Good morning. Plaid CFO Seun Sodipo wants her staff to strike up conversations with company leaders about numbers they've crunched in the back office-so much so that it's been a top priority for her rookie year. That's meant "shifting mindsets" about how people understand their roles and what it means for a task to be complete, Sodipo said. "It's also been expectation-setting that yes, you should absolutely consider that to be part of your mandate," she said.
Sodipo joined Plaid in October 2025 from Glossier, the cosmetics company. Earlier in her career, she held senior roles at Stripe, the payments processing company. Plaid is best known for connecting users' bank accounts to other apps.
Another focus of her first year has been positioning Plaid for the artificial-intelligence age. The company has announced integrations with AI companies, including OpenAI and Meta. Meanwhile, Sodipo's finance team has built AI tools to replace third-party software providers. Sodipo said that earlier this year she encouraged her staff, which was experimenting with AI, to focus on bigger projects. "Rather than the onesie twosies, which we're doing really well, let's try and think big," she said.
Here a condensed and edited excerpt of my conversation with Sodipo:
What have you worked on in your first year that you're proud of?
We have an amazing finance team here. It's been really exciting to join as their leader and raise the bar on the team. Now I can help elevate the team and really think about the business partnership nature of the role and tie that back to visibility.
For us, it's easy to look at the numbers and know what that means because that is our day to day. A lot of the work I've been doing with the team is, how do you take those numbers and help drive the right level of discourse and discussion with your key business partners, ultimately to help drive better insight and better decision-making.
On the company's IPO preparations, where do things stand?
The company has an amazing opportunity and so many of the qualities of a company that would perform well in the public markets-durability, really powerful compounding growth that's supported by very powerful secular trends. Part of my mission is to ensure our operational rigor and sophistication allow us to eventually, if we choose to, operate as a public company. And so I've been focused on that.
I'm going to ask a CFO Journal favorite question. How are you using AI in the finance function?
Two projects come to mind that I'm happy to share. One is a benchmarking tool that directly connects to the SEC. Rather than relying on third-party services for market data and comp data-it's sort of organized and packaged in a way that does not necessarily fit how we want to look at comps. We were able to build a tool that exactly suits our needs, and we felt delivered higher accuracy for the metrics we care more about.
And then another one was actually a winner of a Plaid-wide AI day. A member of our team worked with a cross-functional partner on building a contract review tool that makes sure customer order forms exactly match with (Salesforce). We were previously using a third party to do this, but the team felt they could build something that would rival it and potentially even close some of the gaps that they'd seen.
Also read: Fintech Plaid Bets on Credit Scores to Fuel Next Phase of Growth
The Day Ahead
Earnings
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-- Lamb Weston
-- RPM International
Economic Indicators
The Federal Open Market Committee releases the minutes from its mid-September monetary policy meeting.
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What Else Matters to CFOs
Paramount Skydance laid out more details of its leadership structure ahead of the close of its deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, confirming the positions of David Ellison, Bari Weiss and Mark Thompson.
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The Big Number
5.310%
The 10-year Treasury yield on Monday, the highest closing level since April 2002.
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CFO Moves
Chevron, the Houston-based oil producer, named Jeff Gustavson as CFO, effective Jan. 1. Gustavson is currently president of Chevron's new energies division. He will succeed Eimear Bonner, the company's CFO since March 2024, who will become president of Chevron's oil-and-gas operations.