The CFO role has evolved faster than the tools built to support it.
Most finance teams are still running infrastructure designed for a job that no longer exists. The reporting. The reconciling. The close that bleeds into the next month. That's not finance - that's overhead with a title.
Agentic Finance shouldn't multiply your output - it should eliminate the work that was never worth doing in the first place.
That's why I run Mostly Media on Brex - an intelligent finance platform with AI-powered agents that do exactly that. Expenses handled automatically, policy enforced before the spend happens, books closed in minutes. So I can spend my time on the work that actually moves the business.
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Will FP&A Eat IR?
My come up as an operator began as an FP&A leader. I built an FP&A group without actually knowing what FP&A was.
For realz. It was back when the function was still new(ish) and far less defined. Sub genres like Corporate FP&A, GTM FP&A, R&D FP&A, Strategic Finance, none of those got thrown around. It was just… FP&A. The ask was framed more like, hey, we need a budget that our accountants didn't build, and preferably one with assumptions we can toggle as the business changes. You worked in consulting and PE for a bit, think you could figure this shit out?
Now that I think about it, we weren't even closing the books or forecasting on a monthly basis when I started. We were on a long, quarterly march through hell. I remember proposing a monthly close and watching people's heads spontaneously combust. How could we possibly run commissions accruals that fast? Won’t this be three times the work? We got there, but it was pushing a boulder uphill the whole way.
So the only thing that amazes me more than how far behind I was when I started in FP&A is how far it's come since. I see the depth and breadth of the function now as someone running a recruiting firm focused on FP&A and Strategic Finance roles. Companies now want:
"an FP&A leader with hands-on R&D business partnering experience, preferably at a pre-IPO company, with prior investment banking experience. Understands token economics."
Back then I was just looking for financial athletes. Now we're building FP&A Victor Wembanyamas in a lab. They can dunk without jumping, and also nailing threes.
And the evolution continues. The latest land grab appears to be Investor Relations.
So I did what I do whenever I think I've spotted a trend. I emailed a pile of sitting CFOs, fully expecting them to confirm I was right.
(I’m always right)
My pitch: Under the CFO, one person gets deputized to run both FP&A and IR. One throat to choke, as they say. The example I kept leading with was Aurélien Nolf, who was the voice reading the Safe Harbor statement at the start of every Lyft earnings call as VP of FP&A and Investor Relations, and later rode the combined seat straight into the CFO job at Navan.
I figured this would be one of the easier trend pieces I've written (I previously wrote about the CFO eating the COO role and most seemed to agree with my premise).
That is not what came back.
Most of them told me (politely) that I had the shape wrong. They still keep FP&A and IR as separate functions, both reporting up to the CFO, and a few were adamant that one human cannot actually do both jobs at once and do them well.
Then a curious thing happened… the same people who shot down my org-chart theory all pointed at the same deeper shift:
"IR professionals used to be only communication people. They were really, really specialists of communication skills. How do you attack an audience, press releases. We're seeing more and more people with my profile, more of a blend of the two, who have a lot more depth in terms of the business and the numbers and the metrics. And it's especially true in tech, because there's a lot of data, a lot of metrics you need to understand to tell the right story in a very granular way."
There is a convergence, but it's not where I initially thought. The org chart is actually pretty similar to years past. What's moved is who companies are now willing to put in the IR chair in the first place.
The comms-only IR professional, the one who wrote the script and guarded the CEO and CFO's calendar, is going extinct. What's replacing them is a finance operator who happens to also be great in front of investors. Whether that person sits inside FP&A, runs their own group, or reports straight to the CFO turns out to be a company-by-company detail. The talent underneath the title is converging.
Where the old setup breaks
Here's where the comms-only setup goes off the rails, and I've been on the wrong end of both.
The IR team consumes the numbers instead of producing them: At my first company, IR lived inside the comms org, and they would email me asking for, and I quote, "wow stats." Like, come on.
The problem wasn't that they wanted a good stat. I love a good stat. It's that they were shopping for one. They knew revenue was $187M that quarter, but they didn't KNOW revenue was $187M. Not the way you do when you watched it start life as a budget line, get argued over, miss for two months, and finally land as an actual. When you build the story backward from the number you wish you had, instead of forward from the one you've got, you end up with something that sounds cool and also doesn't quite hang. That dog don’t hunt, and investors can smell it.
Over time the external metrics drift from the internal ones: When IR is its own animal, it gets pushed to talk about the metrics that fit the story, while the business is actually run on a slightly different set inside the building. For a while that's fine. The two sit close enough. Then the quarters pile up, the definitions slowly come apart, and one day something cracks and you're on a call defending a number that nobody upstairs has steered against in eighteen months (“no one is compensated on renewal rate, but we’re giving it to the street?”)
And the gap between what you say and what you run on is a bill that always comes due.
Four reasons the comms specialist ran out of road
So why now? Well, the questions got harder and the business models got weirder. Four things, specifically.
Disclosure got heavier: NRR, RPO, net new ARR are now part of the common vernacular. None of those existed as standardized disclosures in 2010. Now they get asked for at the cohort level during Q&A. You need someone who's Johnny on the Spot with the numbers, as they say in Saving Private Ryan, and you're only that fast if you helped build them.
The buy side got way more technical: Have you ever seen a model one of your investors built on your business? If you're late stage and dealing with a Coatue or a D1 or a Dragoneer, their models might be better than yours. I once felt really, really sad after seeing the work Sands Capital did on my company. I, as the FP&A pro, felt JV. These funds are running variance analysis against what you told them last quarter in real time, on the call, while you're still talking. A career comms person would break their ankles trying to keep up.
Earnings never stop anymore: Used to be one call a quarter and then back to the farm to tend the crops. Now it's bus tours, an investor day, and a conference circuit that does not end.
And then AI showed up: Token spend, model strategy, how much revenue the new AI features are actually generating. Try answering that from a static script. Once again - you need to have been in the room where the bets got made to explain them correctly.
So where does IR sit?
Here are five takes.
My friend Teddy Collins, EVP of Finance at SeatGeek, runs corporate FP&A, IR, and treasury. This setup makes a lot of sense at a private, later-stage company... if you have the right person. He told me:
"Running the forecast and talking about the story of the business internally and externally is the way of the future. The lines across strategy, operations, and systems are blurring. Shaping the capital structure, telling the story to the market, optimizing every financial system and dollar coming in and out of the business, that's the modern CFO's office."
Aurélien Nolf was VP, FP&A and Investor Relations at Lyft (combined seat). He's now CFO at publicly traded Navan. On carrying both:
"It's a lot because your scope is pretty big, but you are able to know everything from start to finish about the business and then you get to tell the story. I think it's a very, very powerful combination."
The CFO of a publicly traded company approaching $2B in ARR keeps IR reporting to him.
He thinks they should be two separate roles, both reporting to the CFO.
The head of IR has to be senior enough to engage large institutional investors, and someone at that level won't want to report anywhere but to the CFO.
He doesn't believe one person can do both roles well at the same time at their scale.
But he sees real cross-training value. Earlier in his career he managed IR, corp dev, and treasury together, then swapped IR and treasury for FP&A.
Both his IR and corp dev leader and his FP&A leader came out of IB.
He'd never hire a communications leader to run core IR, and wouldn't outsource it to an IR or PR firm either.
He wants both FP&A and IR to be analytical, numbers-strong, and good communicators.
"I don't believe one person can adequately perform both roles simultaneously."
(This felt like the biggest difference between the public and private CFOs I talked to. At scale, the public guys guard that direct line.)
The CFO of an established public company approaching $500M in revenue has IR reporting directly to him.
He considered combining, but says it depends entirely on the individuals.
He tried it, and it didn't work. He had an IR hire who came from IB, pre-IPO, who'd never managed an annual budgeting process or owned the operational and systems side of internal and external reporting. So adding FP&A didn't scale.
He had the reverse problem too. At an earlier company, the FP&A and accounting bench didn't have the comms skills you'd want in IR.
From an efficiency standpoint combining made sense, and people can learn both, but the specific person's skills are really what matter.
"People can learn both areas, but the individual and their capabilities really matter."
The CFO of a privately held company north of $500M in revenue, who previously ran FP&A and IR at a large publicly traded company, sees both angles and ultimately splits them at scale.
He personally ran the combined FP&A + IR seat earlier in his career, then deliberately split it, combining strategic finance and FP&A into one group and kept IR its own function.
There's a ton of leverage between strat fin and IR, but they're distinct enough that one person credibly running both is not a given. They require similar business context and analytical chops.
More importantly, when he built the distinct IR function, he did not hire career IR people. He hired from equity research, the buy side, and PE. People with deep business and financial acumen who understood investor frameworks and still had a foundation in comms.
Several of those hires later rotated out of IR into other senior roles: strategic finance, corp FP&A leadership, head of strategy and ops.
He framed it this way: IR used to be 100% comms and a gatekeeper to the CFO and CEO.
"The goal is that a meeting with IR would be as good or as helpful as one with the CFO."
The CFO of a public company north of $1B in ARR keeps them separate.
But his IR person is not a career IR person. Their background is finance at a fast-growing private startup, so they can double in FP&A and IR if need be.
He deliberately gives IR deep exposure to the entire business. IR sits in all the financial outlook reviews, weekly business reviews, etc. The intent is they understand the whole business, not just the IR-facing slice.
While his IR person was on parental leave, he had his VP of Finance cover the IR side, and they did well.
His view: comms is one skill among several, and the important ones are understanding the business and the financial drivers.
He wants whoever's in IR to have full-picture visibility, because it matters not just for telling the story today but for understanding how the story evolves over the medium term.
"Comms is one part of many key skills. You need to really understand the business and financial drivers to be successful at IR."
So, do you actually combine them?
The honest answer from everyone I talked to is that it depends on your stage and the person you've got.
The CFOs running the combined seat skew private and later-stage, where one strong operator can carry the plan and the story at once. There are no earnings calls.
The public-company CFOs almost all keep IR on its own line straight to them, because once you're across the table from the big institutional money, that relationship is too important to stick a layer in front of it. The bigger and more public you get, the more the boxes split apart.
Now I’ll stop hedging. Because they all agreed on the hiring profile converging.
Public or private, combined or split, nobody wants a career communicator in that chair anymore.
The most deliberate version came from the CFO who built his whole IR team out of equity research and the buy side, betting you can teach a sharp finance person to handle a room faster than you can teach a smooth talker to actually know the business. And he was right often enough that a bunch of those hires used IR as a jumping-off point into bigger finance jobs.
And that’s the part I'd staple to the forehead of anyone in FP&A who wants to ascend to the CFO role someday. IR has a reputation in finance as the soft seat, the spot you get parked if you're good on a call but kinda light on the maths. One of these CFOs told me people look down on it, then in the very next breath called it the one experience that most separates the people who make CFO from the people who stall, especially on the jump from private to public.
And I think he’s right. So many of the CFOs I speak to did at least a short stint in IR.
Now I see the bleeding edge of this from the recruiting side. The reqs are no longer asking for the financial athlete that I once was. They are asking for someone with both analytical and story telling skills. The same can be said for both IR and FP&A roles - they’re much more defined, in both depth and breadth.
So, is FP&A eating IR? Not as consistently as I thought. In fact, the org chart looks pretty much the same.
In retrospect, I realize I went looking for a turf war (exciting!) and came back with a story about hiring. Which, ok fine. I run a recruiting firm for finance professionals. Probably should've seen that one coming.
So next time you're staffing that seat, hire the person who knows the model cold. You’ll have a better chance at teaching the rest.
Run the Numbers
In this episode of Run the Numbers, I sit down with Aurélien Nolf, CFO of Navan, to unpack resource allocation as a finance discipline. We cover:
how to pre-align before budgeting,
how to think about portfolio construction inside a company,
when to fund or kill internal bets,
how IR is becoming more connected to FP&A, and
where AI actually works inside finance teams.
If you need help hiring your next FP&A, Strat Fin, or Accounting person, get in touch with my recruiting arm here.
Wish you an IR person who knows how to open the excel model,
CJ
