Every now and then, you get a moment that makes you stop and look around.
For us, this is one of them.
Three years ago, CFO Techstack brought together a group of people willing to challenge assumptions about how modern finance functions could operate. Today, that community is 13,000+ strong. It’s full of finance leaders, consultants and practitioners pushing what’s possible, sharing what they learn and giving others the confidence to follow.
And right now, the quality coming through feels pretty special.
When you challenge convention, possibilities open up.
The Enlightenment movement was built on a simple but powerful idea: Sapere aude, dare to know. To think independently rather than blindly accept inherited wisdom. In 1789, that movement erupted into the French Revolution with its rallying cry of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
Fast forward to our own CFO Techstack enlightenment, and those ideas have taken on a new form: Liberty, Extreme Quality and Community.
Liberty to challenge the assumption that growth and complexity inevitably mean ERP. Extreme Quality from harnessing best-of-breed specialisation. And, Community, sharing excitement, best practice and confidence to do things differently.
More and more finance leaders are blazing that trail, scaling with Xero + Mayday + best-in-class tech stack, and sharing what they’ve learned along the way. ERP isn’t going anywhere. But the evidence that there’s another way has become impossible to ignore.
The evidence is everywhere
You can see that spirit in the inaugural CFO Techstack Awards. More than 100 submissions across six categories came in. Truth be told, we’d planned to have announced the winners by now. But we were blown away by the volume and quality, so we pushed the timetable back to give them the consideration they deserved.
Behind those entries are brilliant finance leaders, teams, consultants, transformation stories and solutions. People doing exceptional work and raising the bar for everyone around them.
For finalist Katrina Bignasca, Group CFO at Asseti, the impact is clear: “We enrich and develop each other, we inspire each other to be curious, test and adopt new tech and ideas daily… as we work together with mutual respect and support for each other, to grow our businesses and our teams.”
Collectively, the submissions tell an even bigger story: just look at the depth of quality that now exists across this community.
The trailblazers are multiplying
And we’re seeing that expertise spread.
Stackademy takes knowledge from people who have actually done this work and makes it available to more of the community. Their lessons, experiences and hard-won insights become someone else’s starting point.
And the first graduates are coming through.
As recent graduate Anna Page, CA put it: “Highly recommend it for anyone working in/with fast-growing Xero-based businesses! Looking forward to doing Level 2 of the certification.”
That’s what makes this so exciting. One person blazes a trail. They share what they know. Someone else learns from it, builds on it and goes further.
And this is only the beginning
The CFO Techstack Awards and Stackademy are just two manifestations of something much bigger.
There’s so much more coming. More ways to share knowledge, more opportunities to learn from one another, more brilliant work to celebrate and more ideas to come from the community itself.
Liberty. Extreme Quality. Community. Three ideas at the heart of a movement whose momentum is only growing.
We can’t wait to see where you take it next.
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