This Planning Aces episode explores how finance leaders navigate volatility without drifting into political cross‑currents like tariffs. Prologis CFO Tim Arndt explains why e‑commerce triples warehouse demand and how real‑estate strategies must adapt. Genworth CFO Jerome Upton shows how disciplined leverage and balanced product exposure turn rate uncertainty into opportunity while guarding against inflationary claim spikes. Flexport CFO Stuart Leung reveals the weekly two‑hour operating cadence and scenario drills that keep freight flows nimble amid strikes, conflicts, and policy swings. Co‑host Brett Knowles connects the dots, urging planners to pair AI “agents” with dynamic rhythms that detect risk sooner and react faster.

Bea Ordonez still recalls the whirlwind of her first CFO post: a raw fintech start‑up where, in two short years, she recruited “over a hundred people,” built the processes they would follow and decided what kind of culture would bind them, she tells us. Immersing herself in every workflow taught her that finance leadership begins on the frontline—listening, questioning, then turning messy reality into structure.

That builder’s reflex shapes her playbook at Payoneer today. After a decade as a global COO and a stint as Chief Innovation Officer, Ordonez now sits in the public‑company CFO chair, but she leads with the same conviction that data and customer proximity must converge. Payoneer’s mission—“talent is equally distributed globally, but opportunity isn’t,” she says—drives investments in a cross‑border payments platform serving more than two million SMBs. To scale responsibly, she has poured resources into a robust data foundation, predictive AI models that flag churn, and governance that satisfies regulators across 190 countries.

Volatility, meanwhile, no longer startles her. Having weathered the dot‑com bust, 2008, COVID, the 2023 U.S. banking shock—and now a new wave of tariffs whose ultimate impact remains uncertain—she treats upheaval as a catalyst for opportunity.

For aspiring finance leaders, her path offers a signal: there is no prescribed ladder. Curiosity, operational empathy and a willingness to “lean into areas where there’s no obvious right answer” open the widest doors—and keep a company’s growth story moving long after the numbers are scored, through volatile cycles across global markets today.

Back in the 1990s, Dilip Upmanyu sat in a room filled with servers as he pieced together a homegrown database of costs and SKUs. His employer at the time couldn’t tell which products paid the bills; by dawn, the young financial analyst could. That improvised profitability model, he tells us, still informs his investment mindset today.

Upmanyu never mistook rows of numbers for the whole story. Later joining IBM, he moved from product analytics to revenue accounting in a single year, then volunteered to face Wall Street. Preparing earnings decks, he practiced fielding questions until he could anticipate three out of four before the line opened. “Data matter only when you can explain the ‘why,’ ” Upmanyu tells us.

A misstep—a brilliant job wrapped in toxic politics—taught him culture diligence. From then on he evaluated environments as rigorously as balance sheets. That instinct paid off when NetIQ sold to Attachmate: suddenly he was steering a global integration that tripled his team and required fresh capital. He treated the chaos as a practicum in fundraising and leadership, logging the final credit hours for his CFO ambition.

By the time Cloudera called in 2023, Upmanyu had stitched together every major finance discipline. Today he pushes growth by leading with the firm’s public‑cloud platform and embedding AI into forecasting.