the company might hit its limits sooner during budgeting season.

While he takes a frugal approach to AI that aligns with being a startup, he said the AI cost is currently “not a crazy number.”

Cambium CFO Peter Coats aims to create a “North Star” for his C-suite colleagues by deploying artificial intelligence to build key performance metrics and strengthen other aspects of the company’s finance operations, he said.  

The San Francisco-based Cambium, a business looking to create a more sustainable marketplace for the wood industry, announced Coats’ appointment to its top finance seat on Aug. 25. The move is the company’s most senior finance hire to date and its first external C-suite hire, according to the press release.

“A key aspect of our strategy is to deploy new technology, AI, automation, in an industry that's ancient, and that that applies to the back office as well,” Coats told CFO Dive in an interview.

Making space for thought work

Cambium uses technology to better connect wood buyers and suppliers, and manufactures “Smart Wood”— a product line made from domestic salvaged and underutilized trees that can be traced via barcode. Coats is joining Cambium as the business targets “rapid expansion” of its platform, according to the press release.

His hiring comes shortly after the company announced it had acquired Connecticut-based woods product company General Woodcraft in July — its fifth acquisition in five years, according to a press release at the time.

As he settles into the top finance seat, Coats identified several top priorities on his to-do list, including bringing technology further into the finance team’s workflow.

“What I'd like to do is really build out a lot of the automation tools and deploy AI in ways that make our job a lot more fruitful and effective, in pursuing the fundraising as well as other FP&A activities that we need to focus on,” he said.  

A structural engineer by training, he left the field to pursue finance “really with the aim toward…using my analytical skills to drive impact for an organization that was doing well by the world,” he said.

Coats previously spent six years at Google in roles including head of strategic finance, where he managed financial strategy and planning for its “Other Bets” segment, including Waymo and Deepmind. His past experience also includes stints at Goldman Sachs and Wildcat Discovery Technologies, and he is joining Cambium after serving as CFO and co-founder of an unnamed startup in stealth, “focused on building financial infrastructure for the building materials industry,” according to the press release.

His time working with Deepmind at Google means he is fairly familiar with bringing AI tools into finance, and he is working to find the right balance between tech and talent in his first few months at Cambium. He has asked the team to figure out their day-to-day or month-to-month processes, and differentiate the tasks that can be automated from those that must be conducted by employees, such as filling out bank applications, he said.

“What I’d really love is for everyone to be spending as much time as they can on what I think of as thought work,” Coats said. “Part of that thought work is building out the automated tools and maintaining those automated workflows, but some of it is really important analysis and positioning for the company.”

Building out the North Star

Another of Coats’ top areas of focus as Cambium’s CFO is “building the North Star for Cambium leadership,” developing the tools needed so the company can execute on its ambitious strategy, he said. That entails using existing systems and resources and “pulling the data together that we already have flowing through our plumbing and delivering it in a way that's actionable,” he said.

For example, the business needs to further develop key performance metrics, both financial and non-financial, Coats said, and build out financial models so Cambium can isolate data points or external factors that could benefit the company, such as predicting the impact of changing wood prices. The company currently does not have that capability.

In the near-term, Coats aims to allocate the resources Cambium already has to ensure the business can achieve its goals, pointing to developing a “coherent and effective” capital strategy as an essential, he said.

Cambium secured an $18.5 million Series A funding round in 2025 led by VoLo Earth Ventures, according to a press release at the time. The company is working on lining up several different lines of debt capital, Coats said.

“One of my priorities is really just focusing on framing the value proposition that exists in a way that's digestible for investors,” he said.

Coats has been heartened by the enthusiasm shown by existing investors he has spoken to and has faith that the business will continue to receive support, he said.

Newly-appointed Apollo.io CFO Phil Moon thinks of the structure of the finance function like a pyramid, he told CFO Dive. The base of that structure is systems and data, which then support accounting, building up to financial planning and analysis, and then, at the top, strategic finance.

“I think my biggest focus at the moment is making sure that the base of that pyramid is really solid, it's making sure that we have scalable systems, data, and processes,” Moon said of his early days in the CFO role for the San Francisco-based go-to-market platform. Apollo, an “AI-native” platform which offers a business-to-business contact database for sales, revenue and marketing teams, tapped Moon for its top finance seat last month as it seeks to drive further enterprise expansion, according to a May 27 press release.

Building that solid base means “looking around the corner to say, ‘hey, we know that the product roadmap is headed in this direction. Can our systems and processes handle that?’” he said. “’Do we need to reconfigure them in some way to be able to support the business?’’’

Building a solid foundation  

In some ways, Moon thinks about his “marching orders” as Apollo’s new finance chief simply: “It's effectively a capital allocation job,” he said. It’s utilizing the company’s resources —“some combination of people and time and cash that you have on the balance sheet” — and maximizing the return on investment across those resources.

For Apollo, the challenge of that balancing act is not a lack of opportunity, but rather that the business is spoiled for choice. Because the platform is embedded into its customers’ workflows, “there are so many different directions we can take the business,” Moon said, whether that’s potentially moving further into the AI tech stack or possibly building out a content management system.

However, before taking advantage of any number of possible opportunities, having that firm foundation remains crucial. Apollo has rapidly scaled over the past few years — seeing a 400% jump in enterprise accounts over the past 12 months, according to the press release announcing Moon’s hiring.

The company has 4 million global users and has seen its revenue rise five times higher since closing its latest funding round — a $100 million Series D led by Bain Capital in 2023, which gave the company a valuation of $1.6 billion.

Ensuring that the systems and tools in use can keep pace with the business as it scales can be particularly challenging for high-growth companies, Moon said.

Before moving to Apollo, Moon served as CFO for employee management software provider Homebase for two years, helping to shepherd the business through a period of high growth, including the close of a $60 million Series D round in 2024, TechCrunch reported at the time.

He also helped to lead Grove Collaborative, a consumer products maker, through its 2021 public debut, a SPAC merger which valued the entity at $1.5 billion, Reuters reported at the time.

For companies that are slower growing, the urgency around building scalable systems and data is “less acute,” he said. However, if a company is seeing rapid revenue growth, “you’ve got to move really quickly in building those systems, and actually, if you haven't started working on them in advance, you're already behind,” he said.

Moving up the pyramid

It’s still early days in Apollo’s CFO chair for Moon, and he sees a time when his focus will shift away from data readiness. Once the backbone of systems is established, the finance function can work its way “higher up the pyramid” to focus more effectively on strategic finance and driving key business outcomes, Moon said.

Presently, as finance chief, “I think the place where I can be the most valuable is to focus our efforts  into the things that are most important for us to get done near term, and what will set us up best for the long term,” he said.

As well as ensuring scalability and capital efficiency — Apollo, Moon noted, is “somewhat rare” in that it continued to scale, but resisted the temptation to raise more capital than needed when rates were lower — the CFO is also focused on leaving space for the finance team itself to broaden its own horizons.

“I think the guidance that I always give to my teams is, I want you to take kind of a really expansive view of your role in an organization,” he said. “I don't want you to think of yourself as a financial analyst, I want you to think of yourself as a financially minded, analytical, hardworking person.”

For years, the promise of real-time data has been dangled in front of the finance function. We are told that instant visibility into liquidity, risk and forecasting is just one more integration away.

While access to data has certainly improved over the last few years, the reality on the ground for many CFOs is that they are no closer to making real-time a reality. 

The uncomfortable truth is that most CFOs I talk to still end up running everything through Excel. We might be producing these documents faster than we did five years ago, but speed is not the same as synchronization. The underlying data and analysis are not yet truly real-time. To move from lagging indicators to genuine control, we must address the structural and cultural hurdles that keep finance leaders in a cycle of fast but late reporting. 

The weight of technical debt 

The primary antagonist in the quest for data-driven agility is technical debt. Corporate systems are often a patchwork of legacy architecture, and the cost — both in time and capital — to untangle these systems is immense. This debt creates a paradox. While more and more data is accessible, fragmentation and siloes often create more complexity rather than faster insights.

True visibility requires more than speed; it comes from deep integration across ERP systems, payment rails, and suppliers. The more data that is integrated, the more CFOs can actually understand the nuances of their business. The most forward-thinking leaders are now looking beyond their own walls, recognizing that integrating relevant external data is the only way to achieve a holistic, predictive understanding of the financial health and position of the business.  

While the technology for embedded finance and working capital tools has improved significantly, adoption is far from uniform. We are seeing a widening gap between smaller, more agile firms and large, established multinationals. 

For a large multinational, the barriers to entry are structural, not just technical. These organizations often deal with disparate systems, decentralized decision-making, and centralized controls. Furthermore, they have often optimized their legal structures over decades to meet very specific tax or regulatory goals.

When a new financial technology like embedded finance is introduced, it faces many more hurdles than just a technical review. It must survive the many rounds of standard legal and financial product reviews, plus the additional scrutiny of adopting an entirely new tech stack. This multi-stage review can halt innovation in its tracks. 

At the other end of the spectrum, smaller companies are proving far more nimble. Without the weight of legacy complexity or layered bureaucracy, their CFOs can more readily adopt embedded finance tools. For these leaders, these technologies act as financial levers, providing easier ways to manage cash flow and optimize working capital in a volatile market. In this environment, the smaller firm often has a better grasp of its true liquidity than a global giant. 

Closing the blind spots 

The blind spots facing finance leaders today are rarely universal, as they vary from company to company depending on the specific tools and data silos currently in place. However, the solution is almost always the same: better integration. 

CFOs are perpetually hungry for data that is faster and more granular. The blind spot usually exists in the gap between the ERP and the actual movement of money. By integrating payments and supplier data directly into the core finance systems, leaders can begin to see patterns, such as shifting supplier health or payment friction, before they show up as a line item on a monthly report. Integration is the only way to ensure that more data actually leads to better understanding. 

The question of how to gain control and resilience is not a new one. It is a question that could have been asked at any point during my career — be that five, 10 or even 20 years ago.  The answer always depended on the maturity of the tools available at the time. However, we are now at a genuine inflection point. 

I believe that with the implementation of AI technologies, we are finally moving past the era of mere reporting. When properly implemented, AI does more than just surface data in real-time; it enables the organization to move from analysis to action autonomously, accelerating cycle times and allowing technology to execute decisions as fast as they are made. For the modern CFO, the competitive advantage will thrive within organizations that can move as fast as the technology does. 

The future of finance will be defined by cycle time, which is set to shrink rapidly in an AI-driven world. Winners will be those that move as fast as the technology.

For the modern CFO, the goal is no longer just to report on the past, but to build an organization capable of keeping pace with the real-time speed of the market. Those who remain tethered to periodic, lagging insights will find themselves ultimately unable to compete with those who have gained true technological control.

Workday is launching a new artificial intelligence capability aimed at streamlining financial planning and analysis workflows, the enterprise software giant said Wednesday.

The new capability, called Adaptive Decision Intelligence, expands the company’s Adaptive Planning platform and is designed to let teams ask questions in natural language and perform scenario analysis in minutes, pulling data from multiple enterprise systems.

“Ultimately, what we're trying to do for our users is make their lives easier, make them more productive and help them focus on more strategic work rather than just wrangling data and trying to mesh together spreadsheets,” Ben Pierce, general manager of Workday Adaptive Planning, said in an interview.

Enterprise software vendors are ramping up efforts to embed AI into corporate finance and other business functions.

Last week, OneStream announced that it was expanding its agentic AI capabilities, allowing interoperability with third-party systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot. Earlier in the month, SAP introduced an AI suite targeting a wide range of corporate finance functions including cash management, tax, planning and billing.

Workday said its latest tool is targeted at addressing a core FP&A challenge: teams often spend days pulling data from disconnected systems, slowing analysis work.

“Today, planning and analysis is a fragmented process. On one side, there is the governed planning environment that supports budgets, forecasts and reporting, where structure, controls and audit trails are essential,” the company said in a press release. “On the other, there is ad hoc work and urgent requests that often live in one‑off spreadsheets built to answer urgent questions, test new ideas or combine data that hasn't been modeled yet.”

Pierce said Workday is not positioning the new capability as a replacement for spreadsheets altogether, arguing that tools such as Microsoft Excel will likely remain part of finance workflows even as companies automate more analysis and data preparation tasks.

“I think people have said many times over the years, ‘We're going to move people out of Excel,’ and I don't think that ever happens,” he said. “Excel has a place. I use Excel all the time. But I think this will allow people to not have to use Excel for the complicated analysis that they need to do and be able to move a lot faster.”

Workday said its new feature is designed to run scenario models and incorporate approved decisions directly into forecasts and plans, leveraging data from the Adaptive Planning platform combined with other sources, including customer relationship management and human resources systems.

For example, when a region falls short of its target, finance leaders can combine actual results and plans from Adaptive Planning with sales pipeline and staffing data for that region to identify whether the issue stems from weaker sales coverage, lower conversion rates or reduced productivity, Workday said.

The capability is built on Workday’s existing security and permissions framework, preserving auditability and access controls, according to the release. The tool is currently available through an early adopter program and is expected to become more broadly available later this year, the company said.

Finance technology firm Vena is looking to expand through a merger with Acterys, an industry peer, amid a flurry of deal activity in the broader CFO software market.

Vena, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, announced last week that it was planning to acquire Sydney, Australia-based Acterys for an undisclosed amount. Both companies focus on providing financial planning and analysis tools within the Microsoft ecosystem. But Vena has gaps that it wants to fill with the proposed tie-up, according to CEO Hunter Madeley.

“We have deep alignment with Microsoft around Excel and Azure Open AI, and less so around a few other key applications and technologies, including Power BI and Fabric,” he said in an interview.

Vena is one of many vendors competing in the increasingly crowded “office of the CFO software market,” which is expected to grow from $71 billion in 2023 to $131 billion in 2028, according to global investment bank Carlsquare.

OneStream, another major market player, announced last month that it agreed to be acquired by Hg, an investor in software and data businesses, for $6.4 billion.

In December, financial close and accounting automation firm Blackline said it acquired New York-based finance tech startup WiseLayer. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Meanwhile, finance and HR software giant Workday said last November that it agreed to buy Pipedream, an integration platform for AI agents, also for an undisclosed amount.

In the 12 months ending in June 2025, there were over 150 merger-and-acquisition and financing deals in the CFO software market, according to an analysis by global tech investment bank Drake Star Partners.

High growth areas of the market include FP&A software, benefiting from “increasing demand for agile scenario planning and integrated performance management,” Drake Star analysts wrote in a report last year.

For its part, Vena is focused on becoming “the most widely adopted and highly valued planning platform within the Microsoft ecosystem,” Madeley told CFO Dive.

“I’d say it’s less an expression that we believe that Microsoft will win the office of finance writ large,” he said. “It is an expression that we believe the Microsoft market is very large and that Microsoft is making very interesting and smart investments when it comes to office productivity tools.”

Acterys stood out as an attractive acquisition target in part because it does “a unique job of amplifying how folks get leverage out of Power BI and Fabric,” Madeley said. He said Vena was also impressed with the financial profile of Acterys, which has achieved annual recurring revenue of roughly $13 million.

The deal is subject to approval by Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board, a Vena spokeswoman said.

Vena claims to be “the only complete FP&A platform powered by agentic AI and purpose-built to amplify the Microsoft technology ecosystem.” In April of last year, Vena reported that 89% of finance teams were still depending on Excel despite modern planning tools.

OneStream, which owns a broader suite of CFO tools, currently brands itself as the “only unified finance platform built entirely on the Microsoft technology stack.”

An October blog post from OneStream highlighted the challenges of relying on Excel, while also acknowledging its current importance in the office of the CFO, referring to spreadsheets as the “Swiss army knife of finance.”

OneStream announced in November that it entered into an alliance with Microsoft allowing the finance software maker to incorporate its own AI agents into the “most widely used” Microsoft products, including Excel and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

“We look forward to continuing to deepen our strategic partnership with Microsoft as we expand these capabilities and help more finance teams within the Microsoft ecosystem,” OneStream CEO Tom Shea said in an emailed statement.

Workday’s Adaptive Planning platform also supports Excel, although a blog post published by the company last year called for FP&A professionals to move beyond the decades-old Microsoft tool.

“Manual processes, version confusion, and siloed workflows prevent finance from making decisions on time and with confidence,” Bruno J. Navarro, a thought leader at Workday, said in the post. “The needs of the business have evolved, and FP&A must evolve with them.”