How Valentino Hafalia Transformed FP&A from Number-Crunching to Strategic Storytelling

In this eye-opening episode of "Asking Good Questions," host Edward Roske sits down with Valentino Hafalia, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis at Western Alliance Bank Corp. With a distinguished career spanning JP Morgan and eFunds, Valentino shares his transformative philosophy on modern finance leadership.

Discover how Valentino's personal motto—"Listen, Analyze, Plan, Execute"—has guided his approach to financial planning across different institutional cultures. He offers profound insights on the evolving role of FP&A from mere number crunching to strategic storytelling, emphasizing that "whether the story is good or bad, it has to get told."

The conversation explores how AI is reshaping finance teams and why emotional intelligence (EQ) will ultimately triumph over technical skills (IQ) in tomorrow's financial landscape. Valentino's compelling "bass relief" analogy illustrates how humans and AI must work together, with technology handling computations while humans provide the creative insights that truly differentiate organizations.
Don't miss Valentino's surprising advice for aspiring finance professionals—including why acting classes might be the most valuable elective for future financial leaders. This conversation offers essential guidance for anyone looking to future-proof their finance career in an age of rapid technological transformation.

Takeaways

• AI integration will take time and requires hands-on experience.
• Finance professionals must learn to tell the story behind the numbers.
• Emotional intelligence is crucial for finance teams to thrive.
• Recruiting for soft skills is essential in the evolving finance landscape.
• Predictive planning tools can significantly enhance forecasting accuracy.
• CFOs are becoming more strategic and are often the face of the company.
• Technology should be embraced to improve efficiency in finance processes.
• The future of finance will require a blend of IQ and EQ.
• Acting and improv skills can enhance communication in business.
• Finance is about making history, not just recording it. 

Sound Bites
"We’re really storytellers in finance."
"Listen, analyze, plan, execute."
"The CFO will be the face of the company."

Chapters
00:00 Preparing Finance Teams for AI Integration
03:04 The Evolution of Financial Planning and Analysis
06:05 The Role of AI in Finance
09:04 Emotional Intelligence in Finance
12:11 Recruiting for Soft Skills in Finance
15:12 Navigating Data Management Challenges
18:04 Modernizing Finance Processes
21:03 Technology Implementation in Finance
24:08 Vision vs. Efficacy in Decision Making
26:50 Navigating Financial Insights
31:18 The Role of Technology in Finance
32:13 The Importance of Soft Skills
36:46 The Future of Finance and AI
41:08 Preparing for AI Integration
42:30 Lightning Round: Quickfire Insights

This episode of Asking Good Questions is brought to you by Caprus.Ai.

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Transcript

Asking Good Questions: Conversation with Valentino Hafalia

Introduction

Edward Roske: How do you prepare your finance team for AI integration? How can you get them better ready for this AI wave to do all this heavy lifting for us?

Valentino Hafalia: So that's going to take some time. It's going to come in stages. Learn how you interact with it. Throw a couple of things at it that you haven't thought of before. And in playing with it, you're going to learn some things. And you're probably going to incorporate those things into what you do.

Edward Roske: Hello and welcome to Asking Good Questions, the podcast where we dive into the nuances of financial leadership by, well, it's literally in the title, Asking Good Questions. I'm your host, the man in the hat, Edward Roske. And today I'm joined by someone who has been transforming the way FP&A financial planning and analysis functions across not one, but multiple major institutions. His career has spanned JP Morgan, he's now vice president of financial planning and analysis at Western Alliance Bank Corp. He has been at the forefront of redefining FP&A from number crunching to more of a modern strategic storytelling function. One of those mottos I really like is if you think about FP&A, we're really storytellers and that someone is Valentino Hafalia, longtime friend of mine. Val, pleasure to have you on the show.

Valentino Hafalia: Edwards, always a pleasure and it's always great talking to you. We always have great conversations. Yeah, the storyteller thing, I bring up almost everywhere I go, especially when I tour our offices, I tell people what I do. And the heart of the matter is that, you know, whether the story is good or bad, it has to get told. And that's what drives the business forward. And that's what we do.

Edward Roske: Excellent. I think far too many people think their job stops when they hand someone an income statement. And there's not a story there. That's a grid. It's stuff in the rows and stuff in the columns. But being able to explain the narrative behind it, I think is really powerful.

Valentino Hafalia: Absolutely, so you know and this is the toughest thing I have to teach incoming people is that look, income is good, right? So but just because the revenue is up, what does that really mean? Was it a one-time mark to market adjustment? Was there some client who did something different this period? You have to understand what caused that revenue to go up. You just can't say revenue up. We're doing well.

FP&A as Storytelling and Strategic Function

Edward Roske: Yeah, I think parts of many people simplify it down to all charts should go up and to the right. But what is the story behind that? Yeah, because if profit went up and we're making short term profit gains, it's going to cost us in the long term. What led to it? How do we reproduce it as opposed to being a complete one off? One of the things I like is your personal motto: Listen, analyze, plan, execute. I'm curious about how that philosophy has guided your approach. I mean, you've had, you've been in financial leadership roles throughout all your career. Let us know how you developed that mantra. I like it. Listen, analyze, plan, execute. But how does that inform your day-to-day decision making?

Valentino Hafalia: Yeah, so I got to that place. So I had a number of roles in finance and one of them was actually part of sales. So I worked for a software company that back in the day sort of priced derivative instruments. And there, that's the only industry I could think of, not the only one, but that's the one I was deeply involved in where you leverage knowledge. So this is back in the day when people were manually calculating what you know interest rates swaps were worth. It's a long time ago, right? And we had software to do that. It used option pricing modeling and you know, we had the secret sauce and you leverage that against people who have, you know, worst models or don't understand the market and you arbitrage that and you make money.

So I got to that "listen" part because, you know, part of my job was visiting clients and saying we've got this great software and it's gonna make life interesting and great. And that failed me at a particular client and we didn't get the sale. And I had to really think about it. Why? Why? Because when you look at it objectively, it was clearly the right answer for the client and it made sense. And I came to the conclusion that I didn't really listen to the concerns of that client. And the concerns were the finance team seeing their jobs go away. And it didn't register to me. And I think after that, I've learned to think about listening first. What are your concerns about the software? Because it's scary. And similarly, I think we find ourselves in the same situation with AI tools. It's scary. Is it coming to take away our jobs? If so, any vendor that sort of proposes an AI solution will probably be met with resistance. So it was kind of failure for not listening to what the real concerns were.

Evolution of Financial Planning Across Institutions

Edward Roske: So let's talk about that. So you talked about, you know, when you were at e-Funds and other fintech firms, you really focused on starting with that listening side. You've worked across, I mean, a ton of different environments. I mean, you were at a major global bank, you managed a multi-hundred million dollar budget, e-Funds, divisional director, now Western Alliance, and probably 50 other jobs along the way. How has your approach to financial planning evolved across all those different, not just institutions, like institutional cultures?

Valentino Hafalia: So I think the... So the growth in my roles has sort of evolved with the technologies. And the technologies have gotten better. And it may sound kind of basic, but the tools for aggregation are a lot better. And I'll give you a clear-cut example. Back in the day when we were evaluating companies to buy, like a potential merger, the math is actually kind of simple. It's company A plus company B equals company C, and are the earnings of company C accretive to company A, the acquirer? So it's actually pretty simple, but it's really hard to put company A and company B on the same page and add them. But now the tools are available that that's simple to do. So, you know, my growth in FP&A and finance has been, you know, congruent with the growth in better technology. And some of it's actually, it sounds weird, some of it's just basic math.

AI and Technology in Finance

Edward Roske: So let's talk about the basic math side, going back to what you just said a second ago about AI. You haven't been afraid of technology as you've gone along. You've embraced it. So how do we use that AI, that technology to take that basic math and up-level it? How do we do it in a way that doesn't scare people, that they want to embrace those changes?

Valentino Hafalia: Well, it's coming, right? So AI is coming, and I saw this back in the 90s. So in 1996, Deep Blue, which was an IBM construct, a big supercomputer, lost to Kasparov in a chess match using tournament rules. Less than one year later, 1997, Deep Blue beat him. So I knew then that we were, that humans had sort of plateaued and other, you know, artificial intelligence was on the rise. So the question is, how do you combine the two? How do you get the best of both? And my philosophy is at its peak, AI and humans are kind of like a bas-relief sculpture. And do you know what that is, bas-relief? It's just like a, yeah, so it's just basically some substance like tin, marble, and there's a little bit of artwork that sort of raises above that, right? So it's a sculpture, but it's not independent of its base. Like, you know, David as a sculpture is independent of the marble.

So at its best, the underlying substrate is AI. It's going to do all the fundamental calculations and analysis that it should do, that we used to do, and we still do. But the art is whatever we can do to make that bas-relief bigger, to make that picture come out. I kind of phrase it in terms of IQ and EQ, right? So IQ is how we traditionally measure intelligence. And of course, Deep Blue back in 1997 sort of told me that there's no way we're going to compete against artificial intelligence. Right, so a person with 160 IQ is very smart and the IQ of Deep Blue is just off the charts. So you're not gonna compete with it that way. But EQ is emotional intelligence and that's where we are very good. And in fact, and I've mentioned this to some of our, some of our divisional CEOs, you know, the best ones have a very high EQ. They're people who, you know, the, whatever offices they visit, they love to have them visit because they can connect with people. They can bring out the best in people. So it's gonna be that combination of IQ and EQ, I think, in the future. The good companies. Because think about this. If every company has AI, at some level, we're all identical. So the question is, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you make that bas-relief sculpture come out? And that's going to be the human element.

The Evolution of AI and Human Roles

Edward Roske: So there's a lot to unpack there and I want to talk about 10 different things. We're going to come back to the EQ and the soft skills and the communication side. Just on a side note, I like going back to Deep Blue and we beat the best chess player in the world. That was a fundamental moment. There was also a fundamental moment when IBM's... We beat them? Yeah. Well, allow me to clarify. I have life suspicions about...

Valentino Hafalia: Love you, Edward.

Edward Roske: Yeah, no, no, no. There was no way I personally could beat Garry Kasparov, but I, by God, I could be part of the AI that could beat Garry Kasparov. I was not, but that's the... By the way, we all should be really, really nice to our computer overlords. So give them all the compliments you possibly can. Use "we" when talking to them. Say please and thank you when talking to ChatGPT. I say thank you all the time. Yes. It's like, I want to be remembered, I do not want to be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

I was somewhat offended when IBM's Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy. And that wasn't the offensive part. Like, congratulations, far better. What offended me is when they later declared Ken Jennings, you know, they had their greatest of all time championship and they had three people on it. Not one of them was Watson who had beat Ken Jennings. And then this is the part that really offends me when Ken Jennings was interviewing for the Jeopardy spot. They interviewed, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 people for that role and not one of them was an AI. They never actually invited Watson back to see how Watson could have run it. I think we did that in 2025. I think the computer could have got a fair shot at it, which is my pivot back to EQ. You've said before that the skillset that really finance teams need that's going to differentiate them, that's going to let them be that part that pushes out or carves back into that AI framework. It's emotional IQ, it's soft skills, it's people who can communicate things. How do finance teams get to that point? When they define themselves traditionally as people who count, right? It's governance, it's compliance, it's adding things up. How do we get finance teams to that point where they can't be replaced? Because at the end of the day, that's why they didn't interview Watson is because it doesn't have the people skills that a Ken Jennings does to actually talk and interact and smile and everything else. So how do we get finance teams that might go, yeah, I'm worried I could have my role computerized. How do we get them to have that EQ and those soft skills and those better communication abilities?

Building Soft Skills in Finance Teams

Valentino Hafalia: Yeah, so it all comes back to who you recruit to work for you. And five years ago, everyone thought I was crazy because I emphasized getting people with better, softer skills because I realized that a lot of the AI tools were going to get better. So five years, 10 years ago, and this is no knock on data scientists. The flavor was, okay, let's get a lot of data scientists in here and will code up and Python is the new language that everyone needs to speak. And I said, I think the tools will eventually incorporate all of that and they will be much easier to use. So when you think about something like a GPS, you can just ask for directions now. You don't have to even program it in. And AI is going along the same route.

Co-pilot, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, all those fun tools. So simple to use that you don't necessarily need to know coding per se. It always helps to have that base knowledge because you understand this, right? A lot of our job is understanding the data that comes in because you sometimes get weird results. You have to understand whether or not the data needs to be manipulated, wrangling, right? To get you where you need to go. So it's not just take data and see the results. It's do you understand what that data is and where it came from, how it got to where it was? So you do need that skills. But in terms of writing SQL code to go out and get that data, that's going to become automated.

Edward Roske: Well, as somebody with a master's of data science, I'm horribly offended by your, no, actually I completely agree. Yes. I felt the subtle jab. No, no, no. I brought this up actually when I was going through. Thank you, my friend. When I was going through the data science program, they spent days, weeks, months talking about how to code Python, how to code R, how to code SAS. They go through the deep dive on the statistics side of how to build the models and how to calculate your P values and everything else. But the most valuable class I took in that entire, whatever it was, 22 month master's program was a class on business analytics that focused on how to ask better questions and how to deliver that information to the right people. And it was an optional class. It was an elective. And I was like, I think that should be the fundamental start with it.

Maybe you have to start with what does it mean to do data science, but then immediately go, it doesn't do you any good to come up with a conclusion or build a cool model if you can't explain it to anyone. If it actually doesn't drive a better question, if it doesn't drive a physical action, what's the point in it all? I guess it goes back to earlier. If a data scientist thinks their job stops at "I have built a model" and not "I'm actually going to make sure action takes place because of that", that function is replaceable by a computer because you said it exactly correctly, the computers are smart enough now that they can go create their own model. They can decide, okay, do I need traditional AI? Do I need to do some linear regression or do I need to build a REMA model? And all those fun terms, all that great Python coding, frankly, a lot of what I did is replaceable now completely by just a really good foundation level model. So I like that you saw it coming five to 10 years ago and you said, I no longer need to hire somebody based on purely their ability to do debits and credits and be a good modeler, but how can they actually communicate that? How do you find those people? Is it the questions you're asking during the interview process, or is it all other factors being equal? Is it a gut feel? What helps you find those good EQ people?

Valentino Hafalia: So it's a bit of the questions and it's a bit of the gut feel, right? So make sure that if you're lucky enough to have internal recruiters or if you use external recruiters, make sure that's one of the things that you're thinking of. And then you make specific, you know, we need somebody with good people skills because again, the mathematical skills, look, I work for a bank, everyone has a pretty high IQ here. We're good at math. So we're all, we're a dime a dozen here. But the ones with the good people skills are hard to find and you've got to weed through a bunch of people. Now you gotta make it clear that is what you're looking for. Because, you know, again, there's the credit decisioning in a bank is both science and art. What makes a good credit officer? And the science component is very formulaic. That will be replaced. All the big banks are working on this now. That will be replaced. So you can get a credit decision based on set of circumstances and financial history fairly quickly. Whether or not you decide to make that loan though is the art. And that's what makes you valuable.

Science vs. Art in Finance

Edward Roske: I like it. Anything, anything that's a science or anything that's an, that is engineering fundamentally can probably be done a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, a little bit better by a computer. But that art side, you know, what fundamentally it's diving into the why behind it. I think that's where us humans are going to get to continue adding value. Speaking about technology, actually, I want to talk in a second about data integration and process modernization. But before I leave technology, what's the technology implementation you're most proud of leading over your career?

Valentino Hafalia: So we have an ERP model. We use it for FP&A that I implemented. It's an Oracle product. We're very, very happy with it. We used it in non-standard ways. So we built a merger acquisition model using it because the technology makes the math, the simple math, easy. So basic things, you know, think basic blocking and tackling. Once that's sort of done, the rest of your job is creative. And that's the hard part, I think. You want to inject a bit of creativity into what you do because otherwise, you know... Otherwise, finance is kind of boring, right? It's like warfare. It's like really calm and then all of it's guns blazing. So you need to sort of be creative to be able to handle all this stuff.

Edward Roske: I, my very first finance mentor, when I went from the world of computer science into finance, he came to me and he said, you're really good at math and you're really good at the, you know, the communication side of it. He said, I really think you should move into finance. And I said, I don't know anything about finance. That's not what my degree is in. I don't know that, you know, anything about your financial magicness that you do. And he said, finance is just, is math with a dollar sign and a bias. He said, normal math doesn't care. Like, it's not like two plus two. What do I, what is it good if it's four? Is it bad if it's four? It's not, it's just four. It's like, but finance actually says there are certain things you want this to happen and you want to lead to that path. And if it doesn't, you need to go change direction. And he explained to me why finance was much more interesting than math was. And I've, I think I was 20 at the time. I'm 26 now.

That's a lie to anybody online. True about the 20, I'm slightly older than 26, but I've never looked back because I like the concept that yes, we're adding things. Yes, we're consolidating, but we should be driving change, right? There should be a path to doing it. So I love that technology side. Speaking of growth, so Western Alliance grown significantly during your tenure there. I'm without diving into details about Western Alliance, just bigger picture. I'm guessing that's given you challenges in terms of data management, process efficiency. Help me understand how you navigate those challenges as you get more and more data and your pressure to do things faster without doubling the number of people every time you double in size.

Data Management Challenges in Growing Organizations

Valentino Hafalia: Yeah, that is a challenge. That continues to be a challenge. And I think it's more of a challenge for smaller organizations and medium-sized organizations. I think the larger organizations have sort of figured that piece out. So the problem with data is how do you get it? Where do you put it? How do you get it? And if you don't have like a data warehouse, data lake, data whatever you want to call it, data mart, it makes life tougher. You understand? Because all businesses have a lot of very independent applications that do a myriad of things, and they spit out data. So where is that data? Do you have to go out and get the data from the resident application or does it live in a place that's easily accessible, that's governed, that has a data dictionary, that's easy to understand? So the bigger corporations have sort of figured that out earlier. I think smaller companies learned that the hard way and medium-sized companies are somewhere in between trying to figure that piece out.

Edward Roske: So how do you get from those small companies sort of doing what needs to be done type of finance processes to those cutting edge or more modern finance processes? And it's not necessarily at bigger companies. I've seen smaller organizations that have really amazing modern finance processes. And I've seen really large organizations that haven't changed since, I don't know, grandpa invented it way back when. How do you, over your career, you've had to not only identify what processes need to be improved, what data need to be brought together. But how do you get from that traditional way of doing it to that modern way of doing it without getting shut down, running into roadblocks, being told you can't do it, you know, eventually giving up and taking your toys home because it's not any fun playing anymore. Like how do you jump over that chasm?

Valentino Hafalia: A lot hinges, as I've learned, on the decision making process. And the decision making process, I think for a lot of companies, comes down to efficacy and cost. And the thing on the other side of the balance scale is vision. Where do you want to be? So there are great arguments for, you know, can I do it quickly? Can I do it cost efficiently? Great arguments. And you know, you can get stuff set up and start making profits and that's all good and you can't argue with that. But the vision question is okay but where do you want to be in five years? So efficacy solves an immediate problem but you know is that the problem four or five years down the road? And that's the hardest thing to bring into these decisions that revolve around applications and refreshing your technology. Where is the vision? Where do you want to be versus let me solve the immediate problem?

Financial Tools and Technology Integration

Edward Roske: So in terms of solving those problems, just looking at the technical side, before we take a break, and I do want to talk more about AI, because you brought it up earlier. Before we get to that, you've developed a ton of technical skills. You've used a ton of technical products over the years, Oracle's EPM solution, Oracle Analytics Cloud, SyBase, SAP. You obviously are aware of what is available right now, but is there something missing? Like, are there capabilities that are missing from even those most advanced financial tools that you currently have access to?

Valentino Hafalia: I think this has to do with applications and bundling. So a lot of the applications we derive a lot of value from, particularly the BI ones, the business intelligence tools. So they're great at just aggregating information and spitting out great results and analyzing and deep dives and graphs. Great at it. And the colors they use are fantastic versus the colors I would use.

Edward Roske: It's so pretty, right?

Valentino Hafalia: But they're all, for the most part, they're all, for the most part, they're standalone. So it's, okay, let me go out, feed me data and I'll feed you results. So what's missing is integration from a lot of the back office directly in, independent of throwing it into a data lake and pulling it out. So you wanna move into that predictive space where you're basically saying, I kind of know what my receivables are going to be at the end of this day. I know what my loan positions are going to be at the end of this day. I know what the runoffs are going to be in the future. This is what I should be doing. Now, to get to that answer is a multi-step process in a lot of institutions. And oftentimes, it's like ground to cloud, back to ground, up to the cloud, pulling it out. And a way to integrate, to make those all seamless would be good. Now I think the bigger companies that play in this space, like Oracle, are looking for those bigger integrated solutions where you've got your ERP, your EPM, your analytics all in one sort of bundle. Is that the best, you know, in terms of vendor solution or not, I'll give you an analogy.

When I was in college, I was a little bit of a geek. And back then, there were basically three electronic spreadsheet programs. One was Quattro Pro, which no one's ever heard of now. One was Lotus 123, which you may have heard of. And the other one was Excel, which was like way in the bag. They were not gonna win that race. So I spent a lot of time in college understanding Lotus 123, and I was good at building macros and things like that early on. And now, because of bundling, Microsoft has basically stolen the market. I don't even know if Lotus 123 exists anymore. You have Excel bundled in conjunction with PowerPoint and Access and a bunch of other applications, and it's just so valuable to the user. They live in one environment. It's kind of like Apple, right? So in Apple, if you get the watch, well, if you get the phone, you obviously need the watch, and you live in one environment. So good or bad, I think that is kind of the way to go.

Edward Roske: Okay. It would be interesting to be able to mix and match different parts of different solutions in a way that you knew they would work well together. But to your point, staying within that kind of ecosphere makes it a whole lot easier to connect at all. It's fully bundled. It kind of all talks to each other. Speaking about going way back in the way back machine, by the way, I used Quattro Pro and Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel. And Excel for a while had a feature where you could put in like, I think it was the Lotus one of the backslash commands. It would pop up the Lotus menu at the top to try and use that conversion. But I actually used VisiCalc and MultiPlan before those. Because if I remember correctly, and I was like seven, but they came on cartridges that worked in my TRS-80 color computer. And no one could explain to me why I wanted to type stuff into a grid. But I knew there was some sort of power there. Now we have Excel and none of us can even live our lives without it. But I'll tell you on the bundling note, speaking of going way back, when I was a small child, probably about seven, we had these clothes called Garanimals. Are you familiar with Garanimals? Yes, because for anybody that's like, I don't know, under 40, your top and your bottom would all have an animal on it. Like it'd be an elephant or a tiger or a crocodile. And if you match the animal on the top...

Valentino Hafalia: Thank you.

Edward Roske: ...with the animal on the bottom, your outfit would match. I would love this in the world of business, where it's like, well, as long as you, it's fine. If you get an elephant from that person, you match it from this technology vendor and you match it with the elephant from that technology vendor. Those two things are going to talk to each other really well, but instead it's like, yeah, we have to get it all from one company. That was a really long question.

Valentino Hafalia: But we'll promise you that they'll say, well, there are APIs and you can link up here and you can link up there and invariably no.

Edward Roske: Yes. On a side note, as an adult who still has trouble dressing myself, if anyone out there wants to create a company to do Garanimals for adults, I will fully back you on this because like Val, I can't figure out the right colors and I can't make them pretty enough. So please help us males who can't dress ourselves. Garanimals for adults. All I ask is 1% of the company. Y'all may have the rest of the idea to yourself. Speaking of companies and making sure we pay for all of this.

We're going to take a brief moment to hear from today's episode sponsor, Caprus AI. This episode of asking good questions is brought to you by the great folks at Caprus AI. As someone who spent over 25 years helping improve the office of the CFO, I am genuinely excited about what Caprus is doing. They're bringing the power of AI to finance and accounting teams in a way that actually makes sense. Helping unlock insights buried in data and make better business decisions even faster. If you're an FP&A or accounting and you want to see how AI can transform your workflow, check out Caprus AI. Trust me, your future self will thank you. Welcome back. I don't know about you, but I really enjoyed hearing from that person for the last 30 seconds. And now we are going to talk more with Val. During the break, we were also talking about some education. You believe in taking what you've learned and passing it on. Is there advice you would give to people entering college now as to what to focus on?

Education and Skills for Future Finance Professionals

Valentino Hafalia: Yeah, this is kind of funny. I've given the same advice to my kids who've already graduated. The most important elective class you could ever take is acting. So it's far superior to any communications class that you would have. In particular, if the acting has improv in it, and that's part of its curriculum. And the reason why that's so valuable is that when you find yourself working for a company and you could be in finance or other parts of the business, you have to have the ability of getting up in front of people and presenting an idea or something and getting them to think about something. And that's where I think acting class, it's totally underrated and colleges don't sell that. That really helps you, that gives you a foundation, a skill base. Plus sometimes with improv you can be funny and crack jokes and things like that. Don't ask me to do some improv.

Edward Roske: Yes, I agree with you about taking improv class and I think it should be mandatory. I actually rolled it out at one of my companies. I sent the entire company through improv training because any meeting you walk into is not going to go the way you planned. You have to be able to react in the moment. What's the Mike Tyson line? Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face. Unless you somehow script everyone like puppets. Any meeting you go into is an opportunity to react in the moment and people that can't do it and do it intelligently. I will admit this, I actually wasn't the most accomplished public speaker until I went to college and I ended up and in retrospect, total preparation for being a CEO. I didn't realize it at the time, but I went to a liberal arts college that number one, taught everything using the great books method. So you know, textbooks, you all read great books. And number two, it was pure Socratic method.

And you had to be able to not only come up with a compelling argument, you had to be able to defend it. So every class was a rousing discussion. You had no idea of where it was going to go. Max class size of 12 people, you sat around a big round octagonal table. Whatever idea would come up, you would have to be able to react in the moment and add to it. And looking back, there is no greater preparation for being a leader than being able to synthesize what other people are saying, say, here's the best idea that can come out of that, getting everybody on board for that idea and walking out going, yeah, we're all gonna do this. At the time, I thought I was doing it for a class participation grade. In reality, they were training me to be an executive. So I love the acting side. I love the improv side.

Valentino Hafalia: I recall in graduate school, one of my professors, extremely old school, had the old stand and deliver approach where he would force you to stand in your seat, stand from your seat, not even face the class, just stand up and deliver whatever answer to the question he had. It's easy to prepare, and so you know, it's easy to prepare the work and you're probably good on a lot of questions. It's hard to react in the moment and that's what he excelled at. He would throw things at you and you would have to sort of think and you're standing up and you're sweating and you know all the students are looking at you and it's at the graduate level so everyone's really smart so that was fun.

The Future of Finance and AI Integration

Edward Roske: That's awesome. Back when I did that, everybody else was kind of aiming towards more vocational things. How can I put this job to immediate work? And I thought, I really want a liberal arts background, which makes me look smart in retrospect, but liberal arts had been diving down for a while. It's recently had a resurgence for exactly what you were talking about before. It's much more important to be able to have critical thinking skills nowadays, because the technical skills are not, they're not dying off. They're just being absorbed by the under because so many people have done that type of thing and it's something that can be repeatable. Therefore an AI can do it. Generative AI can do it. A large language model can do it. So looking at how finance itself is continuing to transform, it uses AI, uses advanced analytics. They're starting to become mainstream in your opinion. So since you saw the, the deep blue wave coming, and then you saw the soft skills wave coming five to 10 years ago, where do you see the profession of finance heading? And you can start if you want on how it'll affect banking, or you can talk about just in general, how AI will transform that finance role, turning it from a bas-relief into something real.

Valentino Hafalia: Yeah, so it's kind of interesting in that finance is, I don't want to say it's becoming more mainstream, but it's certainly more well accepted right now than I think ever before. So we've always looked to great CEOs, great finance leaders, as people to help run the country, et cetera. But I think people are becoming more fluent in finance now.

Because of a number of things, one of them is personal investing so it's very easy to open up a trading account and you'll have to think about companies you invest in and so you have to learn a little bit of the language so people are becoming more fluent in the language of finance, which means CFOs in particular are gaining more prominence in the public sphere than ever before. So it used to be CEOs, but now CFOs I think are sort of taking that place there. And the way I see it moving in the future, CFOs will be almost the face of the company. And a lot of times they actually are. So certainly on investor calls, you want to hear the CFO. I think that's just going to accelerate into the future. The other thing is that the speed of decision making has increased astronomically.

So we used to worry about waking up and seeing what the market would do. But now there's after hours trading, there's pre-market trading. So you almost never really get a break. You're continuously looking at information in the public and how it reflects on your stock or your businesses that you're interested in. There are a ton of other people, like retail investors out there, who are doing the exact same thing. So as a business leader in finance, as a CFO, you've got to worry about that stuff and be the face of the company because the decisions you make often very quickly with very limited information have to be spot on or otherwise you're gone quickly.

CFOs as Strategic Leaders

Edward Roske: I was over in Europe recently and instead of having CNBC and Fox Business, they had Bloomberg Business. So that was interesting because I think it's out of New York, but they were discussing the European markets and I had the chance to watch a TV program called CFO and they interviewed a bunch of CFOs, but they referred to it as Chief Future Officer. And you just reminded me of it because traditionally, the CFO's role was not only to not be the face of the company, but it was to be backwards looking, you know, talking about what happened on an income statement or a balance sheet, or this is historically where you've been going. To your point, it's now more talking about future potential, like where can we go as a company? Historically, a role of the CEO or the chief strategy officer, how do you see CFOs, how has this been happening? Like how have they become more strategic to use the Bloomberg term chief future officers and not so backwards looking?

Valentino Hafalia: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I used to, so I started off with an accounting degree and actually I was an auditor with Deloitte Touche and then I sort of—

Edward Roske: Yeah, whatever happened to Touche? Did he just get screwed out of his share by Mr. Deloitte?

Valentino Hafalia: Yeah, like I think two Shnivanses and I have no idea where Nivans went so—

Edward Roske: But I would have a Deloitte side interrupt.

Valentino Hafalia: That's okay. But the way I sort of explained it at the time was accounting is very focused on history, right? Is that history recorded correctly, basically? Whereas finance is, you know, focused on making history, right? Where do we go in the future? And that, I think, has been the shift lately. You know, where do we go into the future?

Preparing Finance Teams for AI

Edward Roske: Well, so talk about that future. How do you prepare your finance team for AI integration? Like how can you get them better ready for this AI wave to do all this heavy lifting for us? How do you get them ready?

Valentino Hafalia: So that's going to take some time. It's going to come in stages. So the first stage is to actually, this may sound weird, but play with the technology. So we have access to co-pilot or whatever they sanction, play with it. Learn how you interact with it. Throw a couple of things at it that you haven't thought of before. And in playing with it, you're going to learn some things. And you're probably going to incorporate those things into what you do. It's very hard, I think, for people to... Actually, it's very easy for people to say, give me an AI solution. This is what I do. Blah, blah, blah. But that, anyone can do that and eventually I wouldn't need you because the AI would do everything that it said it would do. But it's hard to think about how can I use that to help me in the future? How can I integrate that? So the very first step is actually playing with the technology.

Lightning Round

Edward Roske: Perfect. Love it. Hands on. Val, we're going to wrap up with our lightning round. I'm going to ask you some quick questions. You just give me the first answer that comes to mind. Ready? Cool. Who is the greatest NFL team and why is it the Arizona Cardinals?

Valentino Hafalia: Well, they're not the greatest NFL team, so I came from New York, so I wasn't born there, but I'm lifelong New York Giants fan, but Cardinals used to be in that division, so and they were last in that division, NFC East, but sort of a soft spot for them. And, you know, they did make it to the Super Bowl once and fell short, so.

Edward Roske: I am a diehard Dallas Cowboys fan. I just lost followers. I saw the number just drop as soon as I said that. As a diehard Dallas Cowboys fan, I have to remind people that it's now been, I think, 30 years since we've seen the Super Bowl at this point.

Valentino Hafalia: We are united in our hatred of the Eagles.

Edward Roske: Yes, darn straight. And that actually gave me some followers when I said United Against Hating the Eagles. Most overrated financial metric.

Valentino Hafalia: I hate to say earnings per share because it's so widely used. I think it's so widely used because it's abused. It's just a simple calculation. And it's not, actually I'll change my answer, share price. Where is the most overrated? It is not indicative of how the business is doing. I will give you a very solid example. So we lived through this. We call it a March Madness. This was the banking crisis two years ago where our share price was dropping. Was that indicative of how the bank was performing? No. No. That was just public perception. So share price absolutely overrated.

Edward Roske: Yeah, it's interesting. Normally I think of earnings because it's such a lagging indicator, literally the final thing you can do. But to your point, share price is not only a lagging indicator, it is a perception indicator based on random thoughts people are having. I love it. Most underutilized tool in a financial professionals toolkit.

Valentino Hafalia: Predictive planning. So predictive planning is inherent in a lot of the ERP systems that you have out there. Excel can do financial modeling. People don't realize that you can YouTube it. I think it uses exponential smoothing. Here's why I really like it. If I could come up with a forecast in two or three seconds that is maybe 60 to 70 percent okay, then I've got hours, days to fine tune that forecast. Whereas in the old days, you spend a lot of time coming up with a forecast just once. Something like predictive planning can give you multiple forecasts in seconds, and people underutilize that. Speed of getting to an answer that is 60 to 70% good or accurate helps you a lot.

Edward Roske: We could probably do a whole episode on timeliness versus precision. And I almost want to now. Best piece of career advice you've ever received.

Valentino Hafalia: Best piece of career advice wasn't given to me as advice, it was an example. So I used to work for a software company in Manhattan. We were based out in Paris. And we were small, I was the 11th person hired. And for the holiday party, we used our conference room because it overlooked the skating rink, the Wollman skating rink in New York City. So we would time it, we would time our holiday party with the lighting of the Christmas tree, the Rockefeller Center. So we had a great view of that.

And of course that day, you know, no one's working. We're all in the conference room, which also doubled as our training facility. We're all like taking our computers out and wires and putting them somewhere and it's just a big mess. And the caterer came and put all this food on the middle of the conference table and took the wrapping off and, you know, was stuffing stuff in our little, you know, business trash bins and it was overflowing. It looked terrible. The president of the company walked into the conference room and saw that we're all busy like taking computers, he saw the trash bin and he emptied it himself. He didn't have to do it. This is a guy with two PhDs. He founded the company. Really smart guy. He could have easily said, you know, hey Val, can you take care of the trash after you put that computer away? But he did not. He realized at that moment the most valuable thing he could do was take out the trash and he did it.

Edward Roske: Awesome. If you weren't in finance, what career would you have pursued?

Valentino Hafalia: My goodness. So I took enough credits as an undergrad to almost major in art. I would be in art. There's an analytical part that I like about myself, so I might have studied semiotics. But I do like art. I do like literature.

Conclusion

Edward Roske: Awesome. As a former art student myself, completely support this. Val, it has been fascinating hearing about your journey. It's amazing how far you've come from back in the Columbia days to leading finance and planning at Western Alliance. You've navigated that whole evolution of the finance function. Before we wrap up, final piece of advice you'd give to finance professionals trying to make that leap from adding numbers to strategic business partners.

Valentino Hafalia: Yeah, so the bit of advice I would give is to find the decision maker in the operation that you're supporting. And it may not be your boss, right? It may be somebody else. Find that decision maker and sit down and talk with them, take them to lunch, try to understand what it is they're looking for. Because your value is what you can deliver.

Edward Roske: Excellent. Thank you, Val. Thank you, my friend, for joining us on Asking Good Questions. I love talking to you. We will definitely invite you back. Thank you to our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. Thank you to our sponsor, Caprus AI, for supporting this episode. Please don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, whatever your favorite podcast player is. I do not judge.

Valentino Hafalia: Love you so.

Edward Roske: You can also find us on LinkedIn and askinggoodquestions.co because I'm not going to pay way too much money just to put an "m" on the end. Until next time, keep asking good questions.