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- [00:00]
A
I want to transition to talk about the IPO process because you've been through multiple IPOs.
- [00:06]
B
Really, the day that we celebrate, everyone's very happy. All of our stock is liquid. But then the hard work starts the next day.
- [00:14]
A
What other tech advantages have arisen for the IPO process?
- [00:18]
B
Back when I first did my IPO and it was a larger company, my team of accountants and finance folks was 130 people. Today, my whole finance team is less than 35 people.
- [00:30]
A
You got to give me one thing that you've messed up before on the job, a mistake you've made here or any previous role.
- [00:35]
B
I do have to say, once I make a mistake, I always think about it and say I will never make this mistake again. That's how I actually think about mistakes. It's just an evolution to being perfect.
- [00:45]
A
Can you explain how stablecoins work to me as if I were maybe in middle school?
- [00:50]
B
Sure, I'll give it a try. It's a digital representation of a US dollar you can use like a Apple Pay. We're saying it's a different type of wallet and you can just use your stablecoin.
- [01:01]
A
Is this thing on?
- [01:04]
B
Yesterday's price is not today's price.
- [01:16]
A
Welcome back to Run the Numbers, the show where we talk with the world's top CFOs and finance leaders. I'm CJ, a tech CFO. My goal is to unpack the frameworks and operating principles that make you better at allocating capital and leading teams. On today's show, I'm joined by the CFO of Figure Technologies, Makrina Gill. And a fun fact to start here, Figure CEO Michael Tannenbaum was actually my very first ever guest on Run the Numbers. This was like 250 episodes ago and at the time he was the CFO at Brex. So we kick things off with what it's like being a CFO working for a former CFO and the ways that changes the bar for the role. Makrina has had a front row seat to multiple cycles in financial services, including taking Springleaf holdings public and now helping build Figure at the intersection of lending and blockchain. In this episode, we go deep on how Figure's business model actually works. Where the traditional lending system is bloated, why those inefficiencies persist, and how speed and origination and funding shows up in financial performance. We talk about stablecoins, which I know nothing about. We talk about it from a simple breakdown of how they work to how they show up on the balance sheet to what changes operationally as they become a real payment rail inside a finance org. And we touch on the evolution of the CFO role in emerging tech, how risk thinking changes when you're operating in crypto, and what it takes to scale finance in a system that's still being built in real time. Finally, we have to touch on the IPO process. Figure just IPO'd. What has changed since the first company she took public 10 years ago and what has actually gotten easier now? If you like this show, please remember to like and subscribe. It helps us with the algorithmic overlords. If you're looking to hire the best finance and accounting talent. Boy oh boy, would I love to help. I run a recruiting service that pairs you with thoughtful, qualified candidates from our community of finance leaders. People who, for better or worse, voluntarily research renewal calcs on weekends. If that's of interest, shoot me an email@talentmostlymetrics.com and we can talk on to today's episode with Macrina Macrina. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
- [03:13]
B
Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
- [03:16]
A
So a fun fact. I started this podcast almost three years ago. The funny thing about having a podcast for CFOs is you have to go out and find them. And I didn't know that many at the time. A kind person named Michael Tanenbaum, CFO of Brexit. At the time he said, I will be your first guest. So I'm eternally grateful to him. He's now the CEO of Figure, where you're the cfo. How funny is that?
- [03:36]
B
I. I know it's the whole full circle. Thank you for having him as the first guest as well.
- [03:41]
A
Hopefully I got all my bad questions out on him, so I can only give you the good ones. But what, what is it like being a CFO working for a CEO who's a former CFO?
- [03:51]
B
I actually really enjoy it because many CEOs have a background in either tech or marketing and they're not as familiar with what goes on in the finance function. And what's really amazing is that I can just talk to Michael and say, hey, here are the problems I have. Or this is what's going really well and we don't have to go into a 10 minute conversation. He gets it after 30 seconds. So it's been, it's been a great pleasure working with Michael because he understands the good and the, the bad of what a CFO does and what's hard and what's easy. So it's Been an amazing partnership with him.
- [04:29]
A
What's something he pushes you on that a non finance CEO probably wouldn't?
- [04:33]
B
Well, he would pay a lot more attention to expenses because usually CEOs are like, you know, you take care of the expenses, just tell me when we're off budget or something like that. But Michael really knows and ins and outs of how it works. And so I love the focus. And it also makes all of us much better in terms of discipline.
- [04:54]
A
Well, maybe some context here. A lot of people have heard of Figure. You've had a successful IPO at the end of 2025, but maybe you can give the background on what Figure does. And even if you could just tell us how it makes money.
- [05:08]
B
So Figure is a marketplace for loans. So that's the majority of what we do today. And what that means is a business can come to Figure's marketplace, use our technology to be able to originate loans. And then on the other side, there are buyers of these types of loans. And so they would buy the loans and what we would take and how we would make money is we would charge the seller of the loans a certain amount of percentages, a take rate, and then, you know, the buyers on the other side really don't pay to be on the marketplace. However, because we're dealing with loans, loans are securitized at the end of the day as part of a securitization vehicle. And Figure also collects a fee from the securitization vehicle where all the loan buyers would contribute their loans. And then the other thing that we would do is because we service these loans, that goes through our Figure ecosystem and Figure marketplace, we also earn servicing fee income. So that would be in a nutshell, where we are collecting our revenue primarily, it's really coming from our marketplace. And you know, if you look back at who we are as a company, we weren't always a marketplace. So we have a little bit of different supplemental information going through. But ultimately that's our north star of getting to be a hundred percent marketplace.
- [06:28]
A
I'm a huge fan of the marketplace model, but man, it's, it's so hard to build. You're basically standing up two and sometimes even three businesses at the same time.
- [06:37]
B
And there's a lot of technology product involved, there's a lot of sales and marketing and business development involved. And there's all the infrastructure behind the scenes as well.
- [06:48]
A
In the infrastructure. You were one of the first companies really to come up with a tangible use case for blockchain technology, right?
- [06:57]
B
That's right. So I'VE been in the blockchain technology industry for quite some time. I remember hearing about it back in 2011, 2012, and you know, everyone was super excited, but no one could really figure out what to do with it. And I joined a blockchain company, blockchain.com back in 2018, which is when Figure was founded. And when Figure reached out for the CFO job to be able to take the company public, I was super excited because I'm very passionate about crypto and blockchain technology. And I knew that Figure was really the only one that made it commercially viable and earning money from it because we're profitable, we make money, and that's really hard to do.
- [07:40]
A
That's the piece that struck me by looking at your business model, I had a ton of fun looking at your S. One is that you made this technology commercially viable because. And a lot of these crypto projects that we had seen before that weren't even full fledged businesses, that that was the knock on them, that there wasn't like a true monetization model behind them, that that solved the problem.
- [07:58]
B
Yes, it was all about customer acquisition. You build the biggest arena as much as possible, but then the profitability wouldn't follow. But you know, figure has been profitable since 2024, so it's, it's been a few years.
- [08:12]
A
The profit margins are something to, to really appreciate.
- [08:16]
B
We're really proud of the margins as well. We were more than 50% in Q4. I do have a guidance out there that we really want to get to 60%. And I think that's only possible because you're in a marketplace model and you are able to have the take rate that we believe is going to make sense and still be able to bring on supply and demand into the marketplace.
- [08:39]
A
I mean, when I think about marketplace models, I mean, Airbnb comes to mind. I think they have 40% EBITDA margins or something close to it. If you're able to get over 50 to 60%, that is truly world class.
- [08:49]
B
We have an amazing engineering and tech team. You know, they've done such great work since the inception of the company and built out an infrastructure that could work with different types of products. And I think that's really the secret sauce. And because of that, you know, anything that new that we bring onto the ecosystem, we're not rebuilding from the beginning. We're able to adjust what we already have or build a little bit on top of what we already have built in the past. And, and that's been very helpful in terms of the growth and profitability of who we are.
- [09:23]
A
Hey, thanks for listening. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Most finance teams aren't underperforming, they're actually under equipped. The problem isn't the people, it's what they're being asked to do. Because there are two kinds of finance work. The kind that moves the business forward and the kind that just keeps it from falling flat on its face. And too many finance teams are buried in the second kind and they call it a good week when they just get through it. Expense reports that take longer than the trips they cover, spend policies living in PDFs that no one reads, a three day approval process for a $40 receipt. That's a lot of burritos, but not worth it. Month end close, it stretches into weeks. And these aren't edge cases. They're the default state of finance at most growing companies. And the cost isn't just the time, it's what your best people aren't doing. While they're buried in the wrong work, you become what you spend on. And right now too many finance teams are spending on maintenance instead of momentum. And that is why I use Brex Agentic finance that captures receipts, automatically enforces policy before the spend happens, and closes your books in minutes rather than weeks. So your finance team stops spending on maintenance and starts spending on momentum. 35,000 companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Anthropic and Doordash already run on Brex because high density talent deserves some high leverage systems. It's time to get Brex af Can't believe they let me say that. Learn more@brex.com metrics that is brex.com metrics. I've seen a lot of FP and A tools and a laugh is one of the few that gave me that aha moment. Within minutes I remember watching their founder shout out to Albert, connect my netsuite data and build me a full P and L live in minutes. Elephant is now trusted by hundreds of leading companies. I've had the CFOs from Turo 8, sleep, zapier and more on the pod and every one of them is a huge advocate. I also just published my second annual CFO Tech Stack Report and Aleph has been on the podium both years including a number one finish in the 50 to $100 million segment. This year instead of being just another planning tool I they built a real enterprise grade data foundation for finance implemented at startup speed with AI native workflows woven into its DNA. All your systems erp CRM, hris, ats, product usage and more. Powering one clean governed data layer that finance can actually trust. With AI moving as fast as it is, they're pushing even further. Mcp, custom AI chatbots, AI powered variance analysis. And the list keeps growing. Try it with your own data at get a left.com run that is G-E-T-A L E P H.com run. Tell him CJ sent you. So here's a pattern I keep running into when I talk to finance leaders at fast growing companies. You've outgrown the spreadsheets. You've probably outgrown your billing tools built in revrec. But you're not quite at the point where you can throw a 20 person team at the problem either. That's exactly the danger zone. Right? Rev owns. Right. Rev is revenue recognition done right. It handles the messy stuff like high volume subscriptions, usage based contracts and mid contract upgrades. The things that break your ERP and the billing platform bolt ons. Here's the thing though. Your sales team isn't slowing down for you. They're closing ramp deals, usage commitments and mid quarter upgrades. And the longer you wait to fix the engine, the further behind you fall. So stop scrambling at month end and stitching together allocations across 3, 4, 5 spreadsheets to just have the numbers ready. Well, that's it. That, that's the whole pitch. CFO's telling me it's like a glow up for the revenue books. That sounds like where you are right now. Right Rev is worth the look. Head to right rev.com cj that's right rev.com cj check them out. Makrina, you'd mentioned loans. What type of loans did you start with? Because there are a lot of different types of you can get helocs, you can get traditional mortgages, you can get auto loans. Where did it begin and where's it going?
- [13:10]
B
So I don't know if everyone's familiar with helocs. Hopefully everyone is. But it's usually like a second lien mortgage on your home value. If you've been through a helo process and I actually personally have been through a helo process before I joined figure it's exactly like getting a mortgage when you buy your home.
- [13:28]
A
It's brutal. It's like a root canal.
- [13:30]
B
Yes. Takes a lot of time. You still have to sign a lot of documents. You literally have to give away all of your personal information to be able to get a loan. It takes over 45 days. I think for me it took close to 60 days. So it took a really, really long time. So when you work with Figure and the ecosystem and the origination system that we built, you can get pre approved within five minutes. So you enter all of your information. You should try your app if you haven't already. I did that as part of my interview process to see, let's see if it really works. You enter all your information, you get an offer, you're pre approved and then you, you give all the documents that's needed, you upload all of that and you can close a loan as fast as five days. On average it's about nine to 10 days. And mortgages, helocs included, have a rescission period. And so that is the reason why it's a little bit extended. Then if you think of a personal
- [14:24]
A
loan, just to go a click deeper, where specifically do you think the system is bloated today that causes over a month?
- [14:31]
B
I think it's because there is a lot of people involved in the process. And if you're familiar with how mortgages, traditional mortgages have been originated, there is a process that is required by Fannie and Freddie because most of these mortgage origination companies, they originate a loan and they want liquidity behind the scenes. So they would be selling to Fannie and Freddie who would then sell on to these loan buyers at the end of the day or securitization vehicles. And so when you're following the process, it says please look at the pay stubborn. So then you know everyone has to download a pay stub. If you don't have a pay stub then get the tax documents or W2 or tax filings. And these are all manual processes and humans are reading through. We use a different process where we are connecting to something like a plaid behind the scenes to read your direct deposit bank account and see that there is constant inflow of cash coming into your bank account. And we know that's your paycheck, that takes very little time. But if you're having to hire someone, look at documents, validate it, upload it, that just takes time.
- [15:37]
A
And part of this it sounds like it does translate into the profitability and the financial performance.
- [15:42]
B
So if, if you're a fintech company and these are this just an example, you could also be a mortgage lender as well. Me being part of a finance company before a consumer lender, there were two things I worried about the most. It was credit and liquid liquidity. Credit is how do I build my underwriting box so that I get the users, borrowers who are going to pay me back. And then the second part is, so where do I get the money to fund these originations? And is that going to be a bank? And usually banks don't lend you money to do that. So you're going out to buyers who are given like a forward flow agreement. So if you produce, you're going to be selling to this buyer at a certain price. Or you can come a securitization sponsor yourself and go through all the rating agencies, have all the track record and proof, and then go out to find different types of investors. So those are the two things I would focus on the most as a CFO at a consumer lender or fintech. And what figure brings to the table really is, you know, we're giving you an origination system, it's white labeled, you can come in as a fintech lender, new person, we have a origination system that anyone can plug into and you bring the customers. And the marketplace is amazing because there is people who are sitting there waiting to see these loans come onto the marketplace and they're able to buy the loans as well. And it's all possible because of the loans being originated by the same system. So we call that homogenized and standard. And you know, all of the loans that figure originates go onto the blockchain. So the blockchain technology, you can actually trust the information on the blockchain. It cannot be double pledged. So if party A is buying the loan or if party A is lending to the loan, party B won't be able to get access to the same loans. And you can see all of that information on the blockchain, which is what makes us more efficient and transparent. The loan buyers can also see the performance of the loans once they buy these loans because it's on the blockchain. If there is payment, you don't have to wait for a servicing report to come from a third party that tells you client A paid you or client B did not pay you, download the loan tape daily and literally see the loan performance, which also makes the whole marketplace so much more efficient.
- [18:08]
A
As a CFO in an emerging industry, emerging industry within the larger fintech industry, which you've been in for a while, what, what risk have you become more sensitive to over time as you've scaled
- [18:19]
B
the overall partner, whether it's coming from, you know, the seller or the, or the buyer on the marketplace, like who you're working with, the trustworthiness, the payback risk from each of these types of different types of companies that come onto Our marketplace would be one. The other thing is because I've been in the blockchain industry for a long time, you always have to think about the security risk of what you're doing and how that is going to be safe for everyone involved. And then at the end of the day, I do also look at overall macro risk because fintech, you're in the financial services industry. Like where is interest rates? Where are interest rates heading? Is that going to go up? Is it going to go down? Where is the credit, where it's going to be liquidity of who, who, who else is really going to lend into the market, buy the loans, et cetera are some of the risks that I always pay attention to. But nobody really taught me how to do that when I first became a cfo. So it's really hard.
- [19:22]
A
It's so funny. I actually said the same thing to Michael. We talked about risk for a while and there's no CFO school. And even if there was, I don't know how they would build a curriculum on this. There's no way that you learn out of the box. Like these are the risks to keep an eye out for and these are the situations in which they commonly arise.
- [19:39]
B
I agree. You make a lot of mistakes and then Hindsight is always 2020. And so you tune and readjust and be flexible and make changes along the way.
- [19:50]
A
Hey, thanks for listening. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. I got news for you. The ERP category is finally getting disrupted. And if you haven't heard of Rillit yet, please pay attention. It's the AI native ERP built specifically to replace netsuite and it's already won over hundreds of finance teams. Their mission is to make these zero day close a reality. And they're actually doing it. We're talking teams closing the books at 1:35pm on the first day of the month. Companies like Windsurf, Mercore and hundreds of others run their entire finance stack on really revenue recognition, close management, multi entity, native stripe and salesforce integrations.
- [20:26]
B
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- [20:27]
A
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- [23:07]
B
So for figure we're a blockchain technology company. We hold very little amount of crypto on our balance sheet. So it's not something that we pay a lot of attention to because we're not a proprietary trader that has that FX risk that would be on our balance sheet. But overall, because I'm in the industry and I'm part of the overall crypto technology industry, I do pay attention because if there is more adoption across institutions and regular individuals, then there's just going to be more interest in what we do as a company as well. So it's more indirect impact, but less direct impact for who we are.
- [23:46]
A
Yeah, it seems like it's more of a leading indicator of how willing people are to try new technologies.
- [23:52]
B
When cloud technology first came about, I think a decade or so ago now, people don't even know if you're on the cloud or if you're where your data is, whether it's in a data center or as part of like Amazon or Google. But I really think blockchain technology can be successful. When people don't realize blockchain technology is being used behind the scenes, it's just that it's very efficient, fast, transparent technology.
- [24:17]
A
Well, even further to that point, I think when we were moving over to the cloud, people would question the security early on, but eventually just becomes the invisible backbone of a lot of what we do. Do you think there are instances in people's lives right now where they don't even realize that they're using blockchain technology,
- [24:34]
B
like centralized exchanges, for example, where it just feels like you're on a banking app and you're clicking through and buying crypto or selling crypto or buying different types of equity. But behind the scenes, what's powering all of that is like real wallets that are tokenized. So I do think people like the ease of use and not having to really trying to understand the technology and get caught up in the adoption of that.
- [25:03]
A
Do you think that the North Star is for people to not even think that figure in some way, shape or form is a blockchain company? They just look at it for how fast and how efficient it is at the loan process.
- [25:16]
B
That's the important part where you get over your hindrance or concern around using blockchain technology like that. Fear factor. I think it's best for adoption when people just know that it's fast technology and there's security and encryption behind the scenes.
- [25:33]
A
Makrina, I was so excited to have you on for many reasons and one of them is I've been trying to figure out stablecoins for a while now you're very early to this, so can you explain how stablecoins work to me as if I were maybe in middle school?
- [25:47]
B
Sure, I'll give it a try. It's a digital representation of a US dollar. So instead of going to your bodega, buying a sandwich using cash today, you can use like Apple pay with a credit card or a debit card. Behind the scenes we're saying it's a different type of wallet and you can just use your Stablecoin which is that's just like cash, and be able to pay for your sandwich. That's $10 is how I would think about it. You know, there are companies that are providing these stablecoins to be able to use. It's not as commercially widespread as I would like and you can just go to a bodega and spend the stablecoin. But there are companies that have been issuing stablecoins and the digital representation is actually backed by cash in a bank account. Is how I would think about it as like the whole gold reserve and looking at gold versus dollar was started with there is a gold bar in some bank in a vault. Now we're just doing that with cash.
- [26:46]
A
I know where cash is on the balance sheet, but where would you put stablecoins in the balance sheet?
- [26:50]
B
We do put different types of stablecoins in our cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet to the extent they are represented by cash behind the scenes. So there are some stablecoins out there that necessarily don't have a one to one cash ratio and can use like Bitcoin or other types of tokens as the reserve. Those we cannot treat as stablecoin. But for every other stablecoin out there, we do have it in our cash and cash equivalents.
- [27:18]
A
And if I have a stablecoin in an account, will it earn some sort of interest similar to how like I'm making it up in my Marcus or my bank of America account of maybe if it's high yield, I can get three and a half percent.
- [27:31]
B
No. So there is a lot of conversations discussions around can stable coins earn yield? The current regulatory environment does not allow you to do that. And that's why figure has its own stablecoin. We call it YLDS yields. We're very original in our name and the reason that we call it yields is because you can actually earn yield on our stablecoin that Frader offers. The differentiation there is our stablecoin is actually governed by the sec. If you think of it more as legal terms, it is a Debt security. And so we will give you one yield and that yield will be earning. So for minus 35 basis points, it's something that we really care about, giving back the yield that we're earning while we use the cash that you give us. We are probably one of the only companies out there that has been able to give you a stablecoin that you can actually use at a bodega if they have the infrastructure built behind it that constantly earns yield.
- [28:36]
A
Because I've heard some stories about stablecoins out there, or at least they were coin to stable coins, no pun intended, that had crazy yields. And I'm like, there's no way that could possibly be true.
- [28:45]
B
I look at our yields as more of a portable money market fund. So you have cash in your wallet, but it constantly earns some type of yield.
- [28:55]
A
Nice. Well, we have a lot of finance leaders listening, Makrina, who are interested in coming up with some sort of stablecoin strategy. Maybe if your game we could go through like a crawl, walk, run here. What would be the crawl? What's the smallest real dollar experiment a CFO could run next week with stablecoins?
- [29:11]
B
I think if they want to, you know, come to figure and let us know that they want to buy ylds, they can actually even start doing that personally. So we have an app or a web app and there's no like low denomination. You can just buy $1 ylds as well if you want to. So if I were the CFO and I wanted to see if it's safe or not, I'd start with $50, $100, try it out, you know, see how easy it is to onboard and be able to see the yields earning daily. So if you look at our app, it shows you, you, you know, x amount of dollars based on the yields that you've deposited with us. So I would start there. And this is a conversation I have with investors as well. Try our app. You can see that you can buy yields. It's really easy.
- [29:52]
A
It is funny how a lot of these technology adoptions do start at the personal level. Like if you think about using ChatGPT now I started using it asking like silly questions about like a recipe or something. Not that I cook that often. And then eventually I get comfortable enough to connect it to my entire G drive, which it's like two years ago they would have been mind blowing to say, yeah, just have access to all
- [30:12]
B
my files, just know who I am.
- [30:15]
A
So what's the walk? What's the next thing that somebody could do is stable coins.
- [30:19]
B
Then I would, you know, reach out to figure because now you've tried it, you see that you can see the earn earning of the yield daily. It's quite easy to use. But institutions a little bit more different. You have to onboard your entity, you have to go through your know your business process and it's also mutual in terms of the company will want to know that if I put in a hundred thousand dollars and I ask for that hundred thousand dollars in cash back tomorrow, you want to be able to see that you can get that money back. So whatever your comfort level is, whether that's $10,000 or you know, $1,000, have that account open and then I call it testing the pipes. You test the pipes, you deposit money and then ask for it back a few days later. All of a sudden, don't warn us, don't tell us and see if that whole process works.
- [31:06]
A
And then what's the run when you've truly incorporated stablecoins, I would start with
- [31:11]
B
depositing your your cash into wilds and then to the partners that work with us, you can pay with YLDS because you know that the pipes are working and you know you can redeem at any time. Then you can put it through the circulation, use it within the figure ecosystem. Because a lot of the products that we offer to institutions and retail work based off of ylds. The marketplace can only be as efficient and fast as the slowest tool in there. And cash is going to be the slowest because you're beholden to the whole banking hour. But if you have a stablecoin as part of the solution, there is no concept of banking hour. You can move in the system as fast as you want. And I love just like moving money into me personally into wild on like a Friday night because you know, the week is done. I can now like look up and see like what's going on. And I know that YLDS will show up in like five minutes.
- [32:06]
A
Oh, me and my wife were trying to buy a car a month ago and they're like, you can take it home today. And they're like, just wire us the money. And I'm like, but it's Saturday. He's like, you can't take it home today.
- [32:16]
B
Well, now there's a stable coin. If you accept it, you can get it right away.
- [32:20]
A
That was frustrating. But at the same time, some would argue that the friction for moving money is in some ways a feature and not a bug of the financial system. What would you say to that?
- [32:30]
B
It does make sense. So in, in crypto world, if you are just looking at bitcoin one to one, you have your own address, I have my own address. And if I send you bitcoin, it's, it's irreversible. So if I send it to the wrong address and you run away with it, I'm not going to get it back. What's different for YLDS is that it's a debt security, so there could be a mistake. When I send you the YLDS and I say no, no, no, no, no, no, it went to the wrong place. We also have a copy of the register as a digital transfer agent, as a company. So we have that license and we have that record of, you know, CJ being the person who is owning the ylds. And so we can, we can get it back for you. That is the safety of who we are and what we do. And that's a little bit differentiated with like true native crypto.
- [33:17]
A
And maybe you can just elaborate on the control strategy there because I do think it, it needs to change in some way. If you're using stable coins or really incorporating any sort of blockchain or crypto
- [33:28]
B
technology, having a digital register and knowing that CJ Macrina, your figure or wherever other entity that may be owns a number of ylds on any given day or any given time and having that record is really helpful. I think bitcoin, it is somewhat not as transparent. It's all on the blockchain, but nobody knows like who owns which wallet. The behind the scenes of what's going on, the overall kyc. So know your customer or kyb know your, know your business process that we take to onboard these types of YLDS coins is really helpful for I think the person who is bringing the money and also for us as well.
- [34:10]
A
I want to transition to talk about the IPO process because you've been through multiple IPOs and you took Springleaf public about 10 years ago and your second IPO was figured just last year. So if you were to reflect on the process, is there one part that actually got easier in the 10 years in between?
- [34:29]
B
I actually was at a panel last week talking about the overall IPO process. And what really came to mind for me as this second time around is I know what's going to happen. So that was so much more easier because I, I would, I could anticipate that the IPO day is really the day that we celebrate. Everyone's very happy, all of our stock is liquid. But then the Hard work starts the next day, so I could anticipate, you know, save my energy, get to a certain point and then we get to work in terms of speaking with our shareholders and investors on a quarterly basis and having that longer term view of everything we say during an ipo, it's something that we have to also deliver on after the ipo. Having that look back, hindsight experience was super helpful for me as part of the overall journey.
- [35:22]
A
Is there a part that's gotten harder?
- [35:24]
B
Yes, I have to say so back when I was doing the ipo, we would just have the roadshow. It was just a 10 day roadshow. You would fly everywhere, meet everybody and be at your best. These days you have to do something called testing the waters meeting. So there's not just round one. You could have multiple rounds, like round three or four. And so you're meeting investors before the IPO roadshow multiple times, telling them, this is what we will deliver on you meet them again and say, yes, we did what we said we would do and here is where we are. And so there's multiple rounds of meetings. And being prepared for that as part of the overall journey was something that was new and I think it's more of a newer concept. After Covid, or right around Covid, people started to educate investors a lot more around who you are as a company and how you're going to make money.
- [36:17]
A
I think that's been a Trend from other CFOs who've gone through an IPO recently. Covid made it easier to talk about the company in the context of, of testing the waters or, or a roadshow. But it also made you always accessible to be able to do these meetings
- [36:33]
B
because you're on Zoom. You don't have to fly around the whole world.
- [36:35]
A
It's funny how you mentioned that you check in with the same investors multiple times. It sounds like you're trying to go from having dots with these investors to having lines to show them how you've progressed over time.
- [36:46]
B
It keeps us on our toes. And the other thing I say about blockchain technology is because a lot of our KPIs and trends are on the blockchain. It's a, it's a constant conversation with our investors and shareholders because people will have questions. Businesses aren't linear, as you know. There's going to be ups and downs in weekends and weekdays. And so the conversations have become a lot more frequent.
- [37:10]
A
Workiva wasn't around back then for SEC filing. What tech changes have there been?
- [37:16]
B
It was around, it was Like a brand new company. When I was going through the whole public company process and I still Remember we paid $25,000 per year for Workiva and I was asking our SEC reporting person like, why do you want to use this? You can just use Word and go through the printer and it's so much easier. Why do you want a platform? And of course she was right. And so we did use Workiva back then. It's become more costly, of course, because there's more offerings, but it has actually completely disintermediated the printer system and people do everything from their offices now.
- [37:52]
A
Well, historically I heard a Fun stat that IPOs would typically cost 150 grand just for the paper.
- [37:59]
B
And you're killing trees all the time because you're looking at multiple rounds of documents. These are like 300 page documents and then you have to print the whole thing.
- [38:08]
A
What other tech advantages have arisen for the IPO process?
- [38:13]
B
This number stat probably will give you like exactly what happened. So back when I first did my IPO and it was a larger company, we had about 3 billion of loans on balance sheet. My team of accountants was and finance folks was 130 people. So that's what I needed to do to be able to maintain the books and records of a company. Because there was no proprietary off the shelf system that really worked well, that was on the cloud and people could use it with AI intelligence on top. Today my whole finance team is less than 35 people and I would say the amount of money that we make, the amount of volume of loans that go through our ecosystem, it's probably like 3 or 4x, you know, what I used to look at when I was at Springleaf. But you can see the whole scale and systems and the benefit of AI that's coming through, I'm sure not just for me, but for many other companies.
- [39:07]
A
If you were to look at the timeline for an IPO Macrina, has it gotten longer or more compressed?
- [39:13]
B
I think it depends on the type of company, but I also think it really depends on the accessibility of the SEC. So, you know, back in 2122, nobody could do anything because the whole SPAC boom, if you recall, I think for 25, 2025, I did find the SEC much easier to work with. They are much more accessible, willing to have a conversation on different types of topics because as you know, we're a very unique company and it's not as easy to understand in one read of the S1. And so it was actually a really enjoyable process.
- [39:49]
A
Stupid question. When you're going back and forth with the sec. Is it kind of like they're giving you red lines on the S1 or are they asking questions thematically about how the business makes money? What conversations occur?
- [40:00]
B
Yes, they really focused on our product. So thematically they were pointing to connections and saying, can you explain how Democratized Crime works? That's one of our products. And can you add in a picture so people can understand how this product really works? So it was really commercially friendly for any reader to be able to pick up the document and understand what we do.
- [40:22]
A
I had no idea that they went into the storytelling part of it to make it accessible about how things make money and what the product roadmap looks like. I figured it was just all about the financials and taking tying that.
- [40:34]
B
No, we actually had very few comments on the financial statements in fact, which is great. And we had very few comments on the legal side of the house respectors with a lot of questions around how we made money and what our products do.
- [40:47]
A
If you were giving advice to a CFO who's trying to ipo, let's say a window opens up, the IPO gods bless us, and they're trying to do it in short order, is there anything that you would tell them to pay very close attention to or something that's non negotiable or, or even like, hey, this is something that I thought we had to do, but actually you can get away with saving time not doing it.
- [41:07]
B
I would say my lessons learned out of the two IPOs that I've done is really be very thoughtful around what your KPIs and key metrics that you communicate to the street and investors are going to look like and not just be myopic about thinking about what's in front of you and who you are as a company today. I think looking at the three to five year business strategy of who you think you're going to be based on what you've laid out, are those metrics going to apply at that time? And being consistent I think is really important. And the other one I would say is what's so surprising is the first earnings that you do out of the gate right after the ipo, which is very close to your whole growth show, and you're speaking with the investors, you would think most companies would either like meet or slightly beat the expectations that were communicated to the analysts during the IPO process. You'd be surprised. Many companies don't do that. And so I ask, how are you thinking about your model? How are you communicating with your analysts because you actually do want to show them that you've been very thoughtful around how you built the model, how you think about the company and what the outcome is going to be on the next growth quarter. So I would say please make sure you're thinking through all of that when you're speaking with investors and shareholders and analysts.
- [42:27]
A
It's such sage advice to be thoughtful about the metrics long term and medium term. Not just to focus on what drives the business today because you don't want to be changing them quarter to quarter or year to year and then re educating them because I mean it's all interconnected that then informs the model that you're speaking to on what they think you're able to produce.
- [42:45]
B
You're absolutely right. And I still read Springleaf, it's called one main today and the metrics that they talk about. And I'm, I'm proud and happy to say it's the same metrics. When I was there and I read it, I'm like, wow, it hasn't changed. This is great. I love it.
- [43:00]
A
You chose some good ones then.
- [43:02]
B
Thank you.
- [43:02]
A
I want to transition to talk about automation because I heard a quote, you said that you want more than 50% of your accounting work to be using AI. What percentage would you say you're at today?
- [43:12]
B
We started this initiative when I joined the company. So like December of 2024 is when I joined. We went through the whole IPO process and then really reset in Q4 to focus on automation and using AI a lot more than what we did before. And so I would say we're probably around like the 10, 20% mark today. And our goal ultimately is really to be around like 60% plus by the end of 26 and use like AI for, you know, being able to generate a lot of the journal entries that come out of what we do as a company. And it's not for every company. I think for us because we are more marketplace and we're consumption based and there's expenses or there's more standardization of what we do and it is easier to program into AI agents being able to do what you ask them to do. I think for other companies that a lot of contracts or agreements are customized, it's going to be a bit harder.
- [44:06]
A
That's such a good point. Like not every AI use case is meant for every company.
- [44:11]
B
Yes.
- [44:12]
A
What did you knock off first? You mentioned journal entries. Was there anything else that was low hanging fruit that you said, let's go do this today with AI it's also
- [44:19]
B
like calculations of, you know, certain things that go into spreadsheets. And if it's a repeatable process that you have to do each time, I think that's an easy one that you can knock off as well, is how we're thinking about it.
- [44:33]
A
Have you identified the next wave of tasks that you're trying to knock out? Maybe you're not fully there today, but you're like, we gotta, we gotta charge at this.
- [44:40]
B
We're in our journey currently because, you know, we do have loan information coming through us and we have servicing reports that we need to issue to third parties. We're really looking at how can we automate this the most because the information is repeatable. And so that's a bigger one that we need to bite into that we need to think through.
- [45:01]
A
It sounds like you're pattern matching around what data different tasks run on. Is it predictable? Is it something that is going to be in the same format each time? Is the data even in a spot where I could put AI on this?
- [45:13]
B
We needed to do some cleanups as well. So if you don't have a clean set of information today, the first thing you have to do is not to go out and try and buy an AI tool that's going to sit on top and create more chaos. We wanted to make sure we cleaned up the information first.
- [45:28]
A
So early on you hired a director of Finance Transformation and so I actually run a recruiting arm now for the finance department and that's actually one of the roles that we're experiencing an influx of requests for. What problem were you trying to solve when you made that hire?
- [45:44]
B
So Figure is a high growth company. Our volume grows over a hundred percent year over year and we also launched different types of products probably on a quarterly cadence. So we have a lot going on on a day to day basis just to standardize and put controls behind. And so I realized as soon as I came here, we're going to be high growth, we're going to do a lot of things. We have a whole IPO upcoming. I really need someone who's solely focused on transformation, automation and bringing on AI. And so this was an early hire that I brought on as soon as I started at this company. And you know, she has been very, very helpful across the board, thinking through new tools to bring in. We're not just trying to, you know, bring things for the sake of experimenting or trying out and seeing whether it works or not. We want to be really thoughtful and not have to waste a lot of time because the accountants and FP&A folks have day to day jobs, they, they really don't have time to go out and research and find these tools and see what's out there. And so she has been very helpful in thinking through that whole process.
- [46:51]
A
It's a fascinating role because it kind of sits at the intersection of program management and then also accounting, but then also IT and systems.
- [46:59]
B
Good thing is I worked with this individual before and she understands accounting really well. And I think that's like the basis of finance. And so finding that person, but someone who is also familiar with talking to the engineers, working with the tech department, understanding how all the pieces are come together is really key. And it's not an easy role to hire for because if you're an engineer in IT looking to learn accounting, it doesn't come very easily because accountants have been studying this from college.
- [47:31]
A
If there's a CFO or VP of finance listening and saying, listen, I need to have this type of hire, I need to find a role like this. What would you say are some of the 30, 60, 90 day goals that they should measure towards? Because I think it's like a long term bet that you're making that you need to make this transformation. But to get, get the plane off the ground, what are they doing the first 30, 60, 90 days?
- [47:53]
B
Sure. I would say initially this individual would come in and not just map out what finance uses as a tech stack, but really map out what the rest of the organization is using as a tech stack. And in certain cases I ask an engineer like how does this information feed into finance? And I'm not able to understand what they're saying. I've had this experience at every single company that I've been at. And so you know, this individual would come in and be able to explain to me in very simple terms, I don't have to know all the detailed tech background, but I do need to understand where the information is grouped, how it's going to be aggregated, how often it refreshes, what's the time zone that it's using, like the very detailed minutiae that you know, most people don't think about or care about, but accountants care a lot about. And so understanding the whole tech stack, it actually takes longer than 30 days of a certain company. So that is my number one goal. And then based on that, then we can start building the accounting tools or FP&A tools which we already know. That's the easier part.
- [48:55]
A
So you should ask further than what's the CRM you're using yes, Makrina, I'm going to take you into what we call our long ass lightning round. So I ask every successful finance leader that comes on the show, you got to give me one thing that you've messed up before on the job, a mistake you've made here or any previous role.
- [49:12]
B
Honestly, I make so many mistakes every day, whether it's small or big. I do have to say, once I make a mistake, I always think about it and say, I will never make this mistake again. That's how I actually think about mistakes. It's just an evolution to being perfect.
- [49:26]
A
Anything maybe from the banking days that you sent the wrong file or anything like that?
- [49:30]
B
In my private equity days. And I will talk about somebody else's mistake where I told myself, I will never make this mistake. I was actually on a deal on the other side, and the banking analysts on the other side sent me their view of my company. And so I was able to see the whole secret sauce, the negotiation that they were going to intend to do to. To buy what we were offering. I actually sent it back to the company because I felt so guilty knowing that what's coming. And I said, I think you sent this to me by accident and it really should not have come to me. And they were like, oh, my. Like, thank you for letting us know. Please delete the file. Like, don't read it. And then I think the analyst who was working with me was shipped off to another country.
- [50:14]
A
Shipped to Timbuktu.
- [50:15]
B
Yes. So that was a lesson I learned. Always check who you are emailing your files to.
- [50:20]
A
If you could give your younger self advice, knowing what you know today, what would you tell her?
- [50:24]
B
I would tell her to not just work so hard all the time. I would say go out and meet people, meet peers. The CFO role is really a lonely role if you're not talking to other peers of what you're going through. So try to make as many friends and relationships as possible.
- [50:42]
A
Next one I got for you, more of a technical one. Can you walk me through your team's finance software stack? What tools do they use to get the job done?
- [50:48]
B
Workiva. As soon as we talked about Rex, because of where we come from, we also have Sage intact, which is our version of NetSuite. And we have something called Trace Finance, a platform that uses AI and can track all of your digital assets. So not just crypto like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but it can actually track tokenized assets as well, which has been immensely helpful for us to be able to close our books and reconcile.
- [51:18]
A
What's the most recent tool you've purchased. Anything come to mind?
- [51:21]
B
We are actually moving into Ramp because we think that's very helpful and they put on a lot of AI tools. We're also talking about a company called Umos, a tool that can literally read all of your invoices that come through and recreate the journal entries. And so it is more of an AI based tool. So those are the ones that we're currently considering making expenses so much more easier.
- [51:45]
A
A big fan of the team at Nemos AI. They've got something cool going there. Oh, last one I got for you. What's the craziest thing you've ever had someone try to expense?
- [51:53]
B
This was not at my company, but at some other company that I was helping out as part of being private equity. A guy was going on a trip with his wife, so he bought his. Bought the whole luggage package and expensed it to the company.
- [52:06]
A
Really?
- [52:07]
B
Yeah. Like bags, trunks, you. You call it expensive ones and we found out it was crazy.
- [52:13]
A
Well, don't do that, folks. Makrina, this has been an absolute blast. Thank you so much for spending time with us.
- [52:18]
B
Thank you so much for having me
- [52:19]
A
run the numbers Is a mostly media production. Yelling an intro by Fat Joe. Artwork by Meg delesandro. Show is executive produced by Ben Hillman. Nothing said on this podcast is intended to be business or investment advice. It's the sole opinion of me. A guy who feeds his dog way too much ice cream and has a history of net options, operating losses, lol. If you like this podcast, hit subscribe and give us five stars. It will take like two seconds and our algorithm overlords love it. Drink water, call your mom and have a great day.
- [52:48]
B
Peace.