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Billtrust CFO Mark Shifke likes to label himself an \u201caccidental CFO\u201d\u2014a tag that a number of our guests have appropriated from time to time when faced with explaining a past filled with less-than-traditional career experience.

However, in the case of Shifke, the term arguably has little to do with career experience, for Billtrust\u2019s CFO spent nearly a decade on Wall Street before entering the C-suite. Instead, Shifke uses the appellation to help to reveal the pivotal role that a single phone call came to play in his finance career.

Back in 2000\u2014near the beginning of Shifke\u2019s Wall Street career and the end of the market frenzy known as the dotcom bubble\u2014Shifke took a phone call from a CEO founder whom he had met through a personal acquaintance. Just as the CEO didn\u2019t hesitate to ask Shifke to invest in his struggling company, Shifke didn\u2019t dither when it came to coming up with some figurative cash.

\u201cI made a handshake agreement with him over the phone,\u201d explains Shifke, who notes that the investment did require some visibility into the company\u2019s sales pipeline. \xa0

\u201cI told him, \u2018If you are successful at selling into this environment and you are able to generate revenue, then on the back of that, I will raise capital\u2019\u2014and I did so,\u201d recalls Shifke, who raised a "family and friends" round of funds that allowed him to become a central angel investor in the company Green Dot Corp., a fintech start-up and pioneer of prepaid debit cards. \xa0

Fast-forward 11 years, and Shifke is no longer just a Green Dot investor but a board member, when he opts out of a managing director role at JPMorgan Chase to join Green Dot in a senior corporate development role.\xa0

\u201cIt\u2019s one thing to invest in a business and it\u2019s another to advise a business, but it\u2019s quite another thing to go operate it\u2014and I had never operated one,\u201d comments Shifke, who would enter the CFO office at Green Dot a few years later in 2015.

In the end, Shifke says, the \u201caccidental CFO\u201d label still fits because he originally had zero aspirations to be a CFO and now-midsize fintech firm Green Dot simply became the means to scratch his operations itch. \xa0\xa0

Says Shifke: \u201cThere was an opportunity to either enhance my position as a shareholder or materially harm it\u2014but this tended to play out to the positive.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0

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