Episode 103 | How AI is Helping CFOs Avoid Tech Dead and Revolutionize Finance with Sunil Padiyar

Sunil Padiyar  00:03

What you have to do is keep your customer needs in mind when you innovate, right? Which is why there is the saying that Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it didn’t take, you know, 500 years, right? So you need to balance your ambition to be at the leading edge of technology with the realization that your customers do not have the capacity or the willingness or the capability to absorb those leading edge technologies, which often are bleeding edge right?

Voiceover  00:03

Welcome to the lead at the top of your game podcast where we equip you to more effectively lead your seat at any employer, business or industry in which you choose to play. Each week, we help you sharpen your leadership acumen by cracking open the playbooks of dynamic leaders who are doing big things in their professional endeavors. And now your host leadership tactics and organizational development expert, Karan Farrell Rhodes,

Karan Rhodes  00:30

Hello, my superstars. This is Karan, and welcome to another episode of the lead at the top of your game podcast. Now, as you know, for this month, doing our special series that are featuring chief technology officers or technology leaders in a variety of companies, and we’re just over the moon to have on today’s show, our guest, Mr. Sunil Padiyar, who is the Chief Technology Officer at Trend Tech. And Trend Tech is an award winning cloud based software company that automates reconciliation and financial close processes. In other words, they are chief financial officer’s and controller’s heroes to say the least, but I’m gonna let Sunil in just a moment, tell us a little bit more about what they do. But before we do that, we want to welcome him to the show. So welcome Sunil,

Sunil Padiyar  01:34

Thank you. Karan, happy to be on the show.

Karan Rhodes  01:36

Oh, we’re just so honored to have you. And as you know, one technology is huge over no matter what industry you touch. And so this is one reason why we really wanted to feature those leaders who are really trying to help their companies, going to think through approaches to help their businesses thrive. So we’re super pleased to have you on the show. But before we get started and going back the layer the onion of what you do day to day, we always love to get a sneak peek into what you do outside of work. So would you mind just sharing how you love spending your time and what you do where you’re not clocking in?

Sunil Padiyar  02:21

Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things this is the reason passion of mine, when it has to do with AI and when everyone is doing so I said, You know what my daughter sings, she’s, she’s a singer. She became professional singer. You know, she’s in famous restaurants and, you know, places in Scottsdale, Arizona, I said, You know what, I’m gonna create music. And I started doing that three weeks back. I created a few tracks. I put it out there. You know, I’m not under my direct name, created a screen man, put it out there. And, you know, I got 70,000 views and 1100 subscribers. In my just three weeks? You know, it shows you the power of AI, right? Because many people are saying, is AI real? Well, I’m gonna tell you it’s a real, you know, even in a hobby, you know, look at how much further you can advance yourself, right?

Karan Rhodes  03:18

That’s right. Well, I need to get your autograph right now because you are glowing up and you’re going to say, Karan Rhodes who? I don’t know that underling anymore. Congratulations. That’s absolutely fantastic.

Sunil Padiyar  03:34

Thank you.

Karan Rhodes  03:35

Well, if that’s not an encouragement for others to dip their toe in the water of AI if they’re afraid of it, I don’t know what is. So definitely, that’s fantastic. Well, Sunil, thank you for sharing that, and I know I did not do justice what trend tech does. So would you me mind giving our listeners just a little bit more information about what you all do and how you help serve your clients.

Sunil Padiyar  04:02

Well, I think, I think you did a pretty good job, you know, you know, the youth said Trin Tech is the best friend of the Office of the CFO. And you are right, because when the office of the CFO wants to close their books, right, they gotta make the numbers all balance out, and trend tech comes into the pictures, right? So we do, you know, high volume transaction matching, automating and managing balance sheet reconciliations, inter company, accounting, journal entries, close management, all the things that give you a headache. You know, a normal person would buy analysis. Wow, great. So trend tech, you know, provides solutions. And you know, if you look at almost any Fortune, 500 company, they use Trintech. So we got over 4200 companies worldwide that use Trend tech to do you know, these kinds of various things that have to do with closing the books.

Karan Rhodes  04:59

Gocha. So the fortune and the larger companies, you said did, is this also a product for SMBs as well? Or are you mostly enterprise level and and larger we

Sunil Padiyar  05:12

have, there’s multiple products that we have only a product called Karan, seeing the Karan C, you know, which, which of you know, which applies to the, you know, the enterprises, fortune, 500 companies and so so forth. Then we have a product called address, which is more SMB, commercial market oriented. You know, smaller companies up to a billion transactions. That sounds like a lot, but these days, you know, almost every transaction is electronic, right? So add triangle start and now and then we have frontier and accurate and reconnect. You know, we have a bunch of products, you know, that target different markets, highly specialized, you know, targeting, you know, financial institutions and, you know, retail and so on and so forth. So we have a comprehensive suite of applications that do the thing same things right across multiple verticals?

Karan Rhodes  06:03

Boy, have we come a long way Sunil from running enterprise level companies on Excel. Let me just say back.

Sunil Padiyar  06:10

Well, some still do.

Karan Rhodes  06:11

Some still do, you’re right!

Sunil Padiyar  06:13

Because you have 1000s of people doing it, but they’re still doing it with Excel.

Karan Rhodes  06:18

When you have great software like what you all provide, or software solutions like what you all provide, that’s amazing. Now, as Chief Technology Officer, am I correct to assume that you’re overseeing the software development and improvements and of the product offerings that you all have? Is that correct?

Sunil Padiyar  06:38

Yeah, that’s my job, you know, besides coming up with, you know, innovations and cool technologies and so forth, which is what you think most CTOs do, that’s part of my responsibility. But the other part of my responsibility is to build these products quality, you know, quality control it, quality assurance that, and then ship it. And then provide upgrades, provide patches. All of those fall under my domain.

Karan Rhodes  07:03

Wow. And if you don’t mind me asking, how large is your team?

Sunil Padiyar  07:07

My team is probably, I’m gonna say about 50 to 175 people.

Karan Rhodes  07:13

Oh, amazing.

Sunil Padiyar  07:14

Yeah, they need to use contractors and so forth. You know? We Yeah, everybody has contractor workforce, right? So,

Karan Rhodes  07:20

of course,

Sunil Padiyar  07:20

That’s probably about the size of my org.

Karan Rhodes  07:22

Amazing. Well, you know what? You’re just gonna have to join my other podcast. We have a second podcast called blended workforces at work, where we talk about companies that use both FTEs and contractors to get work done. So we’re just gonna have to pop you on that one too. No, I totally get I totally understand. So I’m curious. Sunil, how, as you know, a CTO, do you balance the needs of what customers want, like having most of my career in technology, it never fails that customers you have a fantastic offering, then customers want some sort of customizations that they say will make you know their world of Nirvana, that they’ll love it, but as you you know are continuously making improvements in development and leading your team to do that, I’m sure there’s you have to strike a decent balance between what taking customer feedback and then prioritizing what you can and cannot be infused into your current solutions based on demand and profitability and the feasibility. So I’d love to hear a little bit on how you, as a leader, kind of think through balancing the needs of the customer with the needs of your teams.

Sunil Padiyar  08:40

Yea, I think that’s a really good question, because, you know, we call it capacity, right? This is people have demand, right? I mean, every tech company I can tell you, has more features and functions demand for more features and functions than they have the capacity to deliver, right? So, you know, people such as me, I’ll come up with methodologies, you know, where you say, okay, here is the capacity. Here is the feature nominations, yeah, this is, those are the words that we use. You know, that all the features in the universe that should go into the product, right? And this is how we prioritize, and then we apply, you know, dimensions like, oh, we need to have innovation, you know, we need to have features and functions that are requested by customers. Oh, we need to pay back technical debt, right? So there are standard formulas, you know, people say you should at least spend 20 to 30% of your capacity on innovation. You know, 20 to 30% on this and that. So there are those measures that you can apply, right? But to customers that really want to customize, I think, you know, the thought process that I have is make the software easy to customize so they can do it. We don’t have to do it right so we allow. Our software to be configured, right? And the configurations, you know, can vary customer by customer. To a large extent, they can do things that the product wasn’t built to do by customizing it themselves.

Karan Rhodes  10:12

Themselves interesting. And if they don’t, do you all have consultants that can go in and help them for an extra price, right? Have it go in and help them customize, or are they totally left on their own?

Sunil Padiyar  10:26

Well, it depends on the size of the company, and we can the beginning, we said, okay, enterprises, they always wanna custom, always, always, you know, in fact, there is no out of the box software that fits their needs. So, you know, the theory is, you know, in that case is, you know, you implement a solution that checks off 80% of your needs, and then the 20% you customize over a period of time, you know. So, because people want to get going with the software, right? So that’s what you philosophically try and do, is to say, how fast can we make our software do 93% of the tasks that you do, and the remaining 7% over a period of time you can customize right so that’s in the higher end of the market. In the lower end of the market address, for example, which is per the SMBs, works right out of the box because it’s built generically to serve all the needs you know, those are more finite than the needs in the enterprise side, you know, which are in a pretty large list.

Karan Rhodes  11:28

And how do you… what is your leadership philosophy for building high performing teams in the technical space? Because I’m sure you probably have different roles, people with different specialties, but your workforce has to be architect. They compiled in a way that it runs efficiently and so that you’re all going in the same direction in the North Star, and I’m sure you’re probably partnering with other departments within the company, like your, you know, sales and you know, you name it out there. As a Chief Technology Officer, how do you think about leading that coordination across functions, across your team and departments?

Sunil Padiyar  12:13

Yeah, so given, it used to be a very difficult thing, and I just, you know, 10 or 20 years back, but now almost everything, like, for example, we build what’s, you know, you know, as SaaS applications, like be cloud SaaS application. So you look at the cloud providers, they are figuring out every aspect of technology that a good application needs. It’s not a mystery anymore, right? To go build a good, scalable cloud application. It’s not a mystery. So knowing that is, the first thing that you want to do is to say, what’s a great application? And nothing you know, as it happens, oftentimes, not all applications are great because they will build a dozen years back, and somehow those things are still in the past, which we call tech debt, right? Right? That’s exactly what we call it. And some people call it tech wealth. You know, you’ve got a tech wealth rather than reduce tech debt. You know, I’ve seen that kind of terminology be used. So the first thing that you got to do is to have a vision of what the application should be. Secondly, you got to do is to say, hey, there is no way you’re going to reach there overnight. We got to reach there in a series of evolutionary steps when all COVID together become a revolution, right, right? So that’s how we do it, you know, we look at each of the applications, we say, what should be the best state of the application? And then we say, you know, to your point where you said, how do you use the capacity? Part of that is building thing that pet that, and building the future architecture, which makes it a great application, right? So it’s a continuous balancing act. You know, are where you really want to be, but you’re moving in the right direction.

Karan Rhodes  13:54

Gotcha. Now, that makes a ton of sense. And what is one piece of advice that you would give those that are maybe one to two steps away from being considered to be in a Chief Technology Officer or their company, what is the one or two pieces advice that you can give them to think about being this CXO, The top most leader of a technology organization and preparing themselves, I should say, for that counter role.

Sunil Padiyar  14:25

I mean, I think one of the things upon is people in various stages of their career. You know, have desire to go, you know, you know rapidly, what you really want have to understand is that your customers are not ready. What you have to do is keep your customer needs in mind when you innovate, right? Which is why there is the saying that Rome wasn’t built in a day.  But it didn’t take, you know, 500 years, right? So you need to balance your ambition to be at the leading edge of technology with the realization that your customers do not have the capacity or the willingness or the capability to absorb those leading edge technologies, which often are bleeding edge right? And I think that people you know CTOs are the people that want to be CTOs. Are not quite yet ready to be CTOs. Struggle with this. So if you get this, it’s going to get noticed. You know, executives notice it. Customers notice it. And then some you become a CTO not by, by picking that kind of a path.

Karan Rhodes  14:54

That’s right,  Oh, gosh, that was a negative. I’ve never, ever heard one that was fantastic. What is an example of how you try to stay on top of technologies? I know you probably, you know, there’s articles that you read, conferences you attend and or other ways, forums, communities that you’re a member of, to stay on top of trends. Can you give me an example on one way that you wouldn’t one thing that you do to try to stay ahead, because technology changes at a nanosecond, I found?

Sunil Padiyar  16:05

Well, what’sinteresting is what you just said, you know, used to be the way it was done. Let me elaborate. So you said you read technical papers, you attend conferences, you know, you keep up on top you are in these discussion Rhodes, it has changed. Now you know why. Now it no longer is that. It’s like you have aI assistants, right? Let’s keep on top of all this, right? You did it when chat GPT came or when Claude, you know, came across. My favorites, yeah, they were not connected to the outside world. Now they are connected. Yourself. So now you no longer have to go to into 57 different discussion threads follow up on stuff. All you have to do is go to Claude and say, Hey, what’s going on with this? Tell me what’s going on here when you don’t like the response. Guide Claude in a way where cloud creates the response for you, right? It does. So it has changed. So what I’m saying it’s become easier, is my point is that in this newer world, I think you stay on top of all of these AI tools. And if you are on top of all of those AI tools, they will do a really stellar job of keeping you up to date as a CTO.

Karan Rhodes  17:21

I agree. Yes, you’re so right. And Claude is one of my favorites. Which brings us to what I wanted to get a little bit deeper to as well as AI, you and I were joking in our pre discussion around we could probably talk for years about this. But from your perspective, I’m curious in because there’s everybody’s started an AI company. Right now there are literally, you know, 1000s and 1000s, from maybe millions out there. But where do you think AI’s? The use of AI is gonna evolve, maybe in the next 12 to 18 months, because it, quite honestly, it’s been around for quite a bit, but it’s been in today’s nomenclature, where everybody’s talking about it probably in the last what, couple years, year, your couple years or so, where do you think it’s going to probably go in the next, you know, 12 to 18 months?

Sunil Padiyar  18:14

Yeah, so. laws all the time, right? But something changed, right? Chat GPT came and everything changed,

Karan Rhodes  18:22

Yeah.

Sunil Padiyar  18:22

So I think I’m gonna say, you know, there is a distinction now between the old AI and the new AI.

Karan Rhodes  18:29

That’s a good point.

Sunil Padiyar  18:29

You know, the new AI is really different. I mean, we weren’t gonna say, if chat GPT had not come up, and it had not happened, we would still be talking old AI, which was very different than the Claude, and you know, GPT4 Omni, and GPT 5 that’s coming up. And you know, all of those, you know, have, you know, changed the way that we talk about AI, right? So gotta go back to your question. I got lost in this talk. So definitely,

Karan Rhodes  18:57

Just go where you like.

Sunil Padiyar  19:00

I think that to me, what’s happening in the next 16 and the 18 months is that AI is trying to find a place inside existing applications, which is a big struggle. And there are all these startups that are building the same application from the ground, right? I mean, take, for example, the industry that trend tech is in, which is transactions, billions on them, balanced books, yes, and we have a particular way of doing it. And this particular way of doing it was built over the last dozen years, right? Using, you know, frameworks and technologies that were that have been very popular. All of a sudden the AI comes. This new AI is saying, I might be able to do, take all these billion transactions and balance the books without the need for you to be in the middle, right? So this is where it’s going on, right? So corporate applications like us are. Struggling because we are looking at this, all these workflows and approvals and drop downs and, you know, widgets that we built, right? And then we’re saying, We gotta, we wanna change it. We wanna make it past him, yeah, but then that’s not that easy. We have people following this process. There’s hundreds of people that are using our applications, so we struggle to make these changes, which is why you’re not seeing an immediate benefit, right? So over the next 18 months, you know, major parts of the application are going to get the benefit of AI, you’re going to see if things speed up, ROI, increased tasks get done fasted, right? But in the 18 months, you’re also going to do you see a new Bucha applications are going to come which are written completely with a different mindset, that look at the same problem with a completely different mindset. That’s why I think the next 18 months are going to be a very, very interesting period the old world transitions into something new.

Karan Rhodes  20:58

I so agree with that, and I’m excited to see what happens there it. But there’s two sides of that coin. I think, I think there to your point, there’s the capacity and capability of being able to do so, and then also customer readiness, right? So I think you’re going to find a lot of companies, they’re going to have to handhold their customers to trust these new innovations is what, especially when it comes to what you all do in finances. Because when you’re talking about reconciling in Asia, there are people

Sunil Padiyar  21:29

Remember that too. right yeah, regulated in industry,

Karan Rhodes  21:34

Exactly. So there’s some certain, definitely, some dynamics where the you know, the industry that you serve. I mean, Trintech serves, so I can definitely see that. And I’m just curious. Sunil, do you think your team members are a little bit nervous about how AI is going to impact their jobs in the near future?

Sunil Padiyar  21:54

You know those that are on top of AI that are really using those AI tools to make themselves more productive. I’m not afraid they’re loving it. They’re loving it because all the mundane, boring stuff that they used to do before their assistant does it like myself. I mean, I’m a heavy, heavy, handy user of AI, but those people that are not come up to speed, not using the all these AI tools that are available, not kept on top of it, are the ones that are worried because they see somebody else doing all of those things that they’re still cranking out the old way, and they’re doing it fast, they’re doing it efficiently, and they’re sitting there saying, I think it’s gonna affect me. Yeah, you’re very right to say that because I’m gonna fall back, right? You bring one at equal opportunity, right? You just can take that opportunity.

Karan Rhodes  22:47

But you know, it takes them to also want to have the desire to up level their skill sets in AI. And to your point, those who do will probably naturally find a role. Their role may not look what it is like, what it is today, but it is their adeptness in helping to use AI to, you know, do X project, or whatever it is that you’re needing them to do. They’ll be they’ll have the skills to be able to do it. But those who are ignoring it, fortunately, might be left behind.

Sunil Padiyar  23:17

When the internet came out, right? I mean, we used to like what’s what we call client, server repetitions, right? It was a whole bunch of people. No, I’m gonna do this, yes, and they’re still doing because they still have, okay, so what? They were left behind, right? So you know when new technology trends happen, where I’m gonna say 93% of the world, 99 maybe didn’t see chatgpt coming, right? Yeah, they were all shocked, right? So when we were few of few of them said, Oh, I’m gonna use this. I’m gonna get behind. And if several people said, I’m just gonna watch it from the outside, that’s it, right? That’s what happened with man. Ethernet came too. So you want to be on the right side, meaning behind the technology driving change not be driven over by that change.

Karan Rhodes  24:04

Exactly. No, totally, exactly. And so I’m also just curious, and now, because you have a huge responsibility at your company, I don’t want to downplay that in any way, shape or form. So I’m just curious, what does it take for you to lead at the top of your game. Like, what needs to be in place to make sure that Sunil is, you know, going 100% and feeling good and taking care of both work and self?

Sunil Padiyar  24:34

Yeah. I mean, so one of the things that you want to do is in, at least in my leadership. I surround myself with people, you know, who really want to change the world. I mean, I’m not. This is not lip service, you know, we want to make the job fun, right? So when we come in here, right? We have the unique opportunity, unlike many other people, right, to come in and do exciting things. Things, you know, that we have fun doing it, you know, like playing video games, right? We are producing code and we are doing this stuff that’s gonna make, you know, change users lives, right, right? So to us, up to many of us, and myself included, you know, I look up on this, you know, having fun, right? Coming to work and having fun, right? There’s a part where you got to deal with other real team members and budgets and, you know, expenses, and, you know, we don’t like it as much, but most, yeah, our job is one, right? So that’s right. Kind of mentality that I want to try and build inside my work boards is people you know that look upon their daily day at work is one as one upon an exciting

Karan Rhodes  25:47

Love that I love that’s awesome. Well, as I had mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, you know, we could talk forever, and I look and it’s almost time to close out, but we net. We cannot let you go before we’re able to ask you our signature question of all of our guests. And as you know, I wrote a book on leadership execution, and we did it came out of doing research on some of the best practices there. And there’s seven buckets that came out of the research that we write about in the book. And so you were so kind enough to share that leading with intellectual horsepower really resonated with you, and for my new listeners out there, intellectual horsepower is all about your ability to use your areas of expertise to what I call peek around corners in order to spot trends or connect dots or identify new areas of opportunity that may not have come to The minds of others. Yet it’s all about giving additional value to the teams that you’re working with, or whoever you’re interacting with. So Sunil curious, once we want to know why did intellectual horsepower really resonate with you?

Sunil Padiyar  26:55

Because intellectual horsepower lets you create amazing things, right? Things that are very cool, you know, take chatgpt, for instance, right, somewhere, whoever sat behind it, you know, was creating something magnificent, right, that, you know, that captured the imagination of the human kind. I mean, the fastest growing application and what have you right? And look at all. What it unleashed, right? It’s unleashed, like I said in the beginning of the podcast, you know, ability to create music, ability to mix Bollywood with Latin beach and country, right? Book, whatever thought of doing that, right? But AI enables you to do that, right? So that’s the power of intellectual, you know, horsepower to use the head body to do these things. It’s not just technology and trans right? You can look at market dynamics. You can look at, you know, you can up, you know, you can apply your intellectual curiosity and harsh power to many, many areas in life to become successful.

Karan Rhodes  27:55

Correct?

Sunil Padiyar  27:55

And everything else follows.

Karan Rhodes  27:57

It sure does, and I think it’s the key to opening the doors to your point, innovation, new opportunity, and especially in ways that will, you know, positively impact the communities in which we all live. And that’s exactly, yeah, that is amazing. All right, well, as we’re about ready to close to Neil, you know, we’re going to have information about you in our show notes. We’ll have bios, links, resources, all kinds of good things for our listeners, but I love to always give space for our guests to share on the podcast where folks can find you in the company. So would you mind sharing that information, please,

Sunil Padiyar  28:41

Yeah. I mean where people can find me on the company,

Karan Rhodes  28:45

Where they can find you, maybe on LinkedIn.

Sunil Padiyar  28:49

Clearly I’m on LinkedIn, easily accessible because LinkedIn, your company’s website, you know the leadership page, you know where, you know my contact information is listed, okay?

Karan Rhodes  29:04

And what is the company website? Again,

Sunil Padiyar  29:06

trintech.com

Karan Rhodes  29:09

Okay, wonderful. That’s where we wanted to know. So listeners, you can look at trend tech.com take a look at the fantastic things that you’re doing with their software and how they’re helping businesses of all sizes really rein in their financial tracks for transactions and operate more efficiently. They are key partners in companies doing so, and you heard how many companies have learned their magic and are working with them, so don’t get left behind. And so thank you again, Sunil, for the gift of your time. We really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on leadership and how you think as a CTO and some of the dynamics that are going on in the world of AI today.

Sunil Padiyar  29:53

Thank you. This my true pleasure, and I really enjoyed myself. As you said in the beginning of the call.

Karan Rhodes  29:58

And oh, you’re wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and thank you to listeners for the gift of your time as well as I always like to say that you know there are literally millions of podcasts out there, and we do not take your patronage lightly at all. All that we ask is that you please continue to like and subscribe all of our episodes and just share with just one friend, your best friend, because by doing so, that will enable all of us to better learn how to lead at the top of our games. Thanks a ton again. And see you next week. Take care.And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening to the lead at the top of your game podcast, where we help you lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, and bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at leadyourgamepodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, project, or contract basis. Huge thanks to our production and editing team for a job well done. Goodbye for now.