When Figure Technology Solutions went public on Nasdaq in September 2025, employees celebrated in Times Square. CFO Macrina Kgil was already thinking about the next morning.
“Most of the folks think, ‘We did it. Like, we rang the bell. We got the money.’ Then everyone thinks there’s nothing happening afterwards, but really the tough work starts on day two,” Kgil told the CFO Leadership Conference in Denver.
Kgil took a consumer lender public about 12 years ago. She joined Figure in late 2024, and the timeline she was handed collapsed almost immediately. Figure runs a marketplace where partners originate loans recorded on the blockchain and sell them to buyers, and it takes a fee on what moves through the platform. When she arrived, the bankers were talking about going public in 18 to 24 months. A month later, the target was summer. Figure filed in May and listed in September.
“From a CFO angle, what this brings to all of you is transparency, and there’s more appreciation for all of the work that we do from a governance angle and the integrity that we bring to the table as an executive,” she said. “I think that’s something that I really enjoy as part of my job on a day-to-day basis, that I can be part of the team that’s bringing in the financial interpretation to the business.”
Here’s what she told CFOs about getting there, and about what comes after.
Listen to the bankers, mostly. Kgil said banks run every IPO off a template, and the template is usually right. Usually. When it came to the analyst day and the financial decks, she threw theirs out and rebuilt them herself. “My experience is 80 percent of the time that’s probably correct and we should all listen and get their advice in terms of what is the right way to do things. But there’s that 20 percent when you have to do something different and you want to be able to create a different deck or a different story.”
Use the testing-the-waters meetings to build trust. Figure met investors every other month before the IPO, setting targets and then coming back to show it had hit them. Kgil said every investor the company met on the roadshow came into the deal. “You go out to investors, tell them, ‘I am going to do this in six months’ time or we’re going do this in a year’s time.’ [It’s meaningful to be] able to go back to them and say, ‘Hey, we actually said we would do this and we did it better than we said we would.’ Or, ‘We met the expectations.'”
The first year of SOX is the real shock. Private company auditors check evidence. Public company auditors check all your controls. And that’s a big shift. “Did Macrina review? Did the legal officer review or your CEO review certain transactions?” That process and documentation of the review, that’s not something that you go through on a private company level.”
Always work on your relationship with the audit chair. Sit on the panel that interviews audit chair candidates. After that, stay in touch between meetings. “I meet with our audit chair at a minimum on a quarterly basis separately, because you don’t want give your audit chair a whole surprise agenda of what’s going on.”
Start earnings prep with the CEO weeks out. Figure’s CEO is a former CFO who understands controls and audits. Even so, Kgil brings him a list of themes well before each call and lets him edit it. “If I tell him, like, a week before and he’s just trying to come up with the answers on the flights, it’s going to be much harder.”
“The first time I went public as a CFO, I did have to detox for a little bit going through that cadence,” she said, “and then I had to think really hard, is this a lifestyle that I would enjoy again? And actually, my answer was yes.”
