CFO Spotlight: Rebecca Lowde | MYOB

Rebecca Lowde’s career in finance can be divided into two parts: her work with major internationals and her roles with ASX-listed companies. There’s been some hits and misses, but throughout it all she’s been a firm believer in the transformative role of finance.

Now, as CFO of accounting software firm MYOB, she talks with CFO Magazine A/NZ about competition, the right to be in the room and the art of storytelling.

The power of finance and technology has always kept Rebecca Lowde motivated.

At university she combined her accounting studies with a computer science degree and it has stood her in good stead more than thirty years later.

“I’ve always been excited by technology because it enables so much and I think it just brings out your better self in everything that you can use,” she said.

Multinational starting point

Lowde’s career began at US multinational Oracle, then a major software brand and now known for its cloud computing applications. She worked for the Asia Pacific arm of the company for almost six years with three of them based between Dublin and Vienna.

“It was my first real training ground and from my point of view, it was privileged because you got to deal with a lot of different cultures and learn a lot about people and just how it all fitted together,” she said.

“I also had a number of operational roles as well as CFO roles and having those two come together has helped me throughout my career.”

Lowde moved to Xerox Lexmark as finance director for three years where she initially had responsibility for the finance teams in Australia and New Zealand, and eventually those in Taiwan, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and India.

From there, Lowde worked from Singapore with software company Business Objects before it was acquired by SAP. In her three years there, she spent the final year working as both CFO and COO.

Earning the right to be in the room

Lowde’s decision to come back to Australia and work with ASX-listed companies – first with financial software firm Bravura Solutions as CFO and executive director, and then at marketing company Salmat as CFO and then CEO – was a huge step change.

“It was a really steep learning curve for me coming from US multinationals where you are predominantly responsible for the P&L to an ASX-listed where you’re now responsible for the balance sheet and you’re responsible for governance, and risk and compliance and all the things that come with a company that’s listed,” Lowde said.

During her six years at Salmat, Lowde was charged with selling parts of the business to private equity firms and fetching a maximum return for shareholders while also securing future roles for staff.

It was yet another training phase that ultimately prepared her for the role of CFO at one of Australia’s fastest growing tech companies, Afterpay.

“It had the best of all worlds in my mind,” Lowde recalled.

“So it became a top 20 ASX-listed, but it still had the scale-up mentality and so you got to have the fun of being at the forefront of innovation and driving exponential growth over 100 per cent. But then having to also build in the guardrails and the compliance and the disciplines around how you then are as an ASX-listed 20, you do have a lot of responsibilities on you as well.”

Lowde led Afterpay’s acquisition by US firm Block in 2022. The mega-deal was reportedly worth $39 billion – the largest takeover in Australia’s corporate history.

“It was probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she said.

Eight months after the deal was finalised, Lowde moved on to the rapidly expanding Guzman y Gomez fast-food retailer. But her stint as CFO there only lasted a year with Lowde saying, “it just wasn’t my home”.

She returned to her love of finance and technology when she started at private equity firm MYOB in November 2023. Here, her wealth of experience across different enterprises came to the fore and it’s been an empowering experience.

“Being a finance leader is not just being able to do debits and credits – it’s about knowing how to tell the story of those numbers because we get to see it all,” she said.

“If there’s on powerful thing about a CFO, and it’s why I consciously wanted to always go back to being a CFO, is that you actually own the right to be in the room.

“You should always be a trusted person in the room to be the one that brings a different perspective, but gets heard to do so. To me, it’s an exciting time. We get to play with some great tools. We get to enable ourselves to be even better than we were yesterday and all at the same time is helping our customers also benefit from it.”

Telling the story

Launched in 1991, MYOB is one of Australia’s earliest and most established software platforms for businesses. Today, it’s facing more competition than ever and for Lowde, it’s a source of motivation.

“I think competition helps you become very focused on what you need to do and I think it’s really important that we at MYOB run our own race,” she said.

“We know what our customers need from us and it’s helping them take away the noise and just solve their real problems, and really focus on what is going to help them be successful, whether it be a small medium business or whether it be a mid-market.”

The rapidly evolving finance and AI landscape has not only seen the emergence of competitors, but has changed the role and responsibilities of CFOs. The ‘art of storytelling’ is a skill Lowde believes every CFO now needs to tap into.

“Who better to have a look at what’s going to happen in the future than the person that truly understands what their metrics are telling them?” she said.

“I think the more CFOs can learn what’s important and what the metrics are telling them about the future rather than just what happened in the past.”

As for the future, Lowde is looking forward to the intersection of finance and technology deepening.

“As long as you embrace technology, learn and be curious, constantly curious, I think you’ll always be successful and have a tolerance for failure as well, and I think is an important thing.”