The TAIL Framework: A New Playbook for Finance Leaders

Speaker A: Foreign. Okay, so here we are. We're very excited to have Joel Campbell, our Chief Financial Officer, with us today. And Joel, I'm just going to go ahead and jump right into it. The role of CFO seems to be evolving a lot in the recent years, and it's become more and more robust. You've described yourself in the past, uh, you're on the record as saying CFO plus, quote, unquote. Can you expound a little bit about what that means? And in your eyes, what differentiates today's competent CFO from like, a truly great one?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's a great question. I was hired as a CFO plus, so that was a little bit of a new term to me when I was hired at Trevipay. CFO plus really means for me that I get involved in a lot of things outside of what a traditional CFO does. So I do all the normal finance things and have all the normal finance functions. Outside of that, I get involved in procurement, I get involved in all of the pricing for our products, heavily involved in strategy and in bouncing ideas off of the executive team strategically about where we're headed and what we're going to do. I've been involved in the rebranding of the company and our go to market strategies. So I have an influence over some of those things. Even though I may not directly own them, I have influence over them and thought process around them. Really, from the many years of experience I have from outside the company, working for four large public companies, I just bring a different level of experience and perspective to a much smaller company that I think the organization has always appreciated.

Speaker A: One of the unique things, and it does happen at other companies, it's not a standard, but one of the unique things is that you're also in charge of human resources here. So to some, you know, the financial and human capital of a company could feel like opposite worlds. Does it feel like a significant distinction to you? And do the same skill sets apply to both driving growth and a strong culture?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. I was asked to take over the human resources function about six months ago, and the first thought I had was what you pointed out is, to me, you know, I manage the financial capital of the company. That is my primary responsibility. The human capital of a company is just as important, if in many cases not more important. They are the company, the people who work here and the things that they do day in, day out, they are the company. So I look at that as very much a capital allocation process, whether it's financial capital allocation or human allocation. Those are the resources that we have to deploy to help us grow the company. So in taking that over, yes, there are day to day processes and challenges and issues that come up that are new to me as a CFO to actually manage and manage a team around that. But the thought process around how you allocate human capital across the organization is a very similar thought process to how you manage the financial allocation across the company. And I love the ability as a CFO and head of human resources to be able to blend the two of those together and to challenge people across the organization on how to blend those together in a way to help us grow even faster.

Speaker A: And, uh, you're obviously doing something right. You've won CFO of the Year twice now. You've had amazing career with brands like Western Union and HR Block. So my next question is, what do you find exciting about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for trevipay?

Speaker B: Yeah, CFO of the Year is a great award. I always credit my team. I'm not the only person that earns that award. My entire team earns that award. We've been fortunate to earn it twice in my time here at trevupay. And I'm very grateful for the team that supports me. Always say that under every great executive is a team of people that they stand on the shoulders of that help them ultimately accomplish what they can as a cfo. When I parlay that into trevipay, I think we've had tremendous success at trevipay over the past five years that I've been with the company by focusing on our customers, focusing on growing our brand and getting our name out there so people know who we are. And quite frankly, becoming the disruptor in the order to cash or the business to business payments market. Those things combined together with a strong team underneath us allows us to go out and be nimble in the market, to be aggressive in terms of the way we sell our product and how we price our product. And as well growing these relationships that we talk about that are so important to us. Those team members help us grow those relationship and manage those relationships day in and day out.

Speaker A: How do you personally organize your time when you're having to juggle so many things?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. I love the concept of work life balance. And I will tell you, as a cfo, it's all work and very little balance most of the time. But I mean, truly, I got into this profession because I love finance. I love the finance function and the discipline it brings and the things that we can do with finance across the organization. I do try and balance my work life with family. Family is extremely important to me. I have two now grown kids out of college. Uh, we love to travel as a family from time that we've spent living overseas. So, yeah, I try to do that. I love to read. I'm a John Grisham fan, so I've read every John Grisham novel ever written.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: And on top of that, I try to stay healthy. I try to work out a few days a week and maintain my health and to be able to sleep and get rid of some of the stress. Sure. So while, while people talk about work life balance, we all try to manage it, but the reality is sometimes work just overtakes your life and you have to adjust to that. But when you get a chance to have downtime, you need to take the downtime to do something different.

Speaker A: I'd, uh, be remiss if I didn't also note that you're very actively involved with the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Kansas City. And you're also on the board of the association of Finance Professionals. So my question is, when did you clone yourself and how did you do it? No, my real question is basically, obviously you're busy. Can you speak to a little bit about why you make time for these other organizations, why they're important to you and are you able to bring any of the learnings back to your day job and vice versa, bringing earnings from the day job back to them?

Speaker B: Yeah, joining boards of other, uh, organizations is, it's a little selfish, I have to say, truthfully, and that you want to learn and grow and develop as a, as an executive. So for me those have been opportunities to serve in a different capacity, but use my financial knowledge and the experience of my career to help those organizations, specifically the two that I'm involved in now. The AFP organization I have been a member of for over 20 years. I'd always wanted to kind of join the board and help shape the future of that organization. I had that opportunity three years ago. I'm in my second term of four terms, uh, that they want you to serve and I'm now the chairman of the audit committee. So it just gives you real world board level experience that you can't always get when you're in an actual CFO role when you're doing the job day in and day out. And then secondly, Ronald McDonald House Charities, if anybody knows that organization, they are a phenomenal organization. They're localized. Ours in Kansas City. All the money that they raise stays in Kansas City. 97 plus percent of it goes toward families and providing services. And if you've ever seen their videos or visited their website, the things that they do for families, the service they can provide in the moment to families that are desperately in need when they have a sick child, uh, is just something that's pretty easy to get behind. Yeah. So I love that charity. I love what they do, and I love being able to be part of the. That charity in Kansas City, where I know the dollars I give, the dollars we give as a company are going to people in our community. And the ability to be involved in something at a board level in your community is just incredibly satisfying. So I will always carve out time, whether it's an evening or a weekend or any other time of day, to make sure I can participate in those, those two boards specifically, just because they've had meaning in my life and been able to see how they can grow over time.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's easy to find the energy and time when it's.

Speaker B: It's something that, that something you're passionate

Speaker A: about and you care about it. Right. So, speaking of the world, you know, I wanted to jump into your recent article in the Business Reporter, and I'm going to kind of tee you up for the answer by first talking about the problem. Can you speak about the strange and volatile marketplace CFOs are finding themselves in these days?

Speaker B: Yeah, clearly, geopolitical and economic issues, uh, tariffs, wars that we're seeing across the world, nationalism, all those kinds of things are driving very specific market volatility today. CFOs have to manage that market. Market volatility. And really we're seeing that as CFOs in rising interest. We're seeing reductions in interest rates now. So we've seen a rise now, we've seen a reduction. We've seen corporate strategies that are now really focused on investor, uh, returns and the expectations around those returns. Revenue growth challenges, banking and liquidity challenges. So there's a whole number of things that as a cfo, you can't just focus on today's political headlines. You have to take those headlines and apply them broadly across your business and start to think ahead to the things that might be impacting you today. But really, what are the impacts a year from now, three years from now, as you look forward in trying to project where your business is headed?

Speaker A: And what I love so much about the article is that you made it easy to kind of tackle this with the framework basically tail Stands for trusted partner relationships, adaptive order to cash, Intelligent automation and localized strategy. Why does trust help these companies during these times?

Speaker B: Sure, you know, the TAIL framework was really designed to help finance leaders build trusted relationships with their partners. And you know, I'm a pretty simple minded person when it comes to how I think about running our business. Simple formulas always stick with me. The tail formula is pretty straightforward and simple and I really love that. But you can also think of this, and this is a little bit of a finance geek in me. If you think of a normalized curve, really what you're solving for in the tail model is the tail risk. The things that are outside of what happened every single day, kind of down the middle of the fairway. You're trying to solve for the things that sit outside of that that can disrupt your business. So when we think about the first part of it is trusted partner relationships, it's really when we think of that, it's how do you build trust with your partners? Deep trust, deep loyalty. That in turbulent times in a market, your partners will look to you to be resilient, to have a model that supports their business and helps them grow despite what's happening. Maybe the noise around them that's happening in the market and in our world that's offering really strong credit terms and payment terms, helping our customers reduce friction in their business, maintaining flexibility and responsiveness to their needs in the moment, helping us to be easier to do business with and then in doing that help leading to our customers willingness to spend more with us over time. So that really becomes the heart of what we're trying to accomplish. Building that trusted relationship to get people to spend more with us or their buyers to spend more with us over time and help them grow their own business.

Speaker A: And that brings us to the next part which is the adaptive order to cash. Can you tell us more about the need to having that adaptive order to cash optimization and why that is necessary?

Speaker B: Yeah. The order to cash cycle plays such an important role in how companies are perceived in the market. And in many business the order to cash cycle sits at the heart of their business. So your ability to onboard new buyers into your business, raise a really well developed and thoughtful invoice offering the right payment terms and the flexible payment terms that they might be looking for. Then how do you collect and apply the cash you collect properly to the right invoice in the right way. And then lastly, there are many nuances in businesses today that need to have some intelligent automation built around. So your ability to take a modern platform Customize it for the specific needs of an industry or of a vertical. All those things, all those applications designed for that customer help reduce friction in their business, make it easier to business with us, and then ultimately help us demonstrate our financial value to that customer over the longer term.

Speaker A: And uh, as you said, you explained the intelligent automation analytics. What about the localized partnership strategy?

Speaker B: Yeah, our ability to understand really localized, uh, payment preferences or patterns, regulatory environments and all the nuances around that, uh, from vertical to vertical. And I know many people don't always see that when you're in a specific industry, but if you start to think of transportation versus schools versus government versus retail, there are many different nuances in each of those industries and those verticals that function and look different. So our ability to demonstrate and create a seamless process for our customers across multiple jurisdictions, globally, and our ability to address all those different needs really gives us a flexible approach which ingratiates us with our customers, shows them that we are dedicated to helping them grow their business and in doing so creates longer term business resilience both for them and for Trevipay.

Speaker A: What's a takeaway that you would like CFOs to have from this?

Speaker B: Yeah, my strongest takeaway for CFOs. And you know this is not a trite word, but building trust in every form you can imagine or any ability to innovate around your customers needs and meet their needs will allow you to outperform financially over the longer term. Trust isn't just a soft skill. Trust is a real skill that you have to dedicate time to and be intentional with. And when you do that, it leads to hard financial advantages like for a cfo, improved cash flow, reduced transaction costs, reduced friction, lower customer acquisition costs, improved working capital efficiency. All those things that I spend my days thinking about in our business. When you can demonstrate that ability to help CFOs or customers on the other side manage those things in their business, you build a long term resilient operation that helps support where your customers are trying to grow to.

Speaker A: As we close out and I'm going to take AI off the table. I think we've all heard enough about AI for many, many lifetimes now. But beyond AI, are there any other trends, exciting verticals or technologies that you think will have an impact on the industry or perhaps that others might be overlooking?

Speaker B: Yeah, in the B2B payment space specifically we're seeing a lot of market discussion around stablecoin. We're seeing discussions around same day payments and the impact that same day payments same day ACH or same day payments might have on our business. So I think there are innovations that are happening in the payment space outside of the banking network, at the traditional banking network that you have to start paying attention to. I think we've all believed that at some point we would have to face into those, but the reality is they are becoming more and more real outside of the traditional banking environment that we live in. And so as companies that sit Squarely in the B2B payment space, we have to start considering what those options might be for us, if they're just the flavor of the day or if they truly are things that are going to come along and help us innovate even further than where we are today. So I think those are at least a couple that I would, I would point to that we have to start thinking about.

Speaker A: Awesome. Sounds great. Well, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Great. Thank you.

Speaker A: Well, that was super interesting to learn how the CFO role has changed, changed over the years and to dig into how Joel manages such a complicated and successful career. Also really great to hear directly from him how his tail framework can help businesses navigate these uncertain times and how companies like Trevipay are the perfect solution for that framework. Okay, it's still early days, but be sure to check out Crossroads.Trevipay.com to get ready for the B2B payments conference of 2026. It will be November 8th through the 10th. 2026. That's right. It's still a year away, but that doesn't mean it's not too early to get excited about and more importantly, not too early to get that early bird registration discount. Once again. You can check that out@Crossroads.Trevipay.com until next time, this has been Clint Sears for Beyond the Trans.