Dive Brief:

• Forter tapped Jim Lejeal as its new finance chief and Cyndy Lobb as its chief product officer, appointments that come as the company looks to accelerate its revenue growth, according to a Friday press release. The company provides security solutions for online commerce, including payment optimization and chargeback recovery services, according to its website.
• Lejeal is taking the New York-based company’s top financial seat permanently after serving as interim CFO for two months, the company confirmed to CFO Dive. A four-time public company finance chief, Lejeal has “over 20 years of experience leading hyper-growth companies through two successful IPOs,” as well as secondary offerings, acquisitions, and expansions, according to the Friday release.
• “As a business founder himself, partnering with someone who’s been through the many stages of growth was important to us,” Michael Reitblat, Forter’s CEO and co-founder told CFO Dive in an emailed statement. “As CFO, he’ll focus on scaling our finance operations to support the growing business over the next five years while helping to expand our position as a global market leader.”

Dive Insight:

Prior to Forter, Lejeal served as CFO for cybersecurity firm Absolute Software, according to his LinkedIn profile. His past CFO experience also includes top financial roles at Sphero, Rally Software and Splunk — with the finance chief leading the 2013 initial public offering of Rally Software, which raised $84 million to reach a $315 million valuation, TechCrunch reported at the time.

Lobb, meanwhile, logged an eight-year tenure at payments platform Square prior to joining Forter in January, according to her LinkedIn profile. She served in a variety of roles for Square, including as head of its trust platform and general manager for its commerce platform. Her previous experience also includes serving as chief customer officer for Accelerated Concepts Inc., and a two-year span as a product manager at Google.

Both appointments come as Forter marshals its strategy for its next stage of growth, looking to boost revenue, “strengthen the company's market leadership and drive product innovation,” according to the Friday release.

Among other steps to facilitate expansion, at the top of this month the platform announced a partnership with online pet retailer Chewy for security, payment optimization and chargeback recovery, according to a March 3 press release. Forter’s platform, powered by AI, is supported by a global network of more than 300,000 online businesses and 1.8 billion shoppers, and the platform has processed over $2 trillion in transactions, per the release.

The platform is seeking to capture a widening share of the online security market at a time when both the number of digital transactions, and the amount of cybercrime targeting those payments, is increasing — with online payments seeing a slow but steady increase in adoption. President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order aimed at facilitating a shift in the federal government from the use of paper checks to electronic forms of payment, citing growing amounts of check and mail fraud, CFO Dive sister publication Payments Dive previously reported.

Both businesses and regulators, meanwhile, have reported widening concerns surrounding cybersecurity challenges due to an uptick in online fraud and crime. Small to mid-sized businesses pointed to cybersecurity as a top business concern, a recent survey by VikingCloud found, with SMBs increasingly likely to be the targets of malware, ransomware, and deepfake scams.

Both factors are set to influence the future of the industry, with the value of the payments security software market expected to jump over the next few years — growing at a compound annual growth rate of 14.7% to reach $94.5 billion by 2032, according to a recent survey by SNS Insider.