Hiring skilled, local talent is key for businesses looking to establish a global footprint, but it’s important for business leaders to understand that different markets come with their own cultural, social and regulatory distinctions.

In that vein, “when we talk about global expansion, we're not talking about one solution that fits all,” said Simone Nardi, CFO of SaaS provider G-P. “We're talking about solutions that need to be tailored and compliant.”

The remote-first company provides a global growth solution which helps firms manage their global workforce through one platform. Nardi has served as G-P’s CFO since May of 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile, joining from live TV streaming platform FuboTV. His previous roles include an eight-year tenure at NCBUniversal, where he served in various positions including as SVP and CFO, NBC Universal Networks, and he started his career at General Electric.

Bringing an ROI perspective  

The CFO has an important role to play in establishing a global expansion strategy. When considering when and how effective it will be to hire international talent or enter new markets, “at the end of the day, the opportunity for a CFO is to kind of ensure that the company finds the best solution, the best opportunity for it to expand and grow,” Nardi said.

Finding global talent can provide benefits for CFOs, tasked with ensuring they are creating the most effective pathway to growth — for one, it can help finance chiefs access skills or talents they may not be able to find domestically as they face talent shortages in areas like accounting. For another, hiring local talent can be beneficial from a return-on-investment perspective, acting as a bridge to “understand the market better as an insider, as a local player” who can help them perfect their expansion strategy, Nardi said.

Bringing that ROI perspective to global expansion is key on the part of CFOs as the executives which “want to ensure that we optimize value creation for the company,” Nardi said.  

“Typically, what that means is being the enabler to see what the company is trying to achieve, and how the teams are running the day-to-day operation for the business, to find the best solution,” he said of how finance chiefs think of value creation.

However, as finance chiefs come to play a greater strategic role in such decisions, it’s also important to understand that each market comes with its own individual quirks; “everyone knows there are multiple markets, but not everyone appreciates, straightaway, the diversity, and complexity” of each new market.

Achieving the compliance balance

One crucial distinction that does tend to be top of mind for CFOs and other executive leaders when looking to expand is compliance. Businesses need to juggle a host of regulations that come into play when setting up shop in a new market, not just when it comes to tax or payment regulatory requirements for employees but in crucial areas like cybersecurity — an area where lawmakers worldwide have begun to pay closer attention.

Attempting to balance each market’s distinct regulatory requirements for employment, payments and other standards can be cumbersome — and not to mention, costly — for businesses, in some cases eliminating some of the benefits from hiring global talent.

Being able to understand the labor laws in each country and learning how to properly manage them is critical for businesses to “mitigate any concern about the ability to operate properly, how to get to the right level,” Nardi said.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence can aid CFOs with this compliance juggling act. AI is built into G-P’s platform and helps “across the board” in helping to provide information about compliance with the various tax, financial, cybersecurity and employment regulations companies need to properly operate in global markets, Nardi said.

It’s important to shine a light on the database behind AI, however; G-P’s AI tool is drawing upon the company’s collective knowledge of these compliance areas, enabling it to provide the key insights businesses need, as “ultimately, to have a compelling AI solution, you need to have a compelling data set,” Nardi said. “Because AI is as smart as the data and the knowledge base it has.”