M&A

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Carissa Kell

Companies often look to mergers or acquisitions as a means of achieving their strategic goals. Finastra, a financial services software company, is taking a different approach: divesting businesses that don’t fit its strategic priorities.

Similar to the finance leader’s role in any M&A deal, Finastra CFO Carissa Kell said her primary jobs in the deal process involve communication and valuation. Only, rather than assess an acquisition target, she’s providing information about one of the company’s assets to potential buyers.

“I think that’s the biggest piece as we get down to the negotiation with the final participants, is ensuring that we understand and are conveying the value of the products or the business that they’re buying,” Kell told CFO Brew.

In some instances, though, communicating that value can be a challenge, and all the deals have involved “an incredible amount of work” for Kell’s team.

Built through acquisition. While Finastra is focused on right-sizing itself, the software provider for financial institutions was formed in 2017 through a series of deals by Vista Equity Partners. At that point, “we had over 100 financial services products within the company,” according to Kell, who joined Finastra in 2020.

Finastra’s finance team has had to “[peel] apart businesses that weren’t necessarily set up separately.”—AZ

      

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TALENT MANAGEMENT

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You know that teeny, tiiiiiny leak that you kept meaning to fix? The one that eventually caused the gaping hole in your ceiling?

Well, that’s how many organizations are treating executive benefits—and the clock might be running out on that strategy.

Organizations have often “approached executive benefits through a familiar lens: retention, attraction, and compensation competitiveness,” Tony Greene, president of NFP’s executive benefits division said in a new executive benefits trend report. And while all of those factors still matter, “the pressures shaping the highly compensated workforce strategy are becoming far more complex,” Greene said.

“Economic uncertainty has become persistent rather than temporary. Leadership movement has become less predictable. Retirement timelines continue to shift. Succession planning is becoming more urgent while, at the same time, many organizations still lack formal transition strategies,” he explained.

As a result, executive benefits strategies are going to need to do a lot more than just retain current employees in the years ahead, Greene added. “They are using them to support continuity, leadership transition, and long-term workforce planning.”

Step one: Identify the people who create the most value for the organization.—NP

      

B2B MARKETS

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A new report on B2B buying behavior found that if vendors aren’t first on buyers’ lists, they’re effectively last.

That’s because the report, from ABM (account-based marketing) platform 6Sense, found that buyers are more often than not choosing the vendor they plan to buy from before even engaging with vendor sales teams—meaning sales communication is now actually one of the final steps in the buying cycle. And vendors want to be in the top spot for buyers, as “making second place or below at the time of the first meeting [means] a steep uphill climb.”

That said, a vendor being on the shortlist, even when they aren’t chosen for a particular deal, bodes well for them in the future: Because buyers are tending to go with vendors they already know, “a seller’s role transcends current sales cycles” and “performance in current sales cycles may have a greater impact down the line than in the present.”

“Even if you are the last vendor to make the list and have little chance of winning the current deal,” the report states, “getting on the list and making a good impression is vital for future success.”

Vendors need to be on a buyer’s radar before the sales cycle starts, Revenue Brew reports.—TC

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 41 out of 42. That’s how many bets a mystery Polymarket user won beginning last November, on whether KPMG-audited companies would beat earnings estimates. 👀 (Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “Tearing down our national protections against climate pollution from power plants will have enormous costs for the health, safety, and well-being of families across the country.”—Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, on the EPA’s decision to roll back rules capping some greenhouse gas emissions (AP)

Read: How much control, if any, should companies have over tokenized financial products tied to their shares? (Bloomberg)

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An inside look at expense management platform PEX’s $160 million capital raise—what it signals about where finance teams are putting their trust (and budget) next.