At A Glance
The Future Is Fractional (TFIF) 2026 was a virtual conference hosted by Scrubbed on September 24, 2026. The program included an opening keynote, three panels, three industry spotlights on real estate, nonprofit and technology, and a closing conversation on building a finance team. Sixteen speakers and seven moderators took part, including CEOs, CFOs, fractional finance leaders, AI practitioners, and tax and insurance specialists. The day’s core idea came from Scrubbed CEO Vince De Leon: “Own what is core. Get access to the rest.” This article draws together the themes that ran across sessions: finance team structure, AI and human accountability, data and process foundations, permanent readiness, and early information and cash. It’s written for CFOs, controllers, CEOs and founders deciding how to structure their finance function.
For decades, building a finance function followed a simple rule. Need a capability, hire someone. Need more capacity, add headcount. Need deeper expertise, hire a specialist.
That rule is under strain. Strong controllers and technical accountants are still hard to find. AI can now do real work inside accounting roles. And demand on finance teams rises and falls with closes, audits, fundraising, acquisitions and downturns, while the payroll behind them stays fixed.
Those pressures ran through every conversation at The Future Is Fractional (TFIF) 2026, a virtual conference hosted on September 24, 2026, by Scrubbed, a professional services firm providing accounting, finance, and tax solutions. The event brought together CEOs, CFOs, fractional finance leaders, AI practitioners, and industry specialists across technology, non-profit, and real estate The speakers came from different seats, and they didn’t always agree. But the same three questions kept surfacing: What should a finance team own? What can it reliably access? And what still requires a person?
The Bigger Shift: Capability is Coming Apart from Headcount
In his opening keynote, Scrubbed CEO Vince De Leon named three forces arriving at once: talent is scarce, AI is here, and demand is becoming more variable. None is new on its own. Together, they weaken the assumption that capability and employment have to be the same thing.His suggested reframe: instead of starting with “Who do we need to hire?”, start with “What capability do we need, and what do we have access to?” Some capabilities belong inside the company. Some are needed only periodically. Others can come from specialists, global teams, fractional leaders or technology.
Fractional finance means accessing finance capability, such as a CFO, controller, or specialized accounting expertise, part time or for a specific need instead of through a full time hire. At TFIF 2026, it was framed as separating capability from headcount: owning what is core and accessing the rest.
He was careful about what that doesn’t mean. “A bad fractional hire is still a bad hire. A good full-time hire is still valuable.” The standard for judgment, ownership and accountability doesn’t change with the employment model.
He left the audience with three questions that the rest of the day kept answering in practice:
- What capability do I really need to own?
- What work should no longer require a person?
- Where am I carrying fixed capacity against variable demand?
Finance Team Structure: What to Own and What to Access
A hybrid finance team combines in-house staff with outside capability such as fractional leaders, offshore accounting teams, specialists and AI tools. At TFIF 2026, speakers from very different organizations drew the line between the two in similar places.| Owned Layer (In-House) | Accessed Layer (Fractional, Outsourced or Specialist) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it depends on | Inside context, relationships, final accountability | Technical depth, periodic intensity, scalable volume |
| Examples raised at TFIF | Handling new vendors and unusual charges; grant accounting; reviewing reports; approving AI-assisted work | Routine transaction booking; fractional CFO leadership; merger and scaling support; cost segregation, tax credit and insurance expertise |
| Typical role of people | Review, interpret, decide | Produce, execute, advise |
The owned layer tends to be about context and relationships. Ottavio Siani, a fractional CFO who also runs an eight-location coffee business, described the split in his own company. His on-site finance person handles anything new, like an unfamiliar vendor or an unusual charge, while an offshore team handles routine booking. The in-house role shifts, in his words, to “You will be reviewing this report. You will not be producing the report.”
Costa John, speaking on nonprofit finance, drew the line at the grant accountant, a role built on relationships with program leaders and funders that may not translate if outsourced. He also flagged a common mistake: hiring a fractional CFO for strategic work while the books still don’t close cleanly. The CFO gets pulled back into bookkeeping, which he called “the most expensive way to solve the wrong problem.”
The accessed layer tends to be about depth or intensity. Naita Saechao Chialvo, a fractional CFO who works with nonprofits and social enterprises, described keeping a core internal team and flexing in outside expertise for mergers, scaling or strategic initiatives that internal teams, and often budgets, aren’t built for. The real estate panel made the same point about specialists in cost segregation, tax credits and insurance: the experts “fill out your dashboard, and then the owner gets to make decisions.”
Stage changes the answer, and speakers read it differently. Thar Casey, CEO of AmberSemi, described a progression from bookkeeper to in-house accountant to fractional CFO once fundraising begins, with in-house leadership eventually needed because investors want institutional knowledge that stays. Others were less sure the flexible layer has to shrink. Marcus Guerro, President of Guerro Enterprises, described an interim placement scoped for two or three months that was still in place five years later. Siani said he had yet to see, at the small and mid-sized companies he works with, a hybrid model that outgrows its third-party resource. The two tend to grow together. Eric Valle, Director of Partnerships at Aduro Advisors, described a lean version of that model: “You don’t need to build an entire finance team, you kind of just need one controller and have that person manage out a team.”
The shared conclusion wasn’t that one model wins. It was that team structure is now a decision made capability by capability, rather than a default.
The Flexible Layer Only Works When it’s Integrated
Access doesn’t come free. Guerro distinguished relationship-based partners from transactional staffing, and firms whose consultants are trained employees with managers behind them from individual contractors working alone. Siani asks prospective accounting partners how many clients each accountant carries (four or five is a good answer; 20 is a warning sign) and whether the team knows his industry. He sets communication rules early and spends the first months showing in-house staff that outside support is there to lighten an overloaded plate, not to replace them.AI in Finance is Changing the Work, and Accountability stays with a Person
No session framed AI as a story about eliminating roles. The consistent message was that AI is changing what those roles consist of.The gains described were specific. Dawn Hatch, founding partner and CEO of an AI-native accounting firm, pointed to transaction coding at volume, document extraction, first-pass reconciliation review and narrative drafting that gets “about 90% of the way there.” Her less obvious point: AI lets a team review 100% of transactions instead of a sample, so quality improves along with speed. Siani said that across a nine-month engagement rebuilding a client’s finance function, he “didn’t type a single formula into Excel.” He structured and quality-checked the models Claude built instead.
The same speakers were blunt about limits. Blaze O’Byrne, whose company builds AI agents for CPA tax workflows, said the work “shouldn’t be fully handed off to AI today.” Hatch put it more directly: “the reviewer has to own the output, regardless of what is creating the draft.” Siani, who has been hired to clean up after clients adopted tools promising fully automated accounting, advised skepticism toward any such promise. Rusty Canada, co-founder of Ternpoint Solutions, said it “should scare companies” to picture an agent acting in the accounting system without oversight. Session moderator Kendrick Kho, Scrubbed’s Chief AI Officer, added that products branded as an “AI accountant” or “AI chief of staff” can quietly write the human review step out of the process.
This connects to a principle De Leon carried from his years as a CTO: “Technology should remove the work. It should not remove the value.” If AI saves three hours and those hours fill with more of the same work, productivity rises. If they go toward understanding the business or making better decisions, the role itself changes. Kho described that shift in accounts payable, where people move from document capture toward vendor work and analysis.
AI in Finance is Changing the Work, and Accountability stays with a Person
Banning AI tools doesn’t stop their use, Canada noted; it pushes staff toward personal accounts. Kho shared anecdotes of mid-market companies without a ChatGPT business plan discovering 80–90% organic adoption anyway. The practices speakers recommended instead:| Practice | What It Means | Raised By |
|---|---|---|
| Classify the data, not the tool | Tier data as public or anonymized, client-identifying and regulated, so people know what can go where | Hatch |
| Keep an approved tools list with a fast path | Vet training terms, retention and sub-processors quickly; slow approvals push people around the rules | Hatch |
| Provide enterprise tools | Give staff an enterprise AI account with limited access rather than leaving them to personal ones | Canada, O'Byrne |
| Surface Exceptions | Route uncertain or unusual items to a person’s attention instead of asking them to recheck everything | O'Byrne |
| Name the approver | Put a named person on every sign-off, with an audit trail | O'Byrne, Hatch |
| Check with a second model | Use a separate AI to look for errors in the first one’s output | O'Byrne |
| Run Evaluations | Test workflows against known cases, and retest after any model or prompt change | Hatch |
The Foundation Comes Before the AI
If one idea ran through every AI discussion, it was that AI amplifies whatever it sits on.Hatch said pilots succeed when a documented process exists before the AI arrives and stall when it doesn’t. Otherwise, “you’re just making confusion faster.” Asked how she would spend a hypothetical $500,000 technology budget, she said AI would come last, after core systems, data hygiene and senior reviewers. Skipping those steps, she said, is “buying the faster way to wrong.”Not everyone ordered it that way. O’Byrne’s first move would be to put an enterprise version of ChatGPT or Claude in staff hands, then invest in cybersecurity. Canada would start with the systems stack and outside guidance. The disagreement was about sequence, not about whether the foundation matters.
Abdul Wahab Zafar, SVP of Finance at Studycast, made the case from the systems side. Reliable financial data starts upstream: customer, contract and billing data need a common key tying them together. That’s why, in his view, AI makes finance both easier and harder. Reconciliations and reporting get faster, but deeper analysis breaks down when data from different systems doesn’t line up. He also argued that 90–95% data alignment is often more cost-effective than chasing the last 5%.
Simplicity was a recurring defense. Zafar urged teams to fully use the systems they already have before buying new ones. Costa John advised growing nonprofits to start with the lightest accounting system that works. Satoshi Steimetz, CFO of Playworks, supplied the counterweight: across 16 regions and 12 departments, a spreadsheet budget is no longer possible. The right system depends on scale.
Readiness is a Permanent Operating State
Several sessions arrived at the same view of readiness for audits, fundraising, acquisitions and shocks: it’s a standing condition, not a project that starts when a deal appears.Casey described fielding three inbound acquisition inquiries while raising money and knowing his company wasn’t clean enough to respond. His advice: “readiness, readiness, readiness, be ready, always be ready.” Guerro framed the cost. Companies that save a few thousand dollars a year by under-investing in finance can lose millions in valuation when the books aren’t ready for diligence. Asked when a company should start preparing its back office for a possible acquisition, Zafar answered, “as of yesterday.”
The real estate panel added a planning version. Blake Peters, founder of Peters Specialty Tax Services, said incentives such as R&D credits and energy efficiency deductions are often “looked at a little too late in the process,” once a project is well underway. Geraldine Serrano, Director of Specialty Tax Group, LLC described an owner-builder who missed tax benefits because the cost segregation conversation happened after construction decisions were made. Alex Gilmete, a commercial property and casualty advisor at USI Insurance Services, warned that a $10 million building could now cost $14 million to $15 million to replace, leaving policies written to old values short.
Readiness, in these conversations, wasn’t about perfection. It was about not being surprised by questions that were always going to be asked.
Finance earns Trust by Being Early
The planning and industry sessions shared a view of what makes finance valuable to leadership. It isn’t precision. It’s timing.Steimetz described a budget miss at Playworks that surfaced in the final quarter of the fiscal year, too late to respond. “The size of the miss mattered less than how late it surfaced.” The organization now reviews revenue weekly, refreshes the full forecast monthly and updates a five-year projection quarterly. His conclusion about boards: “Confidence is not built on being right, it’s built on being early with the information.”
Cash was the common measure. Playworks holds enough cash for six months of operating expenses, which Steimetz said lets it absorb bad news and act on opportunities. Costa John suggested every nonprofit board packet show one number: how many days of cash expenses unrestricted, uncommitted reserves can cover. Zafar holds customer payment terms firm while negotiating longer vendor terms, keeping a cushion between cash in and cash out.
Information also has to lead somewhere. Danielle Morris, a succession and governance strategist, argued that finance teams need predictive indicators because financial statements are lagging ones. Costa John said boards should get the forward look, its impact, and a range of choices, not a single option to approve or reject.
This loops back to structure. A team consumed by closing the books has little time for forward-looking work, which is one reason speakers kept separating compliance capacity from strategic capacity.
A Diagnostic For Finance Leaders: 8 questions
TFIF didn’t produce a universal answer, and its speakers would be the first to say it shouldn’t. Scrubbed CFO Aira Pineda offered a better starting point as she closed Session 1: “You don’t have to build the whole engine yourselves, you just have to know it well enough to know when something’s off, and who to call when it is.” Knowing your function that well starts with a few questions to work through with your team:- Where is our finance team stretched? By volume, complexity or timing? Each points to a different fix.
- Which capabilities depend on the context only an insider has? Those are strong candidates to own.
- Where are we carrying fixed capacity for variable demand? Think technical accounting during an audit, FP&A during planning, or CFO-level work during a raise.
- Is our process documented well enough to automate? If not, that’s the first project, before any AI tool.
- Who signs off on AI-assisted work, and do they know what they’re checking?
- If an acquirer or auditor called tomorrow, would we trust our own data?
- How early does our board hear about a change in assumptions?
- If we bring in outside support, how will it work with our team, and who owns that relationship?
The Org Chart is Becoming a Design Decision
The last generation of finance teams was built by accumulation: a new need, a new hire. TFIF 2026 suggested the next will be built by design. Leaders will decide which capabilities to own, which to access, which work technology should take on, and where a person’s judgment has to stay.That’s harder than hiring by default. It takes knowing your processes well enough to redesign them, your data well enough to trust it, and your business well enough to tell what’s core from what isn’t. The speakers who had done that work described finance functions that held up better under pressure and gave leadership answers sooner.
For most finance leaders, the question is no longer whether this shift is coming. It’s which part of their own function to rethink first.
Who Spoke at TFIF 2026
| Session | Moderator | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote: The Future Is Fractional | Vince De Leon, CEO, Scrubbed | |
| Session 1: How We Actually Built It | Aira Pineda, CFO, Scrubbed | Thar Casey, CEO, AmberSemi; Eric Valle, Director of Partnerships, Aduro Advisors; Marcus Guerro, President, Guerro Enterprises |
| Session 2: AI in the Finance Function | Kendrick Kho, Chief AI Officer | Rusty Canada, Partner and Co-founder, Ternpoint Solutions; Dawn Hatch, Founding Partner and CEO, Matax; Blaze O’Byrne, Co-founder, Byron |
| Session 3: Planning Through Permanent Uncertainty | Darwin Pangilinan, Chief Client Officer, Scrubbed | Satoshi Steimetz, CFO, Playworks; Naita Saechao Chialvo, Fractional CFOO and Consultant; Danielle Morris, Founder and Chief Strategist, Triconal |
| Session 4: Real Estate Spotlight | Ejie De Jesus, Partner, Scrubbed | Geraldine Serrano, Director, Specialty Tax Group; Alex Gilmete, Commercial Property and Casualty Advisor, USI Insurance Services; Blake Peters, Founder and Principal, Peters Specialty Tax Services |
| Session 4: Nonprofit Spotlight | Laurence Ruelo, Director of Business Development, Scrubbed | Costa John, CAO, CFO Assignments |
| Session 4: Technology Spotlight | Anthony John Rogador, Accounting Advisory Services Manager, Scrubbed | Abdul Wahab Zafar, MBA, CMA, SVP of Finance, Studycast |
| Session 5: Building Your Finance Team | Debra Andrews, CMO, Scrubbed | Ottavio Siani, Founder, Triangle Coffee, and Fractional CFO |
Key Takeaways:
- Capability is separating from headcount. Talent scarcity, AI and uneven demand are pushing leaders to ask what they need to own and what they can reliably access, rather than who to hire next.
- Own what depends on context; access what depends on depth or intensity. Roles built on inside knowledge and relationships tend to stay in-house. Specialized or periodic work is a common candidate for fractional or outside support.
- AI changes the work, not the accountability. Speakers described real gains in coding, extraction, reconciliation review and drafting, and agreed that a named person must review and own the output.
- Foundations come first. Documented processes and clean, connected data decide how much AI can deliver.
- Readiness and early information build trust. Audit, fundraising and deal readiness is a standing condition, and boards value being told early over being told precisely.
