Smarsh CFO Says Finance Now Shapes Product Decisions

CFOs have traditionally been tasked with keeping things in their place. For years, that has kept CFOs mostly in place themselves, behind the walls of their own finance functions.

But change comes fast, and it doesn’t spare the finance department no matter the projections. CFOs are being pulled into questions of strategy, technology and organizational design, where they are expected to apply financial rigor.

“Our risk used to be only financial. Today, it has evolved to what are the strategic risks of the organization and what are also the operational risks,” Ian Goodkind, chief financial officer at Smarsh, said during a conversation for the PYMNTS “Office of the CFO” series.

“You have to keep a pretty big lens on what’s going on in the macro environment, because it impacts the business,” Goodkind explained.

CFOs may still own the numbers. But the numbers alone are no longer the point.

From Financial Steward to Strategic Operator

The traditional remit of finance was narrow and well understood.

“Historically, a CFO was always viewed as a number cruncher,” said Goodkind, a veteran finance executive. “We had to get the audits right. We had to get a budget in place. We had to make sure there were controls and policies and processes.”

As companies scaled and operations grew more complex, that definition began to stretch. Finance leaders were expected to help design systems rather than merely report on their outputs. Goodkind described this as the phase when CFOs were first recast as operators responsible for scalable processes, data visibility, and execution discipline across the enterprise.

In practice, that meant finance was no longer downstream from decision-making. It had become embedded in it.

This positioning has turned finance into what Goodkind called “the connective tissue of the entire organization,” linking past performance with current execution and long-term ambition.

“When I look at my calendar,” he added, “people would be like, ‘What are you doing, closing the books, doing budget?’ That’s not what it is anymore. It is about sitting with all your peers or even their directs and understanding what keeps them up at night, what can we do differently, and how can we afford it.”

Instead, CFOs are spending more time with operating leaders, product teams, and strategy executives. The conversations are less about variance analysis and more about trade-offs: what keeps leaders up at night, what investments are viable, and what risks the organization can afford to take.

Finance at Center of Governance, Product and AI

The CFO’s expanded role is becoming clearly visible across product strategy, especially as AI reshapes the economics of software.

“With AI, it’s shifting everything,” Goodkind said. “We will sit now with our product teams, understand the technology, understand what it takes to make it. Then we look at, do we build this, do we buy it, or do we partner to make it.”

These conversations extend far beyond cost. CFOs are more involved in assessing total addressable markets, pricing elasticity, customer willingness to pay, and long-term margin durability before products ever reach customers.

As AI makes greater inroads into finance, governance itself has become one of the most consequential nonfinancial responsibilities of finance leaders. As AI tools ingest sensitive data, questions around exposure, lineage and intellectual property are unavoidable.

“Where is this taking data from? Where is it exposing the data? How is the data being used?” Goodkind said. “There’s a lot of questions around it, and CFOs always have that hat of saying, whatever we do, we’re going to make it safe.”

At the same time, the data explosion driving AI has transformed finance operations as well. Real-time dashboards, automated audits, and predictive analytics can promise faster decisions, but many also introduce new complexity.

“I look back to the way we audited early in my career to the way our auditors come in today, and it is completely different,” Goodkind said.

“I don’t know if we can be dependent only on traditional finance backgrounds anymore,” he added, noting that future finance organizations, in his view, may require deeper fluency in data systems, information flows, and technology governance.

For finance leaders willing to step into that complexity, the CFO role can offer unprecedented influence. Not because finance matters less, but because it now touches nearly everything that matters most.