PeFi CFO | Performance Finance

Finance leader | Came up the ranks through FP&A | Tweets about Business and Finance |

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

Financial Planning & Analysis: Career Progression Guide

As a finance professional, I've observed that FP&A offers one of the clearest paths to financial leadership.

Here's my assessment of the journey. I highlight the key skills of each stage in bold:

Entry-Level Analyst (1-3 years)
Your responsibilities: data collection, report generation, model maintenance. Focus on developing technical proficiency in Excel, SQL, and financial modeling fundamentals. Seek certification through CFA or CPA to establish credibility. I personally did a CFA as a testament of my technical ability. Competence at this stage creates opportunities.

Senior Analyst (3-5 years)
You'll lead financial models, conduct variance analysis, and present to management. Develop business partnership skills and deepen your understanding of operational drivers. The analysts who progress fastest demonstrate both technical excellence and business acumen.

FP&A Manager (5-8 years)
At this juncture, you'll manage a team, own the budgeting process, and deliver insights that influence decisions. Success requires balancing tactical execution with strategic thinking. Focus on developing your team while expanding your influence across departments.

Director of FP&A (8-12 years)
You'll set the strategic direction for the FP&A function and regularly engage with executive leadership. The transition from manager to director demands exceptional communication skills and the ability to translate complex financial concepts into actionable business strategies. If you want to stay only in FP&A, this is most likely where you will top out.

VP of Finance (12-15 years)
Leading the finance department requires a comprehensive understanding of all finance functions, including treasury, tax, statutory accounting. Your focus shifts from execution to strategy while managing risk. The most effective VPs has executive presence to convince other stakeholders on their vision.

CFO
The culmination of your finance career. This position requires combination of finance, strategic vision, and leadership excellence. The path to CFO is rarely linear—seek diverse experiences across multiple finance domains: treasury, tax, corporate development (M&A), and even internal audit.

Progress is not merely about numbers, but about enabling sound business decisions. It requires both technical mastery and strategic thinking.

Career advancement comes maintain high standards for yourself.

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

Unpopular opinion: Bottom-up adoption is great, but nothing drives tech usage faster than a CEO who says, "We're using this, find the use cases, find the ROI."

Top-of-mind behavior requires top-down mandate. Simple as that.

[The Secret CFO @SecretCFO]

It’s funny when you step outside the tech and online bubble… most CFOs still aren’t really doing anything with AI.

I asked one about controlling token spend earlier in the week, he said “what’s a token?”

This was a serious finance leader in at a big consumer brand. Was far more concerned about margin pressure from inflation risk, supply chain fractures, a big CapEx program, refi risks / credit markets.

Do remember that this is where most businesses are at still with AI… they’ve got a heap of shit on their desk to work through.

It’s still very very early.

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

The most underreported signal in this deal: Li-Ning is building Curry Brand retail stores in the United States.

This is not a revenue bet but a cultural arbitrage play.

Li-Ning has attempted US market entry for two decades. It has failed every time. Not on product quality, but on brand recognition deficits that American retailers penalize through shelf allocation.

A Curry-branded store bypasses that problem entirely. Consumers walk into a Curry Brand store, not a Li-Ning store. Chinese commercial infrastructure with an American identity wrapper.

That's how you enter a market that has structurally rejected you. You carry in an identity the market already trusts.

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

The most underreported signal in this deal: Li-Ning is building Curry Brand retail stores in the United States.

This is not a revenue bet but a cultural arbitrage play.

Li-Ning has attempted US market entry for two decades. It has failed every time. Not on product quality, but on brand recognition deficits that American retailers penalize through shelf allocation.

A Curry-branded store bypasses that problem entirely. Consumers walk into a Curry Brand store, not a Li-Ning store. Chinese commercial infrastructure with an American identity wrapper.

That's how you enter a market that has structurally rejected you. You carry in an identity the market already trusts.

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

Nike, Adidas, and New Balance apparently all passed on Curry. Li-Ning won.

The gap isn't financial. Western incumbents price athletes as marketing costs while Chinese brands price them as strategic equity. Until that valuation model changes, the West will keep losing these auctions.

https://t.co/tDKTyjxIWm

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

Nike, Adidas, and New Balance apparently all passed on Curry. Li-Ning won.

The gap isn't financial. Western incumbents price athletes as marketing costs while Chinese brands price them as strategic equity. Until that valuation model changes, the West will keep losing these auctions.

https://t.co/tDKTyjxIWm

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

Mainstream: SoftBank surpasses Toyota as Japan's top company.

Reality: SoftBank's market cap is now partly a derivative on OpenAI's private valuation. It committed $65B for a 13% pre-IPO stake.

Is this AI sentiment, or simply getting in ahead of the IPO?

https://t.co/qP84BGSxZe

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

Mainstream: SoftBank surpasses Toyota as Japan's top company.

Reality: SoftBank's market cap is now partly a derivative on OpenAI's private valuation. It committed $65B for a 13% pre-IPO stake.

Is this AI sentiment, or simply getting in ahead of the IPO?

https://t.co/qP84BGSxZe

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

At a $1.5 trillion valuation, against roughly $6.6 billion of 2025 EBITDA, SpaceX would be valued at approximately 266x 2025 EBITDA, far above the 16x to 36x range seen among Meta, Alphabet, and Nvidia.

On conventional discounted cash flow assumptions, that valuation is difficult to underwrite. It requires exceptional execution across several still-developing business lines at the same time, sustained over a long horizon, with very little tolerance for delay or dilution.

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

Hong Kong generates $9.6bn in HSBC pre-tax profit. Nearly a third of the group.

So this isn't a marginal fight.

Elhedery needs to win mandates fast enough to reverse a decade of decline in a market where the competition just got structurally harder.

Genuine turning point, or is the restructuring already doing permanent damage? 👇

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

HSBC's CEO is personally sending video messages to clients.

Flying to Hong Kong. Pitching deals himself.

That's not a comms strategy.

Here's what's actually going on, and what it means for the $43bn battle for Hong Kong's IPO market.

https://t.co/G3Rk1At3s6

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

There's a problem with that.

The top 10 HK IPO arrangers are evenly split between Wall Street on one side, mainland Chinese banks on the other.

HSBC isn't in either camp right now.

And after cutting London and New York equity, a harder question follows: Without cross-border presence, what does HSBC offer that a domestic Chinese bank doesn't?

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

You wonder capital budgeting works in big tech companies.

Sometimes, I feel like it’s just someone drawing hockey stick on a chart and calling it a day.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Meta has lost $73 billion on Reality Labs since 2020. Wall Street calls it the most expensive money pit in tech history.

Then today, quietly, the FAIR team in Paris releases a model that predicts how your brain responds to anything you see, hear, or read. 70x higher resolution than v1. Zero-shot predictions for people it has never scanned.

The training data: 700+ volunteers watched movies and listened to podcasts inside fMRI machines for 1,115 total hours. The model learned how visual cortex, auditory cortex, and language centers fire simultaneously, then built a single architecture that maps all of it.

The competition results tell you how far ahead they are. TRIBE v1 already won first place in Algonauts 2025, beating 262 other teams. V2 is a 2-3x improvement on top of that, with 70x the spatial resolution.

Here's what nobody is connecting. Meta also builds Ray-Ban smart glasses with cameras and microphones. They're developing a neural interface wristband that reads EMG signals from your arm. They run the largest advertising platform on earth, one that generated $200 billion in revenue last year by predicting which content keeps you engaged.

TRIBE v2 tells them exactly which brain regions activate when you watch a 15-second Reel. Which neurons fire when an ad plays in your peripheral vision. How language processing changes when you're listening versus reading.

They open-sourced the model. That's the part that should make you pay closer attention. Meta open-sources things when the research advantage is already captured and the ecosystem benefit of external researchers improving the model exceeds the competitive risk. They did it with LLaMA. They're doing it again.

A company spending $135 billion in capex this year did not build a digital twin of the human brain for academic citations. They built the prediction layer for every piece of hardware and every ad impression they'll sell for the next decade.

The $73 billion was never about the metaverse. It was about understanding the 20-watt computer that decides what every human pays attention to.

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

@PEoperator You don't miss 😂

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Bain just released a 42 page report on their outlook for private equity in 2026

Few charts that caught my eye

1/ LBO deal value and overall exits were +44% and +47%, respectively, in 2025

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

For decades, Japan ran near-zero interest rates under the Bank of Japan. That turned the yen into a funding currency.

https://t.co/gvepQuRGE8

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

CFO takeaway

If you run or allocate capital:

Stress test funding costs without assuming abundant global liquidity.

Revisit FX hedges with volatility, not spot, as the anchor.

Keep more cash on hand. Cash suddenly matters again during carry unwinds.

No drama. Just cycles doing cycle things.

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

For decades, Japan ran near-zero interest rates under the Bank of Japan. That turned the yen into a funding currency.

https://t.co/gvepQuRGE8

[PeFi CFO | Performance Finance @PeFiCFO]

What it means for businesses (not traders)

This is where CFOs should pay attention.

1. Cost of capital becomes jumpy

Even if your base rates don’t change, risk premia do. Credit spreads widen. Equity multiples compress. Refinancing windows shorten.

2. FX volatility leaks into operations

If you sell globally, hedge ratios that worked last year may suddenly be wrong. Yen strength often coincides with stress elsewhere.

3. Investor behavior turns defensive

Projects that cleared IRR hurdles before start getting re-questioned. Growth stories lose air cover. Cash flow reliability gets repriced upward.