When Tom Steer joined Sokin as CFO, he already knew the international payments company unusually well. As an investment banker at FT Partners, he had advised Sokin through a capital raise during a difficult period for fintech funding. He knew its leadership, its financial projections, and the ambitions behind its growth.

What he had yet to experience was the challenge of building a finance organization capable of keeping pace.

Sokin helps multinational businesses manage cross-border payments, currencies, and treasury operations across fragmented banking systems. Its infrastructure supports payments to 170 countries, while a growing embedded-finance offering allows other companies to bring Sokin’s capabilities to their own customers.

For Steer, the challenge is deciding where to place the next investment. North America has emerged as Sokin’s fastest-growing market, while embedded payments and AI-enabled treasury tools present additional opportunities. Each requires capital, talent, and organizational attention.

The assumptions behind those decisions can change quickly. An anticipated shortage of engineers, for example, became less pressing as AI improved productivity, shifting attention toward sales and partnerships.

Inside finance, Steer encountered a different constraint: a lean team trying to accomplish too much. Three months into the role, he and his finance director stepped away from their daily responsibilities to map the work ahead.

“We can’t get this done on our own,” he recalls.

Today, Steer is building systems and teams designed for substantially greater transaction volumes. His guiding question is less about what finance can accomplish today than whether its infrastructure will still work when the business doubles in size.

At Vensure Employer Solutions, completing an acquisition is only the beginning. The company has acquired roughly 120 businesses in eight years, and each new addition enters an integration process containing some 1,400 steps. For CFO and President Kara Childress, the challenge is not simply bringing more companies into the fold. It is making certain the organization can absorb them without multiplying its own inefficiencies.

That challenge has become familiar territory for Childress, whose career took an unusual turn when she left public accounting to join Vensure as COO. Having previously served as the company’s outside auditor, she knew its finances. Operations offered something different: an opportunity to remove roadblocks and help people perform better.

As Vensure expanded into global payroll, HR technology, and human capital management services, Childress’s responsibilities broadened to include finance and the presidency. Along the way, she confronted a finance organization whose regional and divisional structure was duplicating work.

The acquisition engine was not slowing down. The finance organization needed to change before further growth made its existing structure untenable.

“We need to think about this differently,” Childress recalls.

The resulting reorganization reduced duplication and positioned finance to support additional acquisitions without continually adding staff. Meanwhile, a dedicated integration accounting team now brings acquired businesses into a common reporting framework beginning in their first month.

Today, Vensure is also expanding its AI capabilities while Childress concentrates on client retention, organic growth, and sales investment.

For a company accustomed to acquiring businesses, the next test is making its growing organization work better.

When Perry Beberman arrived at what is now Bread Financial, the company had a balance sheet problem. It was carrying too much leverage, had insufficient capital, and needed a more disciplined approach to funding its lending business. For a finance executive who had spent decades navigating consumer credit cycles, the assignment was familiar territory. The scale of the transformation, however, would demand patience.

Today, Beberman points to a substantially different financial foundation. Bread has paid down more than 70% of its parent-company debt, built capital beyond established targets, and shifted direct-to-consumer deposits from less than 5% of funding in 2020 to more than half.

The changes have given Bread greater capacity to invest in technology, support growth, and return capital to shareholders.

Still, Beberman is quick to explain that financial discipline is not simply about strengthening a balance sheet. At Bread, whose products include co-branded credit cards, private-label cards, and installment lending, the daily challenge is balancing the ambitions of retail partners with the economics of consumer credit.

Retailers want more approvals. Credit executives must manage losses. Finance must determine where the returns justify the risk.

“They collide all the time,” Beberman says of those competing priorities.

For him, such disagreements are not organizational failures. They are essential to making better decisions.

That philosophy also shapes Bread’s adoption of AI, its continuing finance transformation, and its approach to capital allocation. Technology may accelerate analysis and automate routine work, but Beberman sees little reason to surrender judgment.

After nearly four decades in finance, his operating principle remains remarkably consistent: growth matters, but only when the economics support it.