As a CFO, I know the frustration of asking AI for insights only to get conflicting or unreliable answers. The problem isn’t AI — it’s the data.
FinQore today announced a major advancement to its AI-powered platform: the first financial data connector for Claude. This new connector gives finance teams real-time access to expert-validated, deeply segmented financial data, right inside Claude. Ask questions in plain language, explore your numbers in depth, and act on insights without wrestling spreadsheets or conflicting data.
Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and maintained by FinQore’s in-house finance experts, this integration ensures full auditability, accurate reconciliations, and context-rich insights so CFOs can trust AI for high-stakes decisions.
Why it matters:
Seamless exploration of granular financial data
Faster, more confident decision-making
AI-powered insights you can rely on
I've had more than one guest come on my podcast under the title "CFO," only to ask after recording if we could change it to "COO" before the episode goes live. Not because their role had changed. Just because... optics.
The COO title still carries serious weight, especially in public companies, as well as large, international Private Equity backed firms. It often reads as shorthand for "second in command" — the heir apparent, the right-hand operator who might one day step into the CEO’s shoes. It’s a market signal. Investors see a strong COO and think, "this company has its house in order."
But in private companies, especially those still in venture-backed territory, the lines between CFO and COO are blurring fast. Frankly, you probably don’t need both.
Focus matters in young companies. You either build the product, sell the product, or help the people who do the first two things do them better. Within that third group is where the leadership of the COO and CFO tend to collide.
When companies are sub $10 million in revenue, operational complexity — sprawling GTM orgs, international supply chains, intricate business units — just doesn't exist yet. Founders still play a massive operational role, whether they like it or not.
In fact, COO at most younger companies is a catch all title for the non-technical co-founder who isn’t the CEO.
But a “professional” COO at an early ($10M in revenue), even mid stage ($100M in revenue) company? From a reporting standpoint, feels duplicative, and from a cost standpoint, absolutely redundant.
A strong CFO with operational chops can and should cover what would traditionally fall under a COO’s purview. We’re not talking about your grandpa’s CFO from 1948. These days, they’re already forecasting and enforcing plans. They're leading GTM planning and headcount allocation. They're deciding where the dollars go, and then measure if they achieved the desired result. They are leaning more forwards than looking backwards at past results.
In some cases, as CFO Alyssa Shadinger from Sisense shared with me, the CFO absorbs ownership of data and analytics. They are stewards of financial, operational, and product data. In fact, I’ve seen this occur at multiple companies after the COO role was eliminated.
This isn’t a niche startup phenomenon either. Some of the world’s biggest companies are actively combining the CFO and COO mandates. PayPal gave Jamie Miller the dual title of CFO and COO earlier this year. Salesforce went a step further, inventing a whole new executive role — the COFO — and naming Robin Washington to it (silly name, but the sentiment remains pure). Qualcomm, not to be outdone, expanded CFO Akash Palkhiwala’s scope to officially include operations as well.
While these moves come with a certain level of cost savings, using that as the core reasoning would be losing the forest through the trees. Consolidating responsibilities reflects a new reality: it no longer makes sense to separate the "how we plan" function from the "how we execute" function.
Today's top CFOs aren’t spreadsheet assassins (well, they still are a freak in the sheets). They’re company operators who run planning processes, decide which metrics belong in operational dashboards, drive major software decisions, and keep the executive team aligned across a set of shared OKRs. By spanning these functional areas, they have the best gauge on what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to get cut.
The real truth is, whoever owns the dashboard owns the company’s destiny. Especially in a private equity backed environment where operating results are reviewed on a weekly, not quarterly basis.
Today, that dashboard increasingly belongs to the CFO. They are, to steal a term from Klaviyo CFO Amanda Whalen, “like dolphins”: diving down deep into the numbers to get to core truths, and surfacing above the water to see longer term horizons.
Jenny Decker, former CFO of Tempo Software, once told me something similar - the CFO is playing both eagle and mouse. Traditionally, the ground game was reserved for the COO, but you can cut down on the delay if it’s the same person benefiting from both vantage points.
So yeah… the CFO didn’t just eat the COO’s lunch.
They’re working on dessert.
Thanks for reading, and make sure to check out our sponsor, Finqore. You ain’t gotta get ready if you stay ready for a fundraise or exit. Download their white paper on the perfect data cube.
Great thumbnail