1137: Scaling Finance Across Borders | Amy Foo, CFO, Ignition

She starts with tape from the field, not the spreadsheet. Listening to enterprise sales calls, Amy Foo heard customers whose usage rose and fell with seasons. Fixed per-seat pricing “wasn’t quite hitting the mark,” she tells us, so she piloted a pooled-seat model that flexed monthly within an annual commitment—turning smaller clips into “one to five million” deals and lifting revenue “six to seven times per customer,” she tells us.

That instinct—to meet the customer where they are—threads through her journey. Early at Zendesk, she was “employee number one in the region,” handling FP&A, accounting, taxes, and team-building as the business scaled, she tells us. Trust won her a dual path: SVP of Global Finance Operations (deal desk, billings, shared services) and APAC managing director, aligning teams across seven countries, she tells us. Mentors’ unvarnished feedback helped her shed imposter syndrome and lead without geographic ceilings.

Today at Ignition, she reduces complexity to a few levers—ARR, payments volume, cash flow—and aligns accordingly, she tells us. She monitors top-of-funnel quality and pipeline coverage daily to steer marketing spend and sales motions, she tells us. On pricing, she watches what customers pay and repackages value by segment, she tells us. She leads with customer insight, she tells us.

As for AI, she calls it “not a magic pill,” advocating first for AI built into existing vendors, then new tools where capabilities are missing, she tells us. Finance, after all, is “about narrative and conviction”—numbers that move people to act, she tells us.