Workforces are going global by default, pay expectations are shifting and new technologies are reshaping how companies hire and manage talent. CFOs who understand the financial side of these changes will be better prepared to guide their companies through what comes next.
James Loftus, CFO of Pebl, an employer-of-record provider based in Palo Alto, California, has plenty best practices when it comes to multi-country hiring.
With more than two decades of experience leading high-performing teams in fintech, M&A and venture capital, Loftus was previously managing partner at PayPal Ventures, where he led the $1 billion-plus early-stage fintech investment fund and helped launch the firm’s AI investment strategy. Before PayPal, he founded and led the corporate venture capital program at Cash App and held senior corporate development roles at Block, Yahoo!, A16Z and Google.
In an interview, Loftus shares how CFOs can turn hiring from a cost to the bottom line to a financial strategic lever, what role AI plays and the power of a distributed workforce.
As companies expand their talent search across borders, what’s the smartest way for CFOs to redesign cost structures so they gain an advantage from multi-country hiring rather than relying on a single labor market?
The most effective way to benefit from multi-country hiring is to move from a local headcount model to true talent unit economics. Once you break labor into its real cost drivers like salary, social taxes, benefits, overhead and admin, it becomes clear that geography is a strategic lever.
A practical way to do this is to build a “talent cost curve” for your most critical roles: Start with the skills you need, not the location, and compare fully loaded cost per role across several viable markets. The goal is not to chase the lowest-cost country, but to understand where you can get the right level of capability at the most cost-effective total package.
When you approach it this way, you move away from the old default of “we hire engineers in Silicon Valley” or “we staff finance in London” simply because that is what you have always done. A few years ago, most companies looking for senior engineers would automatically pay top-dollar in Silicon Valley because they did not have a realistic alternative. Today, a disciplined CFO can compare what it means to hire that same role in Vancouver, Toronto, or Warsaw, Poland, accounting for compensation, statutory costs and the impact on collaboration. Once talent is modeled as an input that can come from multiple markets, you are no longer constrained by a single labor pool.
With AI changing how roles are structured and where work gets done, which financial metrics should CFOs prioritize to measure the true ROI of global teams?
CFOs often fall back on the metrics that are easiest to quantify, even if they are not the ones that reflect real productivity. Measuring ROI starts with understanding how work actually moves through the company.
That means going beyond headline metrics like “days to close” and looking at the underlying workflows: how many handoffs a work process requires, how much time goes into reconciliation, how often work is redone and where people are still manually moving data between systems. Without that baseline, you risk declaring victory on the wrong things.
A useful starting point is to run simple work-inventory surveys and process walk-throughs with your finance and operations teams. Map out the major workflows in plain language, then identify which steps are repetitive, rules-based or error-prone—those are the best candidates for AI assistance or global team support.
The mousetrap to avoid is assuming that AI “productivity” will automatically show up in traditional output metrics, or using headcount reduction as your primary ROI signal. In knowledge work, the more meaningful measures are reduction in manual steps, fewer reconciliation cycles, and fewer errors that require rework.
The return shows up when you eliminate manual steps, reduce rework and shorten process cycles. Global teams and AI create value when they remove friction, not when they speed up inefficient processes. The priority is to map workflows, find the bottlenecks and measure how much work disappears.
That is the clearest financial signal you will get, and it also frees your core finance team to spend more time on analysis, planning and partnering with the business rather than chasing down numbers.
Growing geopolitical and regulatory uncertainty is testing business continuity plans. How can a distributed workforce help CFOs strengthen resilience and reduce exposure to region-specific disruptions?
A distributed workforce is one of the most practical ways to reduce geopolitical and regulatory risk. When critical work sits in a single market, you are exposed. Spread it across multiple regions, and continuity risk falls quickly. Recent disruptions—from the war in Ukraine to recurring currency instability in Argentina—have shown how hard it is to maintain operations when your talent is concentrated in a single hub.
Unlike traditional in-country hiring, modern global workforce models let you shift work rather than pause it when disruptions occur. If employees relocate or local conditions change, you can continue employing the same team where they are, rather than rebuilding infrastructure in a new country. Time zone diversity also adds natural redundancy. For CFOs, this is not only a talent decision. It is a resilience strategy rooted in diversification.
The financial impact is meaningful. A distributed model reduces the sunk cost tied to any one country, limits expensive entity unwinds and keeps customer delivery steady when a region is offline. Instead of anchoring continuity plans to a single geography, you gain the ability to rebalance in real time as political and regulatory conditions evolve.
Payroll innovation is accelerating, from multi-currency pay to new digital rails. What steps should CFOs take now to build compensation strategies that support flexible payment options without increasing financial risk?
Compensation is evolving fast. CFOs need a framework that supports flexibility across currencies, digital payment rails and in some cases stablecoins, without increasing financial risk.
Start by standardizing your global compensation architecture. Anchor base pay in local currency, define clear rules for variable pay and control FX exposure. Stablecoins can help in markets where traditional banking is slow or unreliable, but they require strong governance such as treasury policies, compliance checks and clear conversion rules.
The goal is simple. Give global teams reliable and fast payment options while keeping financial risk contained.
