Workiva's CFO on Growth and ESG Data
Originally published on Fortune
When entering college, Jill Klindt, CFO, SVP, and treasurer at Workiva Inc., a software-as-a-service company, thought she'd have a career maintaining the health of animals, not as a finance leader.
“I was going to be a vet,” Klindt told me. “I really love animals. But as a vet, you have to have a little bit of a hardened heart. And I couldn’t quite get there.” So, Klindt pivoted toward business, earning a degree in accounting from Iowa State University. She'd eventually lead in an era of digitization and work on environmental, social, and corporate governance solutions. “I do think that I'm perfectly suited for the CFO role at this company because I know it so well,” Klindt says.
This past spring, Workiva announced the addition of an ESG solution on its platform to automate a collection of data to build a strategy within ESG frameworks. As there’s more regulation around ESG reporting, Klindt foresees, in the long term, a standardized report companies can complete on Workiva’s platform, she says. And XBRL, Extensible Business Reporting Language, is “probably likely to become a component of these reports in the long term,” she says. “We have XBRL tagging technology directly in our app,” Klindt says. “So, we're well-aligned to provide that if that ends up being the way that the market is going.”
ESG is an area where Klindt will represent her company. “We are the first SaaS company to join the United Nation's Global Compact CFO Taskforce,” she says. “What we really hope to do is to drive that conversation around technology and how technology can solve some of those challenges that companies are seeing around ESG regulations.” The task ahead for Klindt will include working with fellow members to examine quantitative and qualitative methods for ESG measurement and come up with best practices that will support the UN's overall sustainable development goals, she says.
