Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share How 2020 Revealed the Importance of Liquidity with Eric Ball, General Partner at Impact Venture Capital and former Sr. VP & Treasurer at Oracle
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
How 2020 Revealed the Importance of Liquidity with Eric Ball, General Partner at Impact Venture Capital and former Sr. VP & Treasurer at Oracle
This episode features an interview with Eric Ball. Eric is a technology finance professional, investor, and board member. He is Co-Founder and General Partner at Impact Venture Capital, and previously served as CFO of C3 AI-- which went public in December-- and he spent ten years as Senior VP & Treasurer at Oracle, where he was named one of the 100 most influential people in finance.
On this episode, Eric discusses how the concept of liquidity has evolved, what 2020 revealed about the importance of liquidity, and how to manage cash in times of prosperity as well as times of crisis. He also shares insights on the digitization of the CFO’s office, the importance of having someone who functions as a Chief Liquidity Officer, and tells some fascinating stories from his 10 years inside Oracle.
Key Quotes
“March of last year was kind of an ‘Oh crap’ moment for CFOs…I think it ended up being like September 2001 or September 2008, where it was a crisis that forced CFOs to look at cash and liquidity...liquidity became not something that we probably should track. It became, for a lot of folks, the absolute key to survival.”
“When 9/11 happened, it was embarrassing but not career threatening to not have answers in a crisis, because the board members were not getting better answers at their other companies. There's no excuse now. In 2020, you should know how COVID was impacting your liquidity and your cash in real time…Using these tools, it's no longer something that's nice to do or makes you look good--you better have these answers.”
“Elements of liquidity are purely in the treasurer's purview, but elements of it cut across all of finance....Somebody has to look holistically across those lines. Everybody can't just be looking down at their own function. So I think there does have to be a Chief Liquidity Officer, if you will. That person may be the CFO, but if they're not the CFO...if the CFO doesn't make it a priority, it's not going to happen.”
“I think CFOs are going to spend less time collecting information and more time acting on it. They're going to have more information available in real time and rely less on the financial statements from the last quarter. In effect, financial statements should be generated almost in real time. Finance leaders have to know where their cash is, how much of it is accessible on short notice, what's their ability to increase liquidity in other ways…and all of that needs to be even more true in 12 months than it is today.”
“I think that a lot of finance professionals need to spend less time collecting data, and they’re valued more for how they can act on data than simply their ability to play scorekeeper. I think that the types of people who are becoming CFOs now are those with more of a strategic mindset and less of a score-keeping mindset.”
Sponsor
The Invisible Vault is powered by the team at Kyriba, The global leader in cloud treasury and finance solutions, empowering CFOs and their teams to transform how they activate liquidity as a dynamic, real-time vehicle for growth and value creation. To learn more visit www.kyriba.com
Links
Follow Tom on Twitter
Find Eric on LinkedIn
View all episodes
By Kyriba
5
1616 ratings
This episode features an interview with Eric Ball. Eric is a technology finance professional, investor, and board member. He is Co-Founder and General Partner at Impact Venture Capital, and previously served as CFO of C3 AI-- which went public in December-- and he spent ten years as Senior VP & Treasurer at Oracle, where he was named one of the 100 most influential people in finance.
On this episode, Eric discusses how the concept of liquidity has evolved, what 2020 revealed about the importance of liquidity, and how to manage cash in times of prosperity as well as times of crisis. He also shares insights on the digitization of the CFO’s office, the importance of having someone who functions as a Chief Liquidity Officer, and tells some fascinating stories from his 10 years inside Oracle.
Key Quotes
“March of last year was kind of an ‘Oh crap’ moment for CFOs…I think it ended up being like September 2001 or September 2008, where it was a crisis that forced CFOs to look at cash and liquidity...liquidity became not something that we probably should track. It became, for a lot of folks, the absolute key to survival.”
“When 9/11 happened, it was embarrassing but not career threatening to not have answers in a crisis, because the board members were not getting better answers at their other companies. There's no excuse now. In 2020, you should know how COVID was impacting your liquidity and your cash in real time…Using these tools, it's no longer something that's nice to do or makes you look good--you better have these answers.”
“Elements of liquidity are purely in the treasurer's purview, but elements of it cut across all of finance....Somebody has to look holistically across those lines. Everybody can't just be looking down at their own function. So I think there does have to be a Chief Liquidity Officer, if you will. That person may be the CFO, but if they're not the CFO...if the CFO doesn't make it a priority, it's not going to happen.”
“I think CFOs are going to spend less time collecting information and more time acting on it. They're going to have more information available in real time and rely less on the financial statements from the last quarter. In effect, financial statements should be generated almost in real time. Finance leaders have to know where their cash is, how much of it is accessible on short notice, what's their ability to increase liquidity in other ways…and all of that needs to be even more true in 12 months than it is today.”
“I think that a lot of finance professionals need to spend less time collecting data, and they’re valued more for how they can act on data than simply their ability to play scorekeeper. I think that the types of people who are becoming CFOs now are those with more of a strategic mindset and less of a score-keeping mindset.”
Sponsor
The Invisible Vault is powered by the team at Kyriba, The global leader in cloud treasury and finance solutions, empowering CFOs and their teams to transform how they activate liquidity as a dynamic, real-time vehicle for growth and value creation. To learn more visit www.kyriba.com
Links
Follow Tom on Twitter
Find Eric on LinkedIn