Inside a $5 billion FinTech acquisition (from the Brex SVP of Finance)

Join us as Erik Zhou, SVP of Finance and Accounting at Brex, walks through 7-plus years building the finance function behind one of the most consequential deals in financial services: Capital Ones $5.15 billion acquisition of Brex.  Topics covered: • The range of emotions inside Brex when the deal hit, and why longtime employees felt pride and relief at the same time (2:13) • What Brex gets on day one: Capital One's deposit base and a lower cost of financing (3:53) • Whether a $5.15 billion exit kills the scrappy-startup identity (8:26) • Moving company spend off wires and onto cards, and why procurement teams light up at the rewards (13:25) • His first journal entry at Brex posting straight to the P&L with no review, and learning to be his own control (18:19) • Making peace with "good enough" after a career trained on precision, and the move from auditor to trusted advisor (22:11) • The client relationship from his audit days that got him the Brex job 3 years later (28:35) • Staying almost 8 years on an owner's mentality, and the 3-year cycle he carries from PwC (32:00) • Running finance as the steward of company data, and catching customer churn before spend ever drops (37:40) • Why new customers take 9 to 12 months to fully ramp, and how today's bookings forecast next year's revenue (41:44) • The infrastructure that made Capital One's diligence clean: a Big Four audit from year one, no accumulated tech debt (47:21) • The 3 ways Brex actually uses AI in finance, from off-the-shelf reconciliation to an FP&A agent wired in over MCP (51:51) • His honest take on whether agentic AI threatens finance and accounting jobs (58:23) • The time machine question: would he do it all again the same way? (1:03:51) Erik spent over a decade at PwC before joining Brex as one of two accountants at a 70-person company. For CFOs, Controllers, finance and accounting leaders, and anyone scaling a startup finance team, this conversation is a working guide to the audit-to-industry shift, preparing a company for acquisition, and what Ai actually changes in the day-to-day of finance. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.