Adriana Carpenter, CFO, Emburse, speaks to us about her management philosophy, major areas of investment within finance and how her job role has changed over the last 12 months.
Can you describe your current job role?
I am the Chief Financial Officer at Emburse. I joined towards the end of last year from Ping Identity, and it’s an exciting time to be a part of the Emburse story.
As CFO, it’s my job to provide expert financial leadership in the next phase of Emburse’s growth, as we challenge legacy vendors and capitalise on the demand for modern spend management solutions. We’re a global, late-stage private company with nearly 900 employees and 18,000 customers – I have a team of 30 across North America and Europe.
In addition to the daily tasks of running a finance department of a fast-growing company, Digital Transformation is a significant part of my role, as it is with many modern CFOs. As a FinTech company, we are lucky in that we have several of our own solutions which we’re able to use. And although we were already quite far along the journey when I joined Emburse in 2021, the process of automating and integrating all of our solutions is still a significant initiative.
What philosophy do you employ in your current position?
My philosophy is simple: stay true to who you are. Every day, I choose to lead with authenticity – even when that means my leadership style looks different from those around me. This isn’t always easy and it was a journey for me to get here.
For most of my career, and I’m sure many other women can relate, I was told that I’m ‘too loud, too aggressive, too…something.’ So, I adjusted who I showed up as and changed how I led to mimic the leaders around me. Things stayed this way until years later when our CEO became active in encouraging his team to pursue authentic leadership through coaching and training. That’s when I realised how much of my true self I wasn’t bringing to work.
Today, as a leader, I encourage us all to be true to who we are and live our mission of humanising work; when we do that, we can achieve diversity of thought and a more welcoming, embracing workplace. I also know that when we’re aligned around the company’s work and goals, while bringing our own unique perspectives, it can result in better decisions, happier employees and a stronger culture.
What do you currently identify as the major areas of investment in your industry?
For me, everything starts with automation. Automation is what gives finance professionals the ability to access and interpret data more easily at scale so they can provide the real-time reporting that’s needed to manage a business.
Thankfully, the barriers to automation are the lowest they have ever been. Companies can capture real results quickly through inexpensive means. As an example, think about automation’s impact on one of the most dreaded finance activities: expense reports. General employees can manage their expenses on the go and finance professionals can approve those expenses without raising a finger.
By eliminating the manual processes, time is immediately freed up. In turn, errors are minimised and productivity is hugely increased. The benefits speak for themselves and automation can then support businesses on their Digital Transformation journeys. It makes it easier and quicker, accelerating the finance department’s ability to provide real returns.
Finance pros will be able to spend more time working on valuable strategic endeavours — such as analysing and providing actionable data to the business — that are sure to keep us engaged for years to come.
What behaviour or personality trait do you most value?
In everything we do as finance professionals, it comes down to integrity, which is closely aligned with trust. We must be good partners to the business and these relationships can take time to build. Through integrity, our partners can see over time that we’re doing the right things the right way. They can learn to trust and rely on us because we’ve earned it. Even more so, we can establish that we’re a finance department that leads and runs with integrity to all of our stakeholders.
What changes to your job role have you seen in the last year and how do you see these developing in the next 12 months?
Overall, the finance career landscape is very different today from when I started 30 years ago. As CFO, that also means my role has changed quite a bit. Coming out of the pandemic, we’ve seen that having a healthy work-life balance has to be a main topic of conversation. Burnout is a real concern and especially in departments that are more behind the scenes – balancing the books and determining the strategic direction of the company. For many women or less experienced employees, it can be hard to establish boundaries and really unplug when the workday is over.
As a leader, to address this issue, one change I’ve made is to check in on my teams to see how they’re doing. Are they ok emotionally? I make a comfortable space for employees to talk about their mental health and well-being and encourage my peers to do the same. This is something we never would have done years ago, but we must change to fully embrace those who work with us. If we don’t adapt how we lead, I believe we’ll see issues with burnout continue on a wide scale throughout our organisations.
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