Are chargebacks eating into your profits? Jack McCullough sits down with Rebecca Beam, CFO of Chargeback Gurus, to demystify the complex world of chargebacks and reveal how to reclaim lost revenue. Rebecca brings a unique perspective to combating these disputed credit card transactions that lead to fund reversals. She explains how the company uses an award-winning proprietary platform and data science to provide compelling evidence for its clients, helping them win disputes and prevent future chargebacks.
In addition, she shares her experience in the Big Four, transitioning to fintech and the advantages of working for a private company.
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I’m excited about our guest, so we are going to get right into it. I’m joined by Rebecca Beam. She is the CFO of Chargeback Gurus. Chargeback Gurus helps businesses recover lost revenue by managing and preventing chargebacks while providing insights to improve payment dispute strategies. Rebecca, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
It’s great. I’m glad to have you, and hopefully, I didn’t butcher the company description too badly in my one sentence, but maybe you can add a little more color to that. Give it the old 10,000-foot view.
I think you did great with your description. Chargeback Gurus wants to prevent chargebacks for our clients and recover revenue from chargebacks. Maybe for those who aren’t super familiar with the term chargeback, a chargeback is a dispute of a credit card transaction by the cardholder that ultimately results in a reversal of the funds. We utilize extensive industry expertise. We leverage powerful data science and learning models that are powered by our proprietary platform to provide the best evidence and the best way on behalf of our clients, so that the banks can make the right decision on whether or not the funds should be returned from the merchant or belong to the cardholder.
That’s a great description. You made the Inc. 5000 list, so you are filling an important niche and growing rapidly.
We made the Inc. 5000 list. We have also won some awards on our proprietary system. I’m very excited and honored by the different awards that we have won.
Personal Background
We’ll talk about your company quite a bit, but I want to get a little bit on your own background, and I can tell from your accent where you grew up and plus, you told me beforehand anyway, but you grew up in North Carolina.
That’s correct. I grew up in a small town, Concord, North Carolina. It was a small town back then. It’s developed a lot over the last many years. The closest big city to Concord is Charlotte, which is where I live now.
I understand your mother was born in Saudi Arabia.
Yes, she was. My mom grew up in Saudi Arabia. My grandfather worked for Aramco, the oil company. My grandmother was also originally from Greece, grew up in Egypt, and she had siblings in Australia, Egypt and Canada. While I grew up in a small town in North Carolina, I got more of a worldly view from listening to their stories throughout the years.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. It must have been an interesting childhood to have parents with that perspective.
It was, and it’s funny that you brought up my accent because my grandmother, like I said, grew up in Greece, but she spoke five different languages throughout my early childhood and even into high school and college, when I would take foreign language classes, and I would always try to speak to her. Typically, I took Spanish or French, but I would try to speak to her in those languages, and she would often make comments about my southern accent in my foreign language, so she always got a kick out of that.
I took French in high school, and one of my classmates was from Texas, and he was taking French with me, and it was hysterical. We were probably saying it in a Boston accent, but we wouldn’t have recognized it amongst ourselves. Do you speak any foreign languages now?
I remember things from high school and college. I can still recite the French national anthem, which came in handy during the Olympics, but the language is not fluent.
I took it for four years and I can speak about fourteen words of it. I can read and write it a little bit, but when I hear it goes past me. When you grew up, did you have many brothers and sisters?
I have two older brothers.
I have two sisters. I understand that your older brothers put you through some of the same things that I did to my sisters. They were quite the World Wrestling Federation. Is that correct?
That’s right. Yes. My brothers were fans of the WWE. Some of those popular wrestlers from the early ‘90s. They would often try to replicate figure-four leg locks. I was typically the person that they would try those wrestling moves on. It was a very interesting childhood.
To me, that’s a good brother. It’s remarkable. I did the same thing, the actual same whole, the figure-four leg lock Rick Flair, who I believe was from North Carolina. Maybe that’s why, but I did the old figure-four leg lock on my sisters. It wasn’t the nicest thing a brother could have done, but perhaps.
Flair wrestled within the last few years. He’s got to be 75 now. I remember watching him as a child, and he is well older than I am. I remember watching when I was like ten. He’s got to be 10 or 15 years older than me. That’s probably about enough about the World Wrestling Federation for the moment, but hopefully, we’ll find a way to come back to it. When you graduated high school, you studied mathematics first and then you got a master’s in accountancy, and I’m curious how that educational combination has served you professionally.
I went to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and got my undergraduate degree in mathematics directly after, attended the Master of Accounting program at Kenan-Flagler Business School, and that combination of degrees has helped me professionally. I’m a big believer of, if you can truly understand the underlying principles of whether it’s mathematics or it’s finance and accounting, then you can use those skills and apply them to real-world situations. It’s served me well over the last several years.
Big Four Stint
One thing I have learned from doing this show is there are so many different ways to become a CFO, educationally, career path, whatever it might be. You completed your master’s and then you worked at PwC. What were the great lessons you learned there? Did you have a five-year run at PwC?
A little less.
What were some of the big lessons and maybe some key mentors that you met along the way?
Coming out of grad school, I was fairly certain that I wanted to work for a Big Four firm and audit. Not necessarily sure what industry I wanted to go in, but pretty early in the recruitment process, I connected with a female partner from PwC. She was in the private company’s practice, and she was instrumental in shaping my career thus far.
I feel like PwC is where I learned the profession. In the classroom, you always learn the principles and the textbook way of doing things, but for me, it’s about applying that in the real world that helps me grasp and master those concepts. Working in the private company practice gave me exposure to several different industries throughout my career there, and with the different clients that I worked with. I had some exposure to real estate, wholesale distribution, family office and financial services. It gave me a wide view of different companies, different industries and helped me overall learn different things.
If young people are not sure where they want to focus I recommend public accounting, exactly because of the experience you described. You have three to five years, whatever it might be. You are exposed to some of the most talented people in the profession and then all sorts of industries. You are getting paid and doing interesting work along the way. It’s not for the faint-hearted. Public accounting remains a difficult place to work, but it’s so worthwhile.
I completely agree. I often reference my time at PwC as an extension of the master’s program because you learn so much, so quickly and a lot of times, you are working with people who are in the exact same situation that you are. They graduated from a MAC program or graduated from college, they are about the same age and you are all experiencing the same life era at the same time.
I worked at Peat, Marwick & Mitchell, KPMG, to you young readers. My starting class was 100 people and I knew precisely none of them before I started, so it was a cool little community that we developed there. I want to talk about your post-public accounting career. Your biggest job by tenure was Maxwell, which is a healthcare community. What was that like? What are some of the things that prepared you for your current role when you were at Maxwell?
At PwC, I had some exposure in the real estate industry. After PwC, I spent many years in real estate and senior housing operations as a controller and then a CFO. That company, Maxwell Group is a family-owned company here in Charlotte. We operated continuing care retirement communities, mainly in the southeast. CCRC is a very important industry in my mind, especially as the Baby Boomer generation is aging. A key factor to a happier, healthier life is socialization, and the one thing that we did well was developing programs around dining and social experiences to help seniors live a happier, healthier lifestyle.
While I was at that organization in those roles, we did a lot of process improvement, where I found this excitement around implementing different technologies and platforms to make our lives on the financial side more efficient and ultimately do our role in supporting what was the overall major mission of the company.
Portable Skills
It’s great when you can work for a company where the mission somehow improves the world itself, which is something you are doing. That’s fantastic. You had a great run there, and then it’s interesting because you went from there doing great things working for an important company, then you did a little switch, and you went to the tech industry. How did you come across the opportunity, and looking back, it’s a great choice. The company’s doing well. It’s a marquee company, but what were you thinking at the time, because it’s not the most obvious of transitions to someone looking from the outside?
At the end of my time in senior housing, my life was changing a little bit personally. I had my first child and that first year of life of motherhood or parenthood in general is always a very difficult one. I feel like if you truly understand and have a good grasp of underlying accounting principles, finance principles, you can take that and you can apply it to any industry.
Historically, there’s always been this mindset that people need to work their entire careers in one industry. I don’t think that’s true because I think as long as you have a true understanding of the finance profession, you can apply that elsewhere. At that point in my life, I was looking to make a change, and Chargeback Gurus incorporated a lot of my interest and that’s what drew me to this role.
I have spent the majority of my career working with privately held companies, whether that’s family-owned or private equity-backed. I enjoy companies that are at this point of transformation and growth, which is where Chargeback Gurus is. I have a knack for implementing new platforms, implementing process improvements, automating processes, putting controls in place, transitioning from a cash concept for accounting to accrual accounting and driving progression for accounting and finance functions. That was one piece of the Chargeback Gurus’ role.
I have also always had an interest in fraud and the human behavior behind it. You learn a lot about the fraud triangle in accounting programs. Another thing that [the University of North] Carolina does well is that it puts an emphasis on a well-rounded education. I took several sociology classes completely unrelated to a Math major, and that sparked some interest in why people behave the way that they do.
Lastly, in my role at Maxwell Group, I found this passion for tech-enabled solutions that drive efficiencies in the finance function, and ultimately, the goal of Chargeback Gurus is to help make this challenge with chargebacks become something that we can do more efficiently for our clients and ultimately recover revenue for our clients. It brought those three things together for me, and that’s why this role is so exciting. Not to mention, it is a completely brand-new industry, and I like to try new things.
The one thing about the CFO role in the modern world is that the skills are very portable. I believe you’ve remained a CPA, but whether or not that’s true, you have the solid accounting skills and can pick up the stuff and delegate what you don’t have time for, but it’s about leadership strategy and vision and partnering with the CEO. That’s the modern CFO, and that’s not industry-specific. On the subject of partnering with the CEO, you work for one of the best ones. He’s a bit of a titan in your industry. I don’t think it’s unfair to call him that. Tim Tynan. I’m wondering what your relationship with Tim is and because it’s the critical relationship in the company.
I completely agree. I feel that with any relationship, it takes some time to develop. I feel that there’s always this period where you are trying to learn and understand how the other person either prefers to communicate or wants to consume information. This relationship is no different, but we have a fantastic working relationship. As you said, he has some unbelievable experience in the payment space and some other industries as well.
The thing that I appreciate about our relationship is that we collaborate on different strategies, and we review projections together, and together we decide on the best next steps forward as an organization. One thing that I also appreciate about him is that he is a big believer in inclusion. If there’s any one person within the organization that might have a piece of information that’s important to a conversation, he is the type of person that wants to include that person, invite them to the conversation. It’s not about the small team doing things in a vacuum. It’s about the broader organization and [the] client focus. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that we are meeting the [needs] of clients.
You mentioned inclusion, and when we spoke previously, the pride you have in your own team is palpable. It was pretty obvious we’d met for the first time, but what’s your philosophy on building a world-class team, maybe both within finance and accounting and across the entire enterprise?
What you said is true. Our team is very motivating for me. I look for people that have positive attitudes and this motivation for process improvement, improving their skills and wanting to make it to the next level. We are a company of honesty, integrity and transparency. That’s something that cascades from the top down. We are looking for people to join our team who ultimately have that same type of mindset.
Fintech Challenges
That’s great that the two of you have such a fantastic relationship and that you’ve built such a world-class team around you. I want to talk a little bit more about Chargeback Gurus on a more global basis. The first one, and this is a little bit of a cliché, but what are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities you see the company facing in the next few years?
In general, chargebacks are increasing on a global level. In 2023, the volume of chargebacks was somewhere between $8 billion and $11 billion, and that’s expected to increase approximately 50% by 2026. In general, a lot of our clients’ merchants globally are having challenges related to chargebacks, and so, ultimately, that gives us the opportunity to build these long-lasting relationships with our clients to help them with that challenge.
One thing that occurs to me is that fintech generally, and I don’t know your industry specifically, but it’s constantly changing and hyper-competitive. That might be a fair way to describe it. In your role as a CFO, you need to balance that in a competitive landscape. You need to support growth, innovation, problem-solving, but you are the CFO. You also have to do that in a financially prudent way. How do you manage those two things?
The things that we do well, speaking of competitors in the space, is that we have an award-winning platform that we have developed internally. You were talking about our team earlier, and we have developed this very talented team of product engineers. The platform has been the basis for our success over the last couple of years. With that, we pride ourselves on having industry-leading recovery rates and fully aligning ourselves with our customers’ goals.
We are a client-focused company and want to give our clients expert advice and recommendations to ultimately help them improve their processes, create efficiencies, reduce the number of chargebacks and recover the most revenue possible. In my role as CFO, I’m working and collaborating with the other leaders in our company to ensure that our strategy aligns with our financial plan.
You’ve mentioned client satisfaction. Given that you have a financial background and understand the issues that people might be facing, are you involved in any support role, or do the developers ever come to you to pick your brain a little bit?
The thing that I like a lot about working with private companies, and this happens in the public world as well, but a lot of times in the private company world, you get exposure to not just the financial function, but you get a lot more exposure to the operational function, the marketing function and the overall business.
To your point, we regularly look at the product together and say, “Is the formula driving this piece of the product? Does that make sense? Does that make sense to me as a financial user of the product?” To be honest, you may be shocked to know that as a chargeback management company, we have received chargebacks in the past. Not only am I the CFO of the company, but I’m also a user of our product, and we give feedback to one another respectfully on the product itself.
I said before that the team motivates me because we regularly have discussions on how we can make things better for our clients. Listening to our client solution team speak about if we tweak this for X, Y, Z clients, then they can receive this type of positive ROI. It’s very exciting, but we do that across the organization. That’s not the ops team, it’s not the sales team deciding how to sell things. We truly do as an organization talk about those different items together.
It’s exciting that you can influence the direction of your company. If you work for an airline or a pharmaceutical company, not that those people aren’t smart, because I’m sure they are brilliant, but you are not influencing the customer satisfaction model all that much. I wouldn’t think so.
Exactly.
I am legally required to ask you the following question. I can lose my license as a host, but we are now into the whole gen AI hitting the mainstream. You are very technically savvy. How are you using gen AI and some other advanced technologies to give Chargeback a competitive and sustainable advantage?
We are using AI in the finance function through different platforms that we have implemented. We did implement a new financial reporting platform, so those platforms are incorporating AI in those cloud-based programs. I have also noticed that our CRM has AI insights associated with it as well. The different platforms that we use tech stacks operationally for our company have those elements incorporated into them.
I have mentioned a few times now that we have our own proprietary system, FPR 1, which we use for servicing our clients, our tech-enabled service. Our talented product engineering team has developed data science machine learning models within that system to ultimately help our teams present the best evidence and the best way to the banks so that the banks can make the right decisions.
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Changes In The CFO Role
I want to get your perspective, and you and I both share, not that you are old school, you are too young to be old school, but we both did start off at large CPA firms. The role of the CFO since the start of our career has changed quite a bit, but how do you see the CFO role and maybe financial leadership evolving in the years ahead?
What we have seen is that term CFO sometimes isn’t always used or what I have seen companies do is they will have a chief accounting 0fficer who’s maybe that more traditional path like I am the CPA path, and then they will have this role of like chief strategy officer that’s maybe gone the more investment banking route. I have seen that happen.
I also think the role of CFOs is evolving to not be about the numbers and the financials, but what we are seeing CFOs now responsible for is some IT aspects, even some risk management aspects on the IT side. We are seeing this concept of ESG become a role of the CFO. I have a good friend who works for a produce company, and she’s on the marketing side of sustainability. All of a sudden, she’s making contributions to the financial filings that the CFO of that company ultimately governs. It’s not about the numbers anymore, and things are starting to move to incorporate a lot more aspects of the business, which are a function of the finance role.
F is for Finance in CFO, so it’s never going to not be a part of being a CFO. Funny, I’m thinking F is for Finance, all of a sudden I’m thinking Cookie Monster and that’s good enough for me. What is wrong with me? Anyway, it’ll never be a part of it, but there’s so much more to it. You mentioned the companies have a chief strategy officer, but that’s part of the CFO’s role. The chief accounting officer, that’s part of the CFO’s role.
You have to be good at so many things. My first CFO role, I got it because I was a very good controller, very good at the numbers part of the job and that wouldn’t get it done nowadays, at least in most companies and certainly not a company like Chargeback. I always like to ask our members because I am committed to changing the perception of our profession. I used to ask people for jokes or something like that, but then someone told me a dirty joke and I don’t want to hear it anymore. It’s not what I was going for, but do you have a fun fact or an interesting story about yourself?
A fun fact or interesting story about myself. A fun fact is that I was a cheerleader in middle school, high school and first year of college. Growing up as a kid, I was a little on the shy side. I was more reserved in a school setting than maybe I was at home, but I will never forget when I first made the cheerleading squad in middle school, and they did the morning announcements and then announced who was on the team.
My English teacher came over to me and said, “Did I hear that right? Are you on the cheerleading team for next year? I’m so surprised. Are you going to do the cheers? I didn’t know that you spoke much.” It helped me break out of my shell in terms of a school setting, and it’s something that I think has helped me gain confidence over my lifetime.
I was a cheerleader my first year at Carolina, and I got an injury that I understand to not be all that common. I broke my first rib, which, I was told, is not very common because your first rib is protected by your clavicle. Ultimately, when the doctors at UNC realized what had happened, for the longest time, they thought it was maybe some strained muscles in my back. They mentioned how uncommon it was and, if it was okay with me, they would include it in some of their medical journaling. I have no idea what happened with that medical journaling, but apparently, my injury somewhere along the way was included in some other studies.
That might be the worst fun fact we have ever had. You sustained a terrible injury that has been written up in medical journals.
The trainers gave me a hard time about it. They are like, “How do you break a first rib when all you are doing is holding up signs?” They had a good time with it as well.
I have heard and I know it to be true because I was skeptical, so I looked it up, but in most sports cheerleaders suffer more injuries than the athletes for whom they are cheering. It seems like it’s safe, but I’m talking like competitive cheerleaders where you are at the top of a pyramid type of thing. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh at your injury. It’s funny that that’s the direction you took the fun fact, a horrific injury. The other thing I’d like to ask is, because you have a lot going on, is work-life balance. You are the mom of two young children. How do you make it all work?
At this point in my life, I’m very intentional about how I spend my time. From the moment I wake up in the morning to the time I go to sleep, I feel like my day is pretty structured. I try to be present in the moment for whatever I’m doing. I have time blocked off, and I have as little as five, ten and fifteen minute increments to pack lunches and get kids ready. I also make sure that my day is scheduled in such a way that I can get as much of it done as possible.
That’s the name of the game, and your husband’s a doctor if I have my facts correctly. I’m sure he’s a busy fellow as well.
He’s a PA in orthopedics, very busy. Yes, a completely different field from what I am in. It keeps the conversations interesting, and he has no idea what I’m talking about. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but when it comes time for the taxes to get completed, I have it, and when one of the children gets an injury, he’s got it. It helps us divide and conquer.
I always like to close by talking to our CFOs about what advice you would give to the next generation of CFOs. I’m thinking about people who may be VPs of finance or controllers, but are around that path to getting the next CFO type job. Anything you’d share with them?
What I would share with them is to take time on the fundamentals. If you have a true good understanding and grasp of finance and accounting principles, you can take that and you can apply that anywhere. Don’t feel like you have to get pigeonholed into one specific role or one specific industry. I would say enjoy the journey, embrace the stage of life that you are in now.
I feel like so often, we get focused on the next step that we are not able to enjoy where we are at, and so much of life is enjoying the journey. I would say to watch those around you, the CFOs that you are working with, and maybe the board of directors that you are working with. Listen to the questions that they are asking, focus on the areas of the business that they are focused on, because you can learn so much by watching others that are around you. Watch the leaders around you, too.
Personally, I have had a lot of great mentors, but I have also tried to take a little bit from everyone that I have had experience with. Even if it’s something that I don’t want to be, those can be good lessons, too. I have seen leaders in the past that want to lead through fear or have so much lack of awareness for those around them that it’s off-putting to the overall team and team members. Learning how others have made me feel helped me to ultimately develop into the person I want to be, the leader I want to be. Watching those around us can be invaluable.
As Yogi Bear used to say, “You can see a lot by watching.” This was a fun interview. More importantly, I know our readers are going to think your insights are great, and that’s what this is all about. I’d like to take a moment to give you the final word.
Thank you. I appreciate that. This has been a lot of fun, so I appreciate you having me. If there are any fellow CFOs, controllers and finance individuals out there who are experiencing any issues with chargebacks, I’d be more than happy to have personal conversations with people around this topic. It’s an interesting topic and one that I have grown to learn a lot about over the last couple of years. I’m happy to have conversations and connect with people. I love meeting people in other industries as well and, ultimately, learning more. I like to learn more every single day. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun.
That wraps up this episode. A huge thank you to our sponsors Planful and the CFO Leadership Council for their amazing support. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and visit us at Rockstar CFOs. Until next time, rock on.
