Lenders and payments fintechs need a CFO earlier

A lending or payments fintech in Australia usually needs finance leadership from around seed and a CFO by around Series A, earlier than a single-product software business. The first finance hire is usually a head of finance.

Lending and payments need a CFO sooner, because finance runs the product

In a software business the finance person reports on the business. In a lender or a payments company they help run it: the funding lines, the settlement, the cash that belongs to customers. When I was asked on Behind The Story why fintech is different, I said non-bank lending and payments are:

“very capital intensive. Like there’s a lot of money going through it. So you will need someone a little bit sooner because the operations of the business is finance itself.”

In that same answer I put the timing at “seed, it might be, yeah, series A-ish”, against late Series A or Series B for a single-product SaaS business. The regulation comes with the product too. As I said on Celia’s Corner: “if you’re doing something like a payments business or a lending business, then there’s a lot of regulation around that”, and “you might need a certain level of liquidity for the loans that you’re paying out.” Somebody has to own that number every day, and early on it is usually the founder.

If your fintech sells accounting, fraud or compliance software on subscription, none of this applies in the same way: your numbers behave like software, and the software timing for a CFO is the one to read.

33% of lenders and payments companies had a CFO before their first round, against 18% in software

We dated the finance hires at 194 venture-backed Australian companies against their publicly announced funding rounds. 40 are fintechs: 24 lend, extend credit or move payments, and 16 do something else (trading, insurance, advice, infrastructure sold to banks). Here is when the 24 first put someone with a CFO title in the seat, against the 82 software startups in the study.

A third of the lenders and payments companies had a CFO before the first round was even announced, which means a lending founder cannot wait for the round to tell her when the seat is due. Software is the mirror image: nearly half of the software companies have no CFO title on record at all. Among the 16 lending and payments companies that have hired a CFO, the median CFO started a month before the first announced round. The rest of fintech moves closer to software pace: 19% (3 of 16) had a CFO before the round.

The first finance hire points the same way.

The median lender or payments company made its first finance hire two years after it was founded, against three and a half for startups as a whole, so a lending founder three years in with nobody in finance is later than most of her peers.

For the fintech data by round, read when Australian fintechs make their first finance hire.

Most still started one level down, and the CFO hired first rarely stayed

Only 6 of the 24 lending and payments companies made a CFO their first finance hire. The most common first seat was a head of finance or finance director (8 of 24): someone to own the controls, the cash view and the reporting a funder asks for, with the capital strategy still sitting with the founders and the board. That seat is due earlier than most founders think. The signs I wrote about on LinkedIn are a financial model that has become a scramble, cash conversations that are more of a guess, and nobody sure which version of the forecast is the live one.

The CFO bought first rarely lasted. Across the 40 fintechs, 10 started with a CFO, and 9 of those 10 CFOs have since left, after a median 15 months. The head of finance seat held: 6 of the 12 fintechs that started there later added a CFO above that first hire, a median 35 months after it. That is the sequence I would plan for in a lender or a payments business: a head of finance from around the seed, briefed for the business 12 to 18 months out, and the CFO when capital strategy needs its own owner. What changes when someone properly owns finance is how the big decisions get made: you stop making significant calls on partial information and optimism. The five questions below are how I tell when that owner needs to be a CFO.

If you are being told to hire now, or to wait

“Hire the CFO first, so you only hire once.” The data says the first-hire CFO is the seat most likely to be hired twice: 9 of 10 left, a median 15 months in. The problem you are hiring for today is rarely the one the person will be solving. As I said on Celia’s Corner, “the problems that you have with finance now might not be the same problems in 12 to 18 months time.” Hire for that horizon, which in a lender at seed is usually a head of finance.

“Hire someone from a bank.” Banks are a real source in fintech: 18% (7 of 40) of the fintech first finance hires in our study came straight from a bank or financial institution, against 6% (11 of 191) across all companies. A corporate background often means the person has seen what good looks like and knows what they are building. The risk is the move itself. When I interviewed the CFO of Beforepay on The CFO Track, I asked how the move out of a corporate worked, because “you can get a little bit institutionalized in larger businesses like that because there is so much there.” Test for what they built without that support around them.

How Alex Bank and Brighte timed their first CFO

Two Australian lenders, told from public profile titles, announced rounds and the study sequence: a CFO from the first year, and controllers through two rounds and then a CFO.

1

Alex Bank

A CFO in the founding year, years before the first announced round

Business

Digital bank for personal loans and savings (founded 2018)

Rounds

First announced round, Nov 2020; Series C, Sep 2021 (A$20M); Series D, Aug 2022

First finance hire

CFO, Mar 2018

Against the first roundVs first round

32 months before

Next finance hire

Head of finance, Dec 2019

Now

CFO and head of finance both still in role (Sep 2026)

Alex Bank lends to consumers and takes deposits, which makes its balance sheet the product. A CFO started in March 2018, the year the company was founded and 32 months before its first announced round in November 2020. One finance profile at the company carries a 2013 start date, older than the company itself, so we start the clock at the CFO.

A head of finance joined in December 2019, below the CFO and still before any announced round. More than eight years on, both are still in the seat, through a Series C in September 2021 and a Series D in August 2022, with accountants added underneath. It is the clearest case in the study of a fintech that had its CFO long before it had an announced round.

The takeaway for a founder

If the product is a balance sheet, the CFO can be a founding hire. Pair them early with someone who owns the day-to-day numbers, so the CFO’s time goes on capital.

2

Brighte

Financial controllers through Series A and B, then a combined COO and CFO

Business

Point-of-sale finance for home solar and improvements (founded 2015)

Rounds

Series A, Sep 2017 (A$4M); Series B, May 2018 (A$18.5M); Series C, Oct 2019 (A$15.5M); Dec 2020 (A$100M)

First finance hire

Financial controller, Jul 2017

Against the first roundVs first round

2 months before

Next finance hire

Financial controller, Oct 2018; first CFO (also COO), Jul 2019

Now

20 finance hires in all since 2017 (Sep 2026)

Brighte finances solar panels and home improvements at the point of sale, so every customer is also a borrower. Its first finance hire was a financial controller in July 2017, two months before an A$4 million Series A, and controllers ran finance through an A$18.5 million Series B in May 2018.

The first CFO title arrived in July 2019, combined with the chief operating officer role, 14 months after the Series B and three months before a Series C. Brighte has made 20 finance hires since 2017, the second-largest count among the 40 fintechs in the study, and the CFO seat was filled again in 2021 and 2023.

The takeaway for a founder

A controller can carry a lender through its first two rounds. Start the CFO search before the round that needs one.

When it is time for the CFO, I set out how a first-CFO search runs in Australia.

A licence turns the finance seat into a list of deliverables

If your business holds a licence, the finance seat carries recurring regulatory work that a software company never sees. Read as a job description, the regulators’ own requirements below add up to a cash projection kept current, a solvency and net assets position watched all year rather than at year end, licence accounts an auditor will test, and a reporting clock that starts when something goes wrong. Someone has to own those from the day the licence is granted, and the brief for your first finance hire should say who.

• Financial services. A business that provides financial services generally needs an Australian financial services licence from ASIC under the Corporations Act 2001, and licensees must keep adequate financial, technological and human resources and adequate risk management systems. ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 166 sets base financial requirements: the licensee must be solvent and hold positive net assets at all times, must have enough resources to meet its anticipated cash flow expenses, and its annual audit report has to cover compliance with those requirements.
• Credit. A business that engages in credit activities generally needs an Australian credit licence under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009, with ongoing obligations that include adequate financial resources and an annual compliance certificate.
• Breach reporting. Both kinds of licensee must report reportable situations to ASIC, in most cases within 30 calendar days of first having reasonable grounds to believe one has arisen.
• Deposits. Carrying on banking business, taking deposits and making advances, requires authorisation from APRA under the Banking Act 1959. APRA’s licensing guidelines include a Restricted ADI pathway that lets a new entrant conduct limited banking business for a maximum of two years before it has to meet the full prudential framework.
• Money laundering. A business that provides a designated service under the anti-money laundering laws is a reporting entity that must enrol with AUSTRAC, and remittance and virtual asset service providers must also apply for registration before they start providing those services.

This is general information from the regulators’ published guidance, not legal advice. Whether your product needs a licence at all is a question for a lawyer who knows it.

Where these numbers come from

The figures come from Story Recruitment’s own study, built in September 2026: 194 Australian companies with a venture round that two independent searches both found, 191 of them with at least one dated finance hire, and 966 finance hires dated from public professional profiles and matched to public funding announcements. 40 are fintechs, tagged from what the product does. The lending and payments group is our own classification of those 40 from each company’s described product. “First CFO” is the earliest hire with a CFO title at the company, including interim and combined titles. Rounds are dated to their announcement, which usually trails the close by weeks. Outsourced and fractional providers do not appear in public employment records, so a company with no CFO title may still have had a CFO’s work done from outside. The company list was built from finance people, so it describes companies that went on to hire internal finance. The two company sequences are read from public profiles and announced rounds, titles and dates only; they show the order things happened in, and none of them shows that a different order would have worked better or worse. Nothing in the figures shows that hiring earlier or later changed how any company did. The groups are small, so read the fintech splits as a direction: two of the 24 lending and payments companies are among the softest rows in the study, and without them the share with finance in place before the first round reads 13 of 22. The full method and its limits are on the study page.

Common questions

These guides set out how we see it, drawn from the searches we run and the finance leaders we work with. They are general information about the market, not financial, accounting or legal advice, and they are no substitute for advice on your own circumstances.