Growing up in the foothills of the Himalayas in rural India, Rohini Jain said she had no exposure to big business or C-suite executives. But throughout her youth, work ethic was a deep value her family held.

“Working hard was the only thing that you could control,” she added.

After gaining her chartered accountancy certification in India, a few years in England at the London School of Economics shaped her perspective and business acumen. She found the “whole big world of corporations…much more interesting than actually practicing as [a] CPA.”

Now, Jain is the CFO of financial services platform Bill, and has worked at some of the world’s most recognizable companies: General Electric, Walmart, eBay, and PayPal. She joined Bill in June 2025, and has since been focused on scaling the business post-IPO.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your experience like after being in London, and then going back to India to apply the skills you learned?

I grew up in a town where it’s very cohesive, and I didn’t even know the people from the South or the West or the East of India. And to straight away leave home, and [the] first time when I got to London was just an amazing growth of who I was, in terms of a person, in terms of the food I liked, or people I associated with, it was just amazing learning to enjoy people, even though they were different.

I think having lived in different places, and worked with GE in very big teams—I had teams from Finland, from Freiburg in Germany, Wuxi in China, Mexico—a lot of diversity on my teams over time, and it just teaches you so much about how to work with diverse thoughts, people, and really extract the best out of all the cultures, and makes you who you are, after a point.

Keep reading.—DL

Where will accounting firms and accountants provide value in the future? Hint: It’s not more technical accounting expertise.

Morning Brew’s recent research report, The state of finance hiring & careers, shows organizations and firms are already thinking of what skills they’ll need down the road. Strategic thinking and problem-solving. Communication and data storytelling. Cross-functional collaboration. Those are three of the top five skill sets most important for the next generation of accounting and financial professionals, according to the 352 finance leaders we surveyed for the report.

Further down on the list: technical accounting expertise. Bad news for the increasing number of undergraduates who are studying accounting after talk of accountant shortages? Not really, for two reasons: One, accounting is “the best background to have to go into business,” Joshua Chananie, a partner in charge of the consumer and industrial products practice at Sax, told CFO Brew. “If you can read and understand numbers, you have a leg up on everybody else.”

And two, “The highly, highly technical…accounting and tax folks are [who] eventually will become the commodity,” Chananie said.

Keep reading.—VR

When you think of banks, you probably picture the towering skyscrapers of Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley looming over Wall Street. But while JPMorgan and friends dominate CNBC chyrons, smaller players are quietly rallying.

Since the start of the year, the KBW Nasdaq Regional Banking Index, which tracks 50 banks with under $100 billion in assets, is up 9.17%, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s outperforming the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index, which tracks large-cap US banks and is up only 4.14%.

One reason: Loan growth is making a comeback. For a while, smaller businesses held off on borrowing amid policy uncertainty and shifting economic conditions. Now, commercial and industrial lending is beginning to recover, with many regional banks signaling a more constructive outlook for the rest of the year.

That rebound also helps on the margin side. Regional banks are typically more sensitive to interest rates than bigger banks because their deposit bases are less stable, forcing them to raise funding costs quickly when rates climb. But stronger loan growth can help offset those pressures, improving profitability even as rate expectations shift.

Keep reading on Brew Markets.—SY

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Chief Financial Officer at Wonderist Agency
• Chief Financial Officer at The Symicor Group
• Chief Financial Officer at Catalant
• PDC Chief Financial Officer at Infor
• Chief Financial Officer at KIPP DC