Going Against the Curve

Working Capital: Fuel for Growing Growth Corporates 

No longer just a buffer or a plug. Growth Corporates (AKA middle-market firms) are now using working capital solutions to fuel growth, manage risk, and move fast when opportunity knocks.

That statement is proven over and over again in this year’s 2025-2026 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, which includes responses from nearly 1,500 CFOs and Treasurers in 23 countries and across 12 industry sectors.

The report is dynamic in more ways than one.  And by that I mean it’s not just a static set of charts nestled between a lot of words. 

In the spirit of efficiency, this year’s Index is an efficient set of deliverables that gives CFOs and Treasurers their own playbooks for getting the max performance from their working capital strategies, and the bankers they lean on to help them. 

Dive into the full dynamic Index, where CFOs and Treasurers can personalize the report for their region and industry to see how they and their peers are performing. 

Let me know what you find. 

Do You Speak Agent? 

Duolingo for agentic commerce. That’s what merchants and marketplaces need if they want to be discovered, says Mirakl’s Scott Eckert. 

It was a very interesting discussion with someone who has seen the innovation movie from the retailers lens.

Take a look and then help handicap how long it might take for the biggest merchants and marketplaces to become fluent.

GenAI Adoption: Not a Curve, but a Steep Line.

The latest of my NEXT newsletters discusses how GenAI broke the dependencies that once dictated how quickly innovation was created, used and adopted. So instead of a gradual slope, it is a straight line up and to the right – in just three short years.

For consumers, GenAI adoption is frictionless and personal. And accessible. All anyone needs is a smartphone and an app, or a PC and a browser. 

For businesses, GenAI is an organizational transformation moving at warp speed, with increasing pressure from consumers (who are getting pretty good at using it) to have the businesses they work with (and at) to be good at it too.

For innovation, it will accelerate time to outcomes and steepen the adoption curves for so many new and exciting breakthrough ideas. 

How do you see it?

Customer-Centric Culture. 

I had a very candid conversation with Judy Jensen and Trevor Marshall about what it takes to operate a modern payments business, now that customer lifetime value has become a daily metric

This topic really resonated with me because I recently had to send documentation of a dispute, by paper, to my issuer. As in printing out paper, getting an envelope, buying a stamp and going to the post office, circa 1980.   

I closed the discussion by asking the following: when it comes to driving lifetime customer value, what matters most when building for What's Next? Is it the tech that powers it? The data that drives decisioning or the culture of the partnership that drives the working relationship?

What do you think they said? 

For Judy & Trevor’s replies, watch the whole roundtable here.