And now, on to the show.
From Data Rails, this is FP&A Today.
Welcome to FP&A Today.
I'm your host, Glenn Hopper.
Today on the show, we're joined by Rohini Jain, who leads finance strategy at Bill, the intelligent finance platform used by nearly half a million businesses to manage, move and maximize their money.
Rohini has more than 20 years of experience shaping and leading finance product and operations teams across some of the world's biggest names in fintech, payments and e-commerce.
Before joining Bill as the company's chief financial officer, She served as CFO and SVP of PayPal's large enterprise and merchant platforms and previously held senior finance leadership roles at eBay, Walmart and General Electric.
She holds a master's in finance from the London School of Economics and is a chartered accountant with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.
At Bill Rohini is helping redefine what autonomous finance means for small and mid-sized businesses, combining data technology and AI to eliminate friction and expand opportunity.
Rohini, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much.
So glad to be here.
I'm so excited to get to autonomous finance, but I'm going to hold my horses on that.
And we're going to walk through your background a bit and everything, because you have a fascinating background and I can't wait to hear, and for our listeners to hear, about some of the positions and roles you've had.
So on that, you've had a remarkable career.
It's taken you through GE, eBay, PayPal, and now Bill.
And I'm wondering...
How did you first find your way into finance and what's kept you hooked on it through all these years?
It's such an interesting question because if I really look back on what got me into finance, it was real chance, almost.
So I was in this queue for depositing my fee for my college application.
And like any other good Indian kid, I was going to be either an engineer or a doctor.
So I was in the science line.
And I saw this queue next to me depositing fee of all these people who are going to do commerce, which is the business and what we call it back in India as a study stream.
And they were all talking about economics and business studies and management accounting.
I'm like, oh, that sounds so interesting.
And I'm just drawn to change.
And I was like okay, maybe interesting to do that instead of physics, chem and math, which I've already done enough of.
And I switched the queue and ended up, much to the disappointment of my mother, who to date regrets that.
I did not become an engineer and went into do commerce and then eventually CPA.
It's been such a fascinating journey.
Like I started out my career with GE and then moved over to eBay and PayPal, was briefly at Walmart and then Bill, and every day there's a new problem to solve.
And every day feels like, you know, What is the closest alligator to the boat I need to deal with?
It's been very fresh.
It's been huge learning every single year, every company.
And yeah, I couldn't do anything else.
That's great.
Well, did you tell your mother you certainly didn't take the easy path?
I've heard about the Chartered Accountant and Institute of Chartered Accountants in India.
And that's a tough exam, right?
Yeah, well, she has three kids.
One of them's a doctor, one's a lawyer, and I am what I am.
She still doesn't have an engineer and she complains about it.
So I'm on the board at the School of Accountancy here in Memphis and we actually just got the accounting program approved as a STEM program.
And I think it was for that very reason.
I think it was so Indian mothers would feel okay sitting there.
I need to tell her that right now.
So, well, you had to have picked up so much along the way.
And just looking back at across all those stops and now at Bill, are there experiences along the way that stand out as turning points and that kind of shape the way you think about finance today?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think starting out my career with GE was probably the most defining and the most critical moment in my career, because it's The GE DNA in finance is really strong.
You probably see around you.
There are so many CFOs that have come from GE and are just great leaders.
So what we do there is this you know a school, you get into, you get into the machine and they churn out people who are deeply rooted into what it means to run a business, not just be a finance partner.
So you are, along with your CEO or your GM, the only other person who knows everything about what's happening in the business, irrespective of portfolios or functions and such.
So, just for an example, when one of my early roles in GE Healthcare Factory, when I was doing the factory manager role, a finance manager role, I actually stood in the line to make circuit boards to know how that's done.
I actually, during the quarter end rush I would be in the shipping dock helping pack boxes and shipping them out of the door.
So the learning about not only how to get deeper into the operations of the business, build your business acumen, but also how to do it at scale.
Like GE has presence in every single country.
It has probably teams across multiple continents.
So doing all of that at scale, I think that was just a really great training ground for me.
And then every other role and company that I've gone to.
There's been at least one or two special things that I have.
I've drawn out of them.
So when I went to eBay, not only learning about the tech world and the finance work somewhat differently from a mindset perspective as well in technology, but I did analytics roles there, which exposed me to big data and the complexity of just how much data there is in transaction businesses right.
And how to deal with that and how to make very efficient, effective decisions with that.
Then moved over to PayPal, new industry FinTech.
The most exciting thing almost a turning point in my development as well was when I moved out of finance for a couple of years and did a product role.
Nerve wracking, right?
It was really hard to be the person who knows the least in the room after being the expert for several years.
When you enter the room, right
So it was really uncomfortable at that stage in my career, but great learning.
And I feel like that was a moment in finance or not being in finance was when I learned most about finance, because you kind of look at the mirror and you see what you are not doing.
Well,
So huge turning point.
And then yeah, taking this role at Bill.
I mean talk about an accelerated growth curve and a learning curve.
It's been all of that.
And working with a wonderful team here has been great.
That's amazing.
And what I really like, it sounds like the through line in that story is it's so easy.
And I think that finance has evolved over the years.
But I know when I and had you not started at GE, it may have been similar.
But when I started in finance, we were in this ivory tower where everything was theoretical and we were just in there with our spreadsheets and our models and crunching our number.
And I can remember telling someone, when I had a career change and went to a different company, that I didn't care what the widget was.
I'm just the numbers guy, the bean counter, I guess is what I accidentally called myself.
And I had that mentality early in my career.
And maybe at a functional level, you can get by with that.
But I think finance has evolved so much now and you have to you still have to have all that domain expertise, but you also have to have this breadth of knowledge that I think when I started out in finance you didn't have to have that.
What do you take from?
I know you said on the product role you kind of see outside in what finance is doing and learn from there.
But just by understanding these aren't just numbers, these are processes techniques, people and everything that's behind it.
What did you take away from that?
So many things, right?
One of the thing is it makes you really empathetic the business.
And sometimes I've seen finance people come in and say oh, why are we not meeting the numbers?
And what's happening?
Rather than trying to get to the root of the problem, you sometimes are just dictating what the outcome needs to be.
And that doesn't help.
So simple things like when you're thinking about product release and what you need to bake into the next year's plan from that.
Now I know that how much time it needs to not only make that product, get it released, Start talking to the customers about it.
There is a ramp period there.
There is this whole cycle that needs to happen.
We cannot just as finance people push a higher number and make the business feel like committed to that right.
So there's this element of empathy and understanding that you get being outside of finance, which I think is super critical.
And then in the end, the impact comes from business results.
It doesn't come from sitting and counting the numbers.
So if you want to drive business results, you want to be a problem solver with them, versus the problem for the business.
Yeah.
And that's I love that because in my CFO roles, I would come in and immediately anger the COO and the CRO because I would be so interested in what was happening outside of the general ledger, because whether it was to make a better forecast or figure out cash flow or just understand the business, you start overreaching the And sometimes, you know, it can create some friction if the company culture isn't there.
But I just think, whether you own the numbers or the metrics, being able to understand them makes you better at finance and it makes you able to be more strategic.
Yeah.
And I'm sure in your experience you would have learned that it's probably friction for a very short period of time.
The moment they realize that you're there to help them get to their numbers, versus just give them a number.
I think it really changes the dynamic between the two.
Yeah, and you're probably a way better people person than I am.
So they stayed angry at me.
That's not what people tell me, but thank you, I take it.
I love having that broader view coming into the Office of Finance.
And we're not just here in our ivory tower.
And then moving across different big companies.
Like that, every company measures performance a little bit differently.
And I imagine there are things that you've taken from each of them.
And I know you could be in different industries and different things apply.
But for you, are there any... key metrics that really stand out and really matter to FP&A.
I mean, the ones that really drive the story behind the numbers.
And this could be from a previous role or what's most important to you, Bill.
Whatever makes the most sense.
Yeah.
And this is again more relevant as I think about the technology industry that I've been a part of for now several years
One of the things that I've noticed is that there's just too many metrics.
There's too many metrics that everybody's trying to measure and trying to focus on and trying to solve for.
So I wouldn't give you one or two metrics.
I would just say that the job of the finance and FPA teams is to really understand what matters most.
What are the metrics that matter in this time in life of the company in this industry, and where they are headed, and what is really the most important thing to focus on?
So not a list, but a few handful that they can really start to work through with the business teams and their leaders to make an impact on those.
The other thing that I have learned around metrics is there are several unintended consequences of measuring a metric.
So what's very important to me as I think about what really matters and what I want to measure is what is the control metric that's associated to it?
So if you're trying to maximize your sales number, you will do a certain type of metrics for sales compensation or whatever else, but you have to have a control metric of profitability around that.
If you're trying to manage your risk basis points of how much risk can you tolerate, you still want to have the sales metric tied to it.
That how much friction are you putting on the sales metric?
So I think seeing the both sides and trying to figure out what could be the potential unintended consequences of measuring just one metric is really important.
And identifying which ones are the actual levers, which are you know they could be lagging indicators, or which ones, if we impact this, we're actually going to drive results.
Yeah, they need to be leading indicators.
They need to be controllable.
A lot of companies spend a lot of time trying to constantly measure and look at, keep themselves busy with looking at things that they cannot control.
It's good to know them periodically, but you need to obsess about things you control and things that are leading indicators that drive outcomes.
Yeah, and there can be so much noise in it.
I was in... private companies, primarily private equity backed.
And we'd have our quarterly meetings with the board and you know whoever else was was in those meetings.
And it grew to a point where we had an 80 page deck, then a 90 page deck, then 120 page deck, where it's you have all these metrics in there and you're going through them.
And it can just sound like, as you go through the different management reports, like you're reading a laundry list.
And it seemed like Every board member had certain metrics that they cared about.
And then when somebody was talking about metrics they didn't care about, they would just be off, you know, making notes or doing what they did.
And if you tried to pull any of them out, but it's so hard to filter through that noise.
And I think that that's where we can find, that's where we're going to add value, when we know what those key metrics are and when we can tell the story around them.
And yes OK, everybody has their pet metrics that they want to look at, but being sure that we're focused on the right ones and that they're going to differ by industry obviously, like you said.
And I understand there are a lot of early indicating metrics and they could be hundreds and thousands in a large company.
This is where I'm super excited about AI as well, where I've always had this optimal vision of what I would like to do.
Is this probably a dashboard or something that's measuring all the metrics?
I never have to look at?
And there's some sort of eye in the sky that's sort of looking at it and saying okay, these are the five ones that are outside of the control threshold, and you tee those up and you still look at it and say okay, do you?
And you know these things could generally end up with a lot of noisy fluctuations, but you, we can now leverage AI to build things like that, where we are focused on the five or six metrics that are most important for the company, but there is a tool that's kind of keeping an eye on everything else.
You are speaking my language now.
And that's I mean.
To me, that's the dream, because I spent so much time going through data trying to find correlations, maybe even to things that weren't there.
And I know correlation doesn't mean causation, but to your point, there's so much data out there and it's more than we can ingest and keep up with.
And maybe all those metrics are somewhere important.
But if you had something running AI in the background that found those correlations and figured out hey, this is a leading indicator here.
If we see this move, we know this is the downstream effect.
I imagine that Bill, with all the data that you have, that you're actually maybe seeing some of that in real time.
That's something that I'm super excited about.
The issue that ends up happening without AI deployment in these things is there are a lot of false positives or false negatives, and you're then chasing how do we get high quality signals?
And the more data that you have, the more scale that you have means more effective AI, right?
So you could actually really yeah, so Bill's just positioned in the right place to do that for our customers.
So with your finance team there, I'm always curious to hear how different companies, especially companies with a lot of data, how they structure that finance team.
And I'm I'm thinking specifically.
I mean we can talk about the broader team as well, because all that's important, but I'm thinking specifically about the role of data science and how, if you have data scientists on your team or if they work really closely with the data science and BI team, like I'm thinking about the team structure and then the different skills, but also making sure the team stays connected, like you were talking about, with the rest of the business, the product engineering operations, all the other as well.
I mean, it's a...
It's a big challenge to have to have this diverse skill set and then to have them all business partnering with the other groups.
How do you approach that at Bill?
That's actually a really excellent question, right?
The way to think about it is and I talk a little bit about how you just need to build a lot of business acumen to be able to be an effective finance person.
The second side of that equation is functional expertise.
So you know the business, you have the functional expertise and you have the latest in technology.
You have that appetite to learn and grow.
You bring all of that together and have the right balance between the two is where the success lies.
And one of the key things that I've been really thinking about over the last few years is how do we continue to evolve the skill set of the finance people and the FPA people?
It's no longer going to be the traditional accounting based teams that are very good at what they do from a finance ROI type of work.
We really start to need.
We need to seed our teams with a few people, these young kids who are very exposed to the latest and the greatest tools, who are using AI and actually a few years ago, I had some finance people who were doing machine learning and SQL and all of those things to help us.
Now that needs to have a step change, right?
So, even if you're structured to support the business, you have to mirror the org of the CEO you're supporting from a finance perspective.
That's the only way to succeed, right?
But within these teams you need to start to now add a different type of skillset that starts to work together and sort of you know, with osmosis or something everybody starts to grow into that place.
And you just need a couple of change drivers.
You need a couple of people to be thinking about the processes and such and making these rapid changes.
And how do you deal with the business partnering?
Do you actually have team members that are embedded in other groups?
Or how do you handle the sort of the cross-functional reporting for finance?
Yeah, so we have that.
And I've had that almost always all through my career where my team is really structured to mirror my CEO Renee's team and each person is sitting there.
And then I have a corporate team that's adding up all of that work and driving the corporate wide initiatives.
So as we think about streamlining reporting dashboarding, introducing AI and all of that stuff, there is a corporate team that just spends time on that and pushes it down.
I love that, yeah.
And that really I mean that level of business partnering.
It builds trust, it gives you better insight and the people who are working with those teams have a way better understanding of it.
And they like going up and going to the assembly line and doing their steps and understanding that.
I mean, you know how to report better on what that flow is and everything.
Yeah, and those guys spend way more time with their business partners than they do with me, right?
That's their key stakeholder.
Yeah, I love that.
So, looking back at your career, What would you say are the biggest lessons you've learned about how to run FPA well,
I love the business partnering part, and then mixing in the new technologies.
Would you say there are traits or things you can do that separate a good finance function from a great one, what it takes to get it to that next level?
Yeah, I think there are a few things in my mind that separate great finance functions.
The first one is the mindset of not being stuck within your job description. is really important.
The most exciting times in my career have been where I have done things to solve business problems that have nothing to do with my job.
So those are the type of people that I want to always hire, that they have all the finance expertise but they don't stick to that job description and go solve for problems.
Curiosity I feel.
Over time I have learned that people who are curious are the ones that I want in my FPA teams.
You just need to ask questions, not only to learn the business how to do things best.
Talk industry-wide, see what's happening and all of that.
You know, the curiosity of a person makes him or her a really great asset.
And then people who can work with high velocity, like get stuff done.
That's my thing.
I just, I like high energy people.
Yeah.
And I love that curiosity component because that goes so far, because if you have that curiosity then you're not going to be just I'm just in the finance lane or I'm just in the accounting lane.
And I always think about FP&A really, in a lot of ways, you're an investigative journalist.
It's one thing to just regurgitate numbers, but then ask why, ask why and dig in, yeah.
Yes, yes.
It could be annoying for everybody else, but it's useful.
So loaded question for me because I have thoughts around this.
But I think, taken with everything that's going on with generative AI right now and I understand you know, for years people in FPA have stood out by if you learn to write a SQL query and if you learn Python and you can do some cooler things than what your buddies in Excel can do, that's great.
But I think- Not to undermine Excel for one second.
Exactly.
Yes.
Yeah.
We love Excel here at Data Rails.
Yeah.
And actually even doing data science projects.
I mean, I talk to data scientists all the time and Excel is kind of where you end up to do your sort of presentation layer and even- The last mile.
Yeah.
But-
With generative AI, I always think of it like okay, we've been talking about democratization of data for I don't know 20 years now, or however long, but with generative AI it's almost like there's a democratization of data science right now, in that you don't that barrier to entry.
If you can't write a SQL query, or you can sort of write one and you need it to be QA'd and fixed, generative AI can fix that.
Or it can do crazy forecasting, like build a complex, you know, like a REMA forecast or something for you that would be a pain to do in Excel.
But I think with generative AI.
Obviously you know there's all you hear all the time about glitches where people are using it wrong, but it is going.
It's going to change and shape finance for years to come.
And what if?
For I don't know.
I always like to think about if you were talking to someone straight out of college, or this could even be to your teen.
But if someone wants to level up their impact and career performance right now, where do you think they should study?
And I don't, it seems like maybe that answer would have been different pre-generative AI.
And I know I'm, I said it was loaded.
I'm completely leading you on that path.
So don't don't feel like you have to answer just for that, but you know, and maybe, even maybe there are some some things beyond that, but what do you?
Where should people just starting in their careers or teams trying to level up?
What skills should they be building and where should they be focused right now for the future?
Yes.
There's so many dimensions to that question.
You know, I still think that as your finance is still at technical field.
You need to know accounting, you need to know the regulation and you need to know how to keep the books.
So those type of things are still very fundamental.
Understanding data structures and I personally think was very helpful for me to do the analytics stint, because you may not use it today?
Because you have the AI tools to help you.
It's the same thing as calculator, but a leap, leap forward, right?
You still want to know how to do the multiplication even if you don't do it.
So I think having that foundation is is really important, so you can smell if there are things that are not outputting appropriately through the ai right.
So i still like the idea of foundational skills that you're building through education.
But more than any kind of education is this, uh and i tell my kids all the time right is the ability to continue to learn.
This growth mindset piece was never as relevant as it is today.
So i don't care what you studied, as long as you're super curious, high energy in terms of learning new things and evolving your career.
I think that's what we need, because we don't know what this is going to look like in five years or 10 years or 15 years, but I still know that there will be problems that will need to be solved.
AI will be an amazing companion to give you data.
It'll be a companion to point you in the right direction, but you still need a human mind to say okay, we are going to take this path out of the three that are possibly out there.
And honestly, as I look back, there were days and nights.
I mean, I had a small child in a bucket seat and I was in the office rocking her and closing the books over the weekend.
What AI could help us do is take out a lot of that manual work that all of us had to do growing up, which we didn't love so much nights that ended at two o'clock or three o'clock because we were doing budget submissions.
If all of that gets automated, that's great.
You have more time to then learn about the business and help strategize with your business partners.
And this is exactly I mean.
I'm gonna talk about build, because this is what makes me excited to be here is that's what we're trying to do for smaller companies.
Now, big companies can put the resources behind it, all the tools and the infrastructure behind it, but the smaller SMBs they're sometimes just a handful of people who is also the chief marketing officer or the CFO or the strategy guy or whatever else it might be.
So if we were to really help them with the tools and AI agents that help them do things much faster and take out all the grunt work, they can actually focus on growing their business the right way.
I know it's a long-winded answer over here, but I do feel passionately about that.
No, your long-winded answer was probably half as long as my question.
So they'll edit me out.
They'll just say, there's Glenn rambling again.
So-
What's top of mind for you personally these days?
I mean we talked about you know we're teams and they should be focusing their curiosity.
But, as someone who I can tell has that curiosity, what are you learning or trying to master in kind of this next chapter of your career?
Yeah, I mean, when I joined Bell, I did it for a reason because I wanted to really get deeper into the SMB space on the B2B side.
I've worked on B2B side for a long time but wanted to really understand what their needs and problems and such were.
So that was a part of it.
Secondly, from a functional perspective, there is a business element, always a functional element, right?
From a functional perspective, I worked closely in the past with the IR teams but not had investor relations and managed the relationships with the shareholders and such in the past.
So that was one of the things that I wanted to come in and learn, and I'm very focused on that, spending a lot of time there, as well as the capital markets area.
That's something that I'm getting my hands into and wrapping my head around, which is great learning for me.
But on top of that, on a more personal level, even though I was expecting some of this getting a public company CFO role it just takes you by surprise how much time you need to devote to external commitments.
And then how do you balance what you need to do internally in running the business, building the teams and investing in talent and all of that?
That's the balance I'm trying to figure out right now.
And secondly, I'm going to throw it out there because you know the stress of this role.
It doesn't switch off.
It doesn't switch off.
It's like seven days a week, 24 hours.
And how do you manage through that when you have a family, you have other commitments and you have you know what's happening at work.
So I think on a deeper level, those are some of the things that are very top of mind for me.
Yeah, I could see between just between IR and regulatory.
And you add that on top of the already full-time job and throw ESG in there too.
You know, but that on top of the regular full-time commitments.
It's doesn't matter how big of a team you have.
If you, if you're managing all that, that's a lot of stuff with you in the end.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, and it's your signature on the financials, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Every time you have to go out and guide, you're like a few sleepless nights before and after, for sure.
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I love what you said about your interest around SMBs, because I spent a large portion of my career on that side.
And even now in consulting, because I'm so leaned in to AI and AI projects.
I'm really focused on enterprise now, maybe more than I ever have been.
But I think about this because I still have a lot of contacts in the private equity portfolio company, a smaller business space, and they don't have the budget or the resources to really capitalize on where AI is right now.
So what Bill's doing and we'll talk more about that in a few minutes but I've thought from the beginning There's going to be someone who is like what QuickBooks was for small businesses back a million years ago, where now you have an accounting platform that's affordable and you don't have to have the big ERP system and all that.
But you think about like all these small businesses, you don't have big data to benefit from.
If you've got a dry cleaner that has three or four locations, that's not big data.
And you probably, whatever data you have is not consolidated or aggregated anywhere.
So when I hear about You're focused there.
And I know where Bill is on that.
That's interesting to see where we're going in the future.
And I think I'm jumping ahead.
I do.
Well, we're going to go and get there because we've waited.
I've gone 30 minutes into the show now and I'm just now getting to AI, which everybody who listens to me knows that I'm chomping at the bit out of the gate to do that.
So if you're good, let's let's dive in on AI.
So, and you know when most people today, when they hear AI, the first thing they think is generative AI.
But I know Bill's been an AI-powered platform for a decade.
You know classical AI, machine learning.
But I do know that now you're rolling out some new agentic capabilities that I'm super excited to hear about.
So without stealing any of your thunder, I'd love to hear what Bill has going on with AI.
I don't know.
You could start telling me kind of if you want, you can go into how you've used AI historically, and then I'd love to hear about some of the new products as well.
Yeah, no, I'd love to talk about the new products.
It's exciting moment in our life.
So the first thing I mentioned, before I get into the agents, is that we have invested the time and effort in building out an integrated platform for AI.
So we have multiple different products that we serve up for the SMBs which are helping them on a day-to-day basis, to take out a lot of the manual work anyway.
But now, you know, with that integrated platform, we want to have the capability to rapidly release the agents.
And the other thing about the agents is that we really want to first think about the problem that the SMBs have, and what are we solving for versus?
Oh, this agent just looks very cool and we're going to roll it out.
But we're very deeply thinking about how to prioritize it.
And you know I talk about a couple of problems that we kind of focused on to roll out solutions for.
First,
And the first one is the W-9s.
I mean, We all love tax, don't we?
So one of the things we hear a lot from the SMBs is that it's so hard to collect the W-9s come tax season.
And on an average it takes them about a week out of their year to just do this collection effort and reconciliation and all of that work.
So what we are trying to do, we are a two-sided network, which is great.
We have the relationship with the suppliers.
We have the relationship with the APs or the bill customers.
So we have this agent coming out that will go do that for you.
It'll take out more than 80% of the manual work required.
It'll get the W-9s, it'll reconcile it automatically, and boom, the work's done.
And I can already see the smiles on people's faces when this happens, because it's really a zero value added work that they have to do.
And it's just back and forth.
I don't know how you feel about collecting your own tax documents to file your returns.
So I was going to say I know when at most companies where I was at, smaller companies even like not having that process upfront to collect the.
You know, if you go through a big company that has a procurement and onboarding process, they're going to get the W-9s early on and everything.
You throw the people at it and you'll figure it out.
Yes.
But in small companies, it was always just that scramble.
So that's, that's significant for a lot of companies out there.
That's huge.
Yeah.
Super excited about it.
But this second one actually it it personally so exciting for me because I am really not good with this.
So we all travel for the company and such, and you would have experienced the SE card that we have or the corporate charge card that you guys would use.
The effort required in taking pictures of the receipts, trying to keep them safe in a separate pocket of a wallet and then trying to upload it to your systems and make sure it reconciles.
And now there is a $10 error that I don't know why and what's happening.
So what we're also trying to do for the S&E business is to automate all of that.
So there'll be automatic collection of the receipts from your emails if you include it and whatnot and automatically gets into your SE card platform and it reconciles it and boom, you're done.
I know my EA will be so excited about it because I never send her the receipts on time, so.
There's gonna be a boo-hoo from a lot of people.
So this one really resonates personally for me as well.
Just to give you the context of the size and scale within Bill SE platform we have 70 million receipts.
That happen.
And there's an interesting stat that I heard is that if you were to line them up around the earth, you would circle the earth three times around the diameter.
That's incredible.
Well, imagine the amount of work that takes to upload these and reconcile these, and a large portion of that just goes away with the agent we're releasing.
So that's really exciting.
That's so huge.
As someone who just filed an expense report this morning and was digging through and like what can I put here?
What is this?
And isn't that your favorite thing to do?
Yeah.
Oh, that is huge.
And I think and we talked about at the beginning and this is the part I've been really excited to get to
I mean those are steps towards autonomous finance, thinking about mindless work that people have had to do.
That kind of work is what got us labeled years ago.
And I know we've evolved since then, but got finance and accounting labeled as a cost center.
And especially in the SMB space where if, like you said, if they do have a CFO, it's usually maybe it's a combo role or something that it's hard to imagine having time to be strategic and add value when you're really a controller with a hierarchy title but really you're looking backwards so much.
And this kind of thing for SMBs, just because they don't have the staffing to be able to do this.
That could be huge and lead towards.
I know it sounds like this is when you talk about autonomous finance.
These are steps in that progression.
So from your perspective, what does that mean?
And again, I guess let's stay especially focused on small and mid-sized businesses.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
The way I think about autonomous finance, it has to be more than just AI.
It cannot just be all about AI.
It's like a whole bunch of things that the SMBs need to make their lives easier.
And some of them we have been doing here at Bell already, but just need to continue to do more of.
So to me it's you know how do you create the most opportunity and have the least amount of friction in anything that you do?
And it would be a combination of the tools and resources, which you mentioned absolutely.
The large companies can throw money at that problem and SMBs don't always have that opportunity to do it.
So you know, giving them the right tools, giving them AI agents as a part of that, for sure, but not everything, but at the same time, giving them control, because everybody doesn't feel the same way about giving up control to the AI agents, right?
So the way we want to build some of these is to have the customers have a say in how much they want to give up control.
So that's on the AI agents.
And thirdly, and I think also really important, is not to have multiple connection points to all the different systems that you're using.
How do we start to integrate and solve problems with our customers, with them just having one entry point to one service provider?
This gets us into what we've been trying to do here at Bill is what we call embed finance.
What that means is really we are partnering now.
We announced that a few weeks ago with both Paychex as well as with NetSuite, where we're going to go meet our customers where they're at.
You know they will have one connection point, simple integration, and we go and solve their problems across a lot of different things that they need to do.
So I think autonomous finance has to just evolve to a bunch of solutions for these SMBs that are just making life easier every day for them.
That's so massive because I think about the work that I do with enterprise clients right now.
And for enterprise level, complex, different systems, we have to find something to automate.
We're actually building systems Custom automations and everything is sort of bespoke.
And there's all the issues that come with that and the time.
And that's not anything that SMBs could ever do on their own.
But for you guys to productize it and bring that to them in partnering and connecting to the other platforms like NetSuite.
I mean that's meeting them where they are.
And there's huge, huge value in that.
Exactly.
I mean, you don't want several people to call if something goes wrong, or you don't want to be approached by several people to oh, now I can do this and I can do this piece of the problem.
So I think as much as we can integrate and work together to solve their problems, I think will be so much more effective.
Yeah.
And that, like I was saying earlier, you know picturing someone that's going to come along and be able to really focus on SMBs.
And I think that the amount of data that Bill has and what you guys see I read the other day what you guys have processed something like a trillion dollars in payments and over a billion documents.
Because of that and it goes to what you're saying about the receipts too but you have all this data that you can get the insights that your clients can't.
So I'm wondering how do you turn that data advantage into whether it's smarter or more reliable agents, or helping kind of define the product and understand how to have something that's not that bespoke solution, that this will work across our whole spectrum?
Yeah, I mean, we have several examples in our business that talk to that, right?
I mean all of the data that we have, all of the scale that we have, is obviously a no-brainer right.
It just leads to smarter agents.
And one of the great examples of that would be in the risk space.
So a lot of SMBs are cash crunched and we want to solve some of the cash flow problems for them.
And we have some financing solutions like invoice financing and such for them.
They don't have to go through a lot of work to try and you know, get that financing.
We have AI deployed in our risk engines.
That helps us really very quickly deploy that cash to the right suppliers who are wanting to, you know, finance.
So there's a bunch of places which are really going to benefit the SMBs because we now have the data that accrues on the both sides.
I think the network is really also important in terms of thinking about.
You know, we have the supplier data and we have the SMB customers data.
And as you start to connect, you see the payments that happen across.
What are the best funding sources for you?
Should you be paying by a virtual card?
Should you be paying by this or whatever else, right?
Those kinds of decisions can be made for them to make it most effective.
So we've been deploying that to get to that outcome rapidly.
And that's an amazing result to get to, but I still, I know you're facing this too.
Any sort of process like this, you have to have client trust and the explainability and then keep the human loop wherever they want it to be.
And I know trust and explainability super hot topics right now.
And not that most of your clients are public customers, but they could still have audit and they're still trying to have gap accounting to whatever extent.
But when you build this, I mean, I know you have to keep that in mind.
So how do you make sure?
And that's one of the issues, sort of the black box nature of agents sometimes.
But How do you make sure that the agents act in a way that a controller or auditor could still go through and check and understand and verify what's happening?
Yeah, and that's a very valid question.
And I've spent some time with our CTO here discussing how he's putting controls.
So I think that was why we spent time building the platform, which has the right controls built into the platform itself, so that each AI agent doesn't need to overdo with the controls right.
So if they're controls built in, we are checking the performance before we release anything.
GA against the actual processes that exist, whether they're compliant.
We are in a very regulated industry, so this is super important for us.
And the other thing is that we have the scale and trust of the customers.
We move that much money.
If you're letting somebody move that much money, we have that trust.
I think we need and we are actually making sure that, with all of the data that we have, our AI agents are really powerful in terms of solving the customer problems, with the right controls built into the platform.
So I think that's how we think about it.
But as you talk about the audit trail we are trying to, I'll take you back to the example of the SE receipts that I talked about, right?
The receipt still exists.
It's all the work to go, take it from place A to place B, to reconcile it and all of that goes away, but the receipt doesn't go away.
So the auditability is still fully there And whatever the outcomes and documentation we want will still be there.
But we're just taking out the manual work and automating the workflows and making the workflows kind of disappear in the background.
Yeah, that's really.
I mean, that's the exciting thing when it's not a matter of just the big players who can afford to build out these massive things have this capability, but it really goes all the way down to the SMB level.
And I know before the show we were talking about.
You know the whole build by or partner on a new capability.
And right now, just with this kind of nascent stages of where we are with generative AI and agents, a lot of it was.
You know well, if you want it, you have to build it.
But I know it sounds like you guys are building a future where it's just going to be part of the package and everything.
And this could apply to your clients or to your own decisions, because I know you guys are pushing the edge on how AI is used and how you can apply it to your customers.
So when you're deciding on that Whether it's you or customer decision when you're deciding on whether to build, buy or partner on a new capability, what factors kind of tip the scale one way or another?
Yeah, I'm going to just zoom out even away from it as just conceptually.
When do you build, buy or partner is the important third component we used to not talk as much about.
I think, when the service that you're providing and the business that you do and this thing that you want to do is very core to that.
It's your bread and butter.
You should build it.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's, it's a, it should stay in house.
That's probably has some IP and whatnot, and you want to control the customer experience for sure.
So that's the build.
The buy and I include acquisitions and all of that stuff in the buy is to me a little bit of a one way door when you're buying a capability, when it's just you know, let's say buying the capability of the LLMs.
We're not going to, that's not core to our business and who we are and what we do.
Somebody else can do a much better job.
So we're not going to start writing our own LLMs, but we are going to go buy that from somebody.
But I think the third most important thing is partner, right?
What are the capabilities?
And to me, partnerships are great because those are two-way doors that you can walk in and out of.
There's really less stickiness there.
You need to build trust.
You need to see if it works for both the parties.
And if it does, you go deeper in, right?
And we are doing a lot of partnerships in our business.
It's less capital outlay.
I think it's a win-win for both the parties.
And this is, again, going back to the embed solutions we are doing.
We are getting to the customers that otherwise would take us longer to get to through these partners.
Those customers are already there.
And our partners are able to serve their customers with all the needs as well.
So I think it's just a great win-win.
And I think I see the industry more and more evolved towards partnerships.
It's just the right way to go.
Yeah, I love that.
And to your point on if it is your core skill set and function and focus, obviously yes, that makes sense.
But otherwise, like in Bill's case, other platforms the same customer base is using.
It makes sense for everyone to have to be in the same protocol, to sing from the same sheet of music and to be able to integrate seamlessly.
And it's just, i think about whether it's an erp implementation or anytime you're making a change in your finance tech stack, like if it's, if the switching cost is painful because the two systems don't play well together, then it just it makes it harder for everyone.
So it really sounds like that, whether it's new features you guys are rolling out or those partnerships, that it's really going to reduce that friction for SMBs.
And that's huge.
Absolutely.
Reduce the friction, not only that one time getting started friction, but also every day as you're operating.
You just have one point of connection for everything.
Well, we are getting to the time of the show.
I can't believe it's flown by, where we have our two standard questions that we ask everyone.
And the first one is what is something that not many people know about you, something that we couldn't find online?
I do bake a mean bread.
And why that is important in my current role or any other role in the past few years, is that the more stressful the week before, the more complex the bread over the weekend.
And I just like to knead it really well to take out all that anxiety.
It works really well and my family loves it.
So it's, again, a win-win situation.
I love that baking therapy.
It's more kneading therapy, I would say.
But the outcome is great.
What's your favorite bread?
You know, I don't know.
Don't tell me you're paleo or keto.
Well, no, I was actually, I was sort of going down that.
I'm sort of brainwashed a little bit on this carb stuff.
So, okay, this one is, I need to start recording these because I love all the answers that I get.
And there are some consistent ones at the top.
But I love asking this to CFOs because I was a guest on the show before I was the host of it.
And You and I know that when you're an analyst and you're down in the weeds, you know all kinds of cool things that Excel can do, and you've got a ready answer for this.
But when you're the CFO yeah, you want to understand how the models work, but you're not out there writing complex statements and using whatever writing Python and Excel and all that.
And I think someone told me I dated myself with my answer.
But all that to say, I think I said Cinder and Merge was my favorite.
No way.
I do not like merge cells because it kind of messes up the flexibility of your spreadsheet.
It 100% does.
Yes.
Yeah.
And it makes things even weirder if you're trying to do a machine readable spreadsheet too.
So with all that, what is your favorite Excel function and why?
That's like asking a mom to choose her favorite child.
I love Excel.
You know, what I'm going to say, I'm going to start with, I'm going to give you more than one.
But I'm going to start with pivot tables only because, well, I do love them.
I love the simplicity, elegance, and how it simply transforms the data.
But also, I don't know if you know our CTO, Ken Moss.
He actually was instrumental in building pivot tables when he was in Microsoft.
So he keeps reminding us all the time.
So shout out to Ken Moss.
Thank you, Ken.
Yeah.
But I will tell you that you know, love the evolution of VLOOKUPs into index matches and all of that.
It's been fantastic, but very infrequently used.
Goal Seek has saved me in a lot of sticky situations.
I think that's an ingenious formula.
I would say Goal Seek.
A hundred percent.
And I haven't used it in forever, but I can remember the first time I saw that it was like this is magic.
It's magic.
Yes.
You don't use it, which is good.
You shouldn't be using it, but when you need it, it's really helpful.
Yeah.
So my first CFO role, I guess, was back in 2007.
And when I was asked that question, my answer was VLOOKUP.
Not even a later iteration.
VLOOKUP is special.
Yeah, I agree with you.
It's special.
It's mature.
There's a 2.0, which is indexed.
There's a 3.0, which is X or something.
I don't know what it's called even.
But yeah, I'm probably from your times and we love VLOOKUP.
Yeah.
And I always say if I'm having to write, make complex spreadsheets right now, then something has gone horribly wrong.
Yeah.
I like to do that for therapy as well.
That is true.
I still do weird things in Excel, like, oh, writing a letter to a family member.
Let's do it in Excel.
I take notes in Excel.
I still take notes in Excel, yes.
Well, Rohini, I really appreciate you coming on the show.
This has been fantastic.
I loved hearing about your journey and about everything that you're doing at Bell.
Absolutely.
It was a pleasure.
