JFJavier D. FernandezSenior Finance Executive
ES
Chief Financial Officer · Payments · International
Javier D. Fernandez

Twenty-five years
closing the books.Now the books
close themselves.

I have built finance functions from zero at a $170M payments company, owned a $150M international P&L at Nestlé, and taken a month-end close from thirty days to fifteen. The difference now is that reconciliations, data entry, and the close checklist can run—and I spend my hours where a CFO is actually worth paying for: judgment, capital, and the call nobody else will make.

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Not a buzz word

The manual half of finance is over.
I lead the other half—the one that creates value.

Most finance leaders still spend their best people on work that no longer requires a person. I moved that work to AI and automation, and I did it as the executive accountable for the numbers—not as an experiment on the side. The controls got tighter, not looser, because the exceptions finally became visible.

↻Bank reconciliation, line by line.→Matched automatically. I review only the exceptions.
▤Closing reports compiled and formatted manually.→Extracted, coded, and posted without typing.
□Thirty-day month-end close.→Fifteen days, then faster—the checklist runs itself.
⌁Annual planning cycles built in static files.→A live rolling model. Planning cycles stop being events.
◎Board reporting assembled by hand.→Drafted from the ledger. I edit the argument, not the formatting.
Javier reviewing financial plans

Operational finance · Strategic planning · Executive judgment

Track record
$150MInternational P&L owned at Nestlé USA
$11BAnnual processing volume, Total Merchant Services
$2M+Annual cost reduction delivered
Weeks→DaysMonth-end close transformed from weeks to days
12%Average sales growth while lowering trade spend
3%→10%Transaction-volume growth at Western Union
“A CFO who is still doing the reconciliation is a very expensive bookkeeper. The job is the decision, and the decision needs the numbers to already be true.”

Javier D. Fernandez

What I take on

Chief Financial Officer

Full ownership of finance for companies between $20M and $200M—reporting, capital, risk, the board relationship, and the team that runs it.

Build the finance function

For companies that grew past their bookkeeping: GAAP compliance, reporting structure, AP/AR, payroll, purchasing and the controls that should already exist.

AI-assisted finance operations

Move reconciliation, document capture, recurring reporting and the close checklist onto automation—designed by the person accountable for the numbers.

Payments & merchant acquiring

Sponsor-bank and processor negotiation, residual and pricing audits, risk frameworks, and the economics of an ISO.

Looking for a finance executive who has already made this shift?

Open to CFO, VP Finance and fractional engagements—remote or across Southern California.

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