Ready before the round opened.
When Northwind Pay set out to raise its Series C, the most important hire was the one that had to happen first. This is how the right CFO was in the chair before the market knew the seat was open.
CASE STUDY
· 5 MIN READ · Case studies / Payments
PAYMENTS · SERIES C
THE ROLE
Chief Financial Officer
SECTOR
Payments · Series C
REGION
United States
TIME TO OFFER
32 days
THE NETWORK
PREDICT ·
ENGAGE ·
DELIVER
Some appointments can wait for the right moment. This one had to arrive before it.
CHAPTER ONE · THE PRESSURE
A raise was coming, and the finance seat was empty.
Northwind Pay had spent three years turning a neat idea into serious infrastructure. Volume was climbing, the product was maturing, and the board could see the shape of a Series C on the horizon. There was just one problem sitting quietly at the centre of the plan.
The company needed a Chief Financial Officer, and not just any finance leader. It needed someone who had stood in front of institutional investors before, who understood payments economics in their bones, and who could be trusted to lead the raise rather than learn on the job during it.
The clock was the hard part. A brilliant CFO who arrived after the round opened would have been the wrong hire, however good. Timing was not a detail. It was the whole brief.
The Northwind Pay team in the months before the raise. Placeholder image.
“
We didn’t want a name on a longlist. We wanted the person who already understood where we were heading.
Alex Rivera · Chief Executive, Northwind Pay
CHAPTER TWO · THE APPROACH
The right person was already part of the story.
Long before the brief was written, PREDICT had picked up the signals: the funding activity in Northwind’s corner of payments, the hiring patterns that tend to precede a raise, the quiet sense that a finance leadership move was due. The search did not start from zero. It started from a head start.
The strongest candidate was not a stranger. Through ENGAGE , she had been part of Storm2’s world for years, met at sector roundtables, known through conversations that were never about a specific job. So the first approach was warm, and the discussion began from trust rather than a cold call at an awkward moment.
Alongside that relationship, DELIVER ran a full, structured search of the open market. The board saw the complete picture, weighed real alternatives, and moved forward knowing the choice was theirs to make with confidence.
THE APPOINTMENT
Dana Osei
Fifteen years in payments finance. Two scale-ups taken through growth rounds, one all the way to IPO. The kind of leader who reads a term sheet and a team in the same glance.
Payments economics
Institutional fundraising
Team builder
CHAPTER THREE · THE RESULT
Finance leadership was in place with room to spare.
The appointment closed in thirty-two days from brief to signed offer. Dana joined with enough runway to shape the financial narrative, build the data room and lead investor conversations from the front, not from behind.
The advantage was time, created by understanding the market before the mandate formally began. Northwind walked into its Series C with a CFO the board already trusted, and the round opened on the front foot.
32 days
Brief to signed offer
Ahead
Appointed before the round opened
Series C
Led from the front by the new CFO
"By the time we were in the room with investors, our CFO wasn't new. She was ours. That changed the tone of every conversation that followed."
Alex RiveraChief Executive Officer, Northwind Pay
