Marie Charpentier, CFO at Accredit Solutions, has spent 17 years doing the kind of finance work that rarely makes it into fundraising announcements: building the machinery that keeps high-growth companies credible when the stakes rise.

She has done it across jurisdictions (Paris, London, New York), capital regimes (VC and private equity), and exit pathways including fundraising, IPO readiness, and acquisition-led scale. On Next Exit with Dan Thompson (CEO of Kluster), her perspective lands with a recurring theme: fast growth doesn’t create fragility. It reveals it.

“When you join a fast-growing company, everything has often been done day to day,” Charpentier says. “You process, you process, but the data is not always clean.”

That single line captures a dynamic many operators recognise: the business moves faster than finance can formalise it. By the time you “have time” to clean up, you’re already in diligence, an audit cycle, a refinancing conversation, or a board meeting where confidence matters more than optimism.

What follows is a practical, experience-driven guide to what Charpentier is really describing: how to build a finance function that can keep pace with growth, survive scrutiny, and increase the odds of a great exit.

Why Fast Growth Exposes Weak Finance Foundations

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Charpentier often joins companies at a familiar inflexion point: a lean finance team supporting an expanding organisation with increasingly complex products, contracts, and geographies.

It’s common to see a small core: AP, a management accountant, a controller. Capable people, stretched thin. In that environment, “getting it done” becomes the operating system.

This is the moment where speed stops being an advantage and starts testing whether the organisation can repeat itself without breaking.

• More customers introduce contract variation.
• More products create edge cases in billing.
• More countries add tax, payroll, and compliance complexity.
• More board scrutiny removes tolerance for “we’ll reconcile it later.”

Charpentier frames it in construction terms: “When you build a house, you need the right foundation… the foundation is to have clean data.”

The reason this matters is not aesthetic. It’s compounding. Small inaccuracies become planning assumptions. Planning assumptions become hiring decisions. Hiring decisions become cash commitments. Before long, the company is operating confidently on an unreliable signal.

Clean Financial Data: The Strategic Backbone of Scaling Companies

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Most finance teams treat “clean data” like an operational goal: close faster, reconcile accounts, fix the chart of accounts.

Charpentier treats it as infrastructure. The input layer that determines whether the organisation can plan, allocate capital, and communicate with investors in a way that holds up under challenge.

“You can’t build your forward thinking if you have the wrong historical data,” she says.

That comment is deceptively important in high-growth environments because forecasting is inherently harder when growth is volatile. As Charpentier points out, when you’re seeing double- or triple-digit growth, “it’s really hard to predict the future.”

A useful mental model here is that the finance function has two jobs at once:

1. Operational truth: Are the numbers right?
2. Decision truth: Do the numbers help the business make better calls?

High-growth businesses often try to jump to #2 (strategic finance, dashboards, board packs) before #1 is stable. That shortcut feels productive. It also creates a brittle organisation, where every board meeting turns into a reconciliation exercise.

If you want a simple diagnostic, look at how frequently the organisation debates the numbers rather than debating the decision.

If the numbers are always contested, the foundations aren’t finished.

Why Early-Stage Companies Struggle with GAAP and IFRS Compliance

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Charpentier makes a point that hits a lot of startups uncomfortably: early-stage companies often don’t fully respect GAAP/IFRS, and it isn’t always visible until they’re forced to formalise.

This gap rarely shows up during early growth. It appears when the business is forced to formalise under external scrutiny.

“If you’ve never been audited before… once you get to that stage where it’s first audit and you get to have your house in order, that can be painful if you’re not really prepared.”

This aligns with what advisory firms see in the IPO pathway. PwC has noted that delayed internal controls implementation is a common pitfall in tech IPO readiness, and reports that a large share of companies disclosed material weaknesses at IPO, largely tied to financial oversight issues.

The practical takeaway isn’t “become public-company ready on day one.” It’s that audit-readiness is a gradient, and companies can move up that gradient earlier than they think:

• Clear revenue policies (especially in subscription and usage-based models)
• Consistent close routines and documentation
• Well-defined ownership for key processes
• Evidence of controls and review, even if lightweight

In SaaS, this is where clarity around  revenue recognition becomes a trust mechanism.

Building High-Performing Finance Teams: Base First, Strategy Later

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Charpentier’s “house foundation” analogy points to a sequencing principle. She describes a two-step build:

1. Get the team that can operate at speed and fix the data
2. Add strategic capability once the base is reliable

This sequencing is rarely visible to the business in real time, but it becomes obvious during diligence, when confidence in the numbers matters more than the sophistication of the model.

Once clean data exists, she adds FP&A and analytics capacity: “you can add a FP&A person… build more granular reports and metrics.”

The sequencing matters because strategic finance depends on credible inputs. Otherwise, the organisation ends up with sophisticated models that create false confidence.

A useful way to think about the finance org chart in high-growth companies:

• Control layer: accounting, close, compliance, cash operations
• Insight layer: FP&A, analytics, unit economics, forecasting
• Influence layer: partnering with GTM, product, and leadership on decisions

Most teams try to hire into the influence layer too early (because it feels senior and strategic) without properly resourcing control and insight. Charpentier’s experience suggests the opposite: build control and insight first, then influence becomes natural.

Centralised Finance Teams: Key to Sustaining Global Expansion

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As finance teams scale, structure matters just as much as headcount.

Charpentier also makes a point that tends to separate “good” from “great” finance functions in international growth: centralise the core, localise only where necessary.

“As much as you can, having a centralised finance team is important because then you’ve got the same process across all your jurisdictions.”

This is less about control for its own sake, more about preventing process drift. Multi-country growth introduces legitimate differences—tax regimes, payroll norms, local reporting needs. But if the finance function becomes a set of loosely connected local practices, consolidation becomes slow, reporting becomes inconsistent, and investor confidence erodes.

Centralisation gives you:

• Comparable metrics across regions
• Faster closes and fewer reconciliations
• A cleaner story during diligence
• More predictable cash management

It also makes it easier to deliver consistent board updates through a single narrative, supported by a reliable operating rhythm, exactly what high-performing finance teams aim for with a structured board report.

C vs PE Funding: How CFO Roles and Priorities Change

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Charpentier has lived the difference between VC-backed and PE-backed boards. She describes the contrast plainly:

• Venture capital prioritises growth and scaling rapidly.
• Private equity talks about EBITDA constantly.
• Cash discipline intensifies under PE ownership.
• PE is often more involved operationally.

“Venture capital, they’re more about growth… driven through metrics,” she says. “While private equity… it’s more about being cash flow and operational efficient.”

This mirrors the broader industry framing where PE underwriting tends to anchor on cash flow and EBITDA, while VC underwriting often places heavier weight on trajectory and potential, particularly earlier in the lifecycle.

The CFO implication is important: the job changes even when the title doesn’t.

In VC settings, the CFO’s credibility often comes from a forward narrative plus metrics. In PE settings, credibility comes from disciplined execution against a value creation plan, with cash visibility as a constant constraint.

Charpentier also notes a practical dynamic: “When you’ve got a VC, it’s maybe more acceptable to have a high burn rate… Private equity… they really invest in how we spend.”

This is where modern CFO tooling matters, because the cadence of questions changes:

• What changed this week?
• Where does cash land at month end?
• Which levers move EBITDA - and on what timeline?
• Where is spend drifting from the value creation plan?

That’s the core reason CFO platforms exist. CFOs are being asked to answer with evidence, not intuition. The most resilient teams build connected systems that allow a living forecast rather than a quarterly exercise.

IPO Readiness for High-Growth Companies: Speeding Up Financial Maturity

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What makes IPO readiness unique isn’t that it introduces new work. It removes tolerance for weak work.

Charpentier’s IPO experience is a case study in compressed complexity.

At Criteo, they had to prepare quickly, transforming systems, building controls, and aligning multiple countries under a consistent reporting and compliance standard.

“We had to set up a new ERP system… completely transform everything… I was in charge of a lot of different countries.”

A company can function privately with patchwork routines. Public markets won’t allow it. The cadence of reporting, the scrutiny of controls, and the consequences of error change the entire operating posture.

This matches what readiness frameworks emphasise: internal controls, reporting infrastructure, and governance need to be built early enough that they are stable under pressure. PwC

Even if IPO is not the planned exit, the readiness discipline is transferable. It strengthens acquisition outcomes and refinancing credibility because the business can withstand diligence without disruption.

Cash Flow Risk: Lessons from When Systems Fail

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Charpentier’s most human story is also the most operationally instructive.

She describes a startup where investors sent funding monthly, on the same day, every month. The entire cash plan relied on it arriving shortly before payroll.

One month, it didn’t arrive. The investor was on holiday. Payroll was delayed.

“It worked and then one day that payment doesn’t come through… he was on holiday in the Caribbean.”

A few days late might sound survivable. In organisational trust terms, it’s expensive:

• Employees remember late pay.
• Management credibility erodes.
• Suppliers become cautious.
• Finance shifts from control to reaction.

Her conclusion is the real lesson: “I would not advise to have this monthly payment investment coming through. Better get a lump sum and then you manage your cash accordingly.”

This aligns with mainstream cash discipline guidance around runway and burn. JPMorgan, for example, frames runway as the time a company can sustain operations before cash is exhausted at the current burn rate - a metric that becomes central in uncertain markets.

The deeper insight here is that cash risk is often not about “having enough.” It’s about having control. Timing dependencies are hidden leverage.

What CFOs Need to Know About Market Trends, Risk, and AI

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Charpentier sees the market picking up, with more M&A and deal activity returning.

“2024 was better. And I think we can expect more deal this year, a lot of more MNA.”

At the same time, she highlights a reality every operator now encounters: investors are risk-averse, and AI has become a near-mandatory narrative component.

“Any pitch deck with no the word AI on it will be a winning story,” she says.

Market signals support the idea that capital attention has concentrated heavily around AI themes. Reuters recently reported on the scale of capital flowing into AI and the concerns about whether spending will translate into profits, underscoring how dominant AI investment has become in market narratives.

For CFOs, the implication is twofold:

1. AI narratives create an opportunity for companies with real leverage.
2. AI narratives increase scrutiny for companies using it as positioning rather than performance.

Finance teams end up underwriting the AI story, because every “AI efficiency” claim becomes a unit economics question:

• Does it reduce cost to serve?
• Does it improve retention?
• Does it expand margin?
• Does it accelerate cash conversion?

The more the market filters for AI, the more finance needs to translate narrative into measurable economics.

A Practical CFO Playbook: Building Exit-Ready Finance for Scaling Companies

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Charpentier’s experience points to a repeatable model for building exit-grade finance in high-growth environments.

1) Stabilise the truth layer

• Define revenue policies early, especially in subscription and usage models.
• Build audit readiness incrementally.
• Document close routines and ownership.

2) Build a predictable operating rhythm

• Monthly reporting that reconciles cleanly.
• A board narrative that explains drivers, not just outcomes.
• Repeatable processes across regions.

3) Treat cash as a system, not a number

• Remove timing dependencies where possible.
• Forecast short-term cash with discipline.
• Align hiring and investment decisions to cash realities, not optimism.

4) Translate strategy into measurable economics

• Invest in FP&A only once the foundation is stable.
• Tie spend to outcomes at department and project level (as Charpentier mentions doing at Accredit Solutions).
• Give the board evidence of cause-and-effect.

5) Prepare earlier than the exit

Exit preparation is rarely a “project.” It’s the byproduct of operating maturity. The stronger the foundations, the less disruptive diligence becomes.

This is why CFO-oriented solutions exist: to unify systems, reduce reconciliation cycles, and improve decision quality. If your organisation is building this capability, Kluster’s resources for CFO teams and private equity environments reflect many of these operating requirements in practice.

Marie Charpentier’s perspective is valuable because it doesn’t romanticise growth. It describes the real trade: speed creates opportunity, and it creates exposure.

The finance function determines which one dominates.

Clean data isn’t a tidy-up project. It’s strategic infrastructure. Investor expectations aren’t abstract. They change how CFOs operate day to day. IPO readiness isn’t a destination. It’s a discipline that strengthens every exit path.

And her most practical lesson might be the simplest: when the organisation is moving fast, the foundations have to move first.

To hear the full conversation, listen to Marie Charpentier's episode on Next Exit, hosted by Dan Thompson.

Turning Insight into Actionable Growth Strategies

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Many of the challenges Marie Charpentier describes come down to one question: can leadership see what matters early enough to act on it?

As finance teams scale, that visibility becomes harder to maintain across revenue, cash, and operational decisions. Spreadsheets fragment. Assumptions drift. By the time issues surface, options narrow.

Kluster is built for this exact moment. It helps CFOs and private equity-backed teams connect forecasting, revenue recognition, and board reporting into a single, decision-ready view of the business. The goal isn’t more data. It’s earlier clarity.

If you’re thinking about how to build exit-grade financial visibility inside your organisation, explore how Kluster supports modern CFO teams.

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