We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Oludayo Odunfa. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Oludayo below.

Hi Oludayo, thanks for joining us today. Have you ever had an amazing boss, mentor or leader leading you? Can you us a story or anecdote that helps illustrate why this person was such a great leader and the impact they had on you or their team?

Over the course of my career I’ve worked for bosses who ran the gamut from forgettable to life-changing. The difference, I’ve learned, has nothing to do with titles, credentials, or even brilliance. It’s genuine care— the instinct to invest in someone else’s success as fiercely as your own.

Caring leaders are the ones who text in the middle of a deadline just to ask how you’re holding up, who slip into the back row of your wedding even after a 12-hour day, and who insist on charting a path that matches your ambitions, not merely the team’s targets. They’re the “bosses’ bosses” I study and try to emulate.

My gold-standard example is Tope, a manager I worked with during my consulting days at PwC. Yes, she was razor-sharp, impeccably composed, and spoke with the kind of poise that could hush a boardroom. But what set her apart was the way she turned mentorship into a full-contact sport.

When I reached a crossroads—contemplating an unconventional move that might derail the tidy trajectory everyone expected—Tope sat me down and helped blueprint a strategy bold enough for my aspirations yet grounded enough to execute. She opened doors I hadn’t even knocked on, lobbied for me in rooms I’d never entered, and refused to let the plan stall until every milestone was crossed.

Here’s the thing: I wasn’t an exception. That was simply her operating system. For Tope, the true metric of professional success was the number of careers she could elevate.

More than a decade later, her example still guides how I show up for colleagues and protégés. Titles change and industries evolve, but authentic care remains the timeless currency of leadership. If I can pass along even a fraction of Tope’s impact, I’ll consider my own legacy well underway.

Oludayo, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Numbers have always felt like a second language to me. Growing up in Lagos, my parents would spread household receipts across the dinner table, and I’d turn balancing the family budget into a puzzle. That early fascination carried me through dual accounting designations—ACCA and CPA—and into my first professional chapter at PwC. Seven years in audit taught me that every balance-sheet line hides a story, but it also revealed something more important: I didn’t just want to *report* the numbers; I wanted to transform how they were produced and, ultimately, how they powered decision-making.

So I pivoted. An MBA from Ivey Business School gave me the strategic toolkit to complement my technical grounding, and I moved into roles that married finance, technology, and change leadership. Today I serve as Director of Finance Strategy & Transformation for a North American insurer, steering global programs that reimagine everything from close-to-report cycles to AI-driven forecasting. My work ranges from end-to-end finance transformation—aligning people, processes, and cloud platforms—to hands-on technology enablement. The goal is always the same: turn finance from a backward-looking scorekeeper into the organization’s strategic nerve center.

The problems I solve are painfully familiar to most CFOs: month-end closes that drag on for weeks, forecasts built on fragile spreadsheets, and data trapped in silos that stifle timely insight. What sets my approach apart is a blend of cross-disciplinary fluency—equal comfort in conversations with accountants, data engineers, and C-suite strategists—and a leadership style rooted in genuine care. Tools matter, but people adopt tools, and I take pride in converting skeptics into champions.

The achievements that mean the most to me aren’t only the operational wins, though. I’m proud of being named a Top-30 global performer in an ACCA exam and of serving as a judge for Ivey’s Scotiabank International Case Competition, but the real legacy is the dozen former team members who now occupy senior finance roles because I invested in their growth as fiercely as I tracked project KPIs. That philosophy traces back to a mentor who once told me the true metric of leadership is how many careers you can elevate—wisdom I try to pay forward daily.

Looking ahead, I’m convinced the modern finance function can be both a well-oiled machine and a crucible for strategic insight—provided it marries cloud technology with a culture of continuous learning. My mission is to build that bridge for organizations and to share what I learn through articles, keynote talks, and one-on-one mentorship. If you’re looking to future-proof your finance function—or your own career—I’d love to be part of that journey.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Seven years into a comfortable audit career at PwC, I found myself in a boardroom watching a frustrated CFO flip through binders of spotless—but stale—financial statements. The numbers were flawless; the insight was missing. In that moment I realized I’d become a superb scorekeeper in a game I no longer wanted to watch from the sidelines. I wanted to redesign the stadium.

So I hit pause on the traditional “senior-manager-to-partner” conveyor belt, packed two suitcases, and moved my family from Lagos to Canada for an MBA at Ivey. Friends thought I was crazy—why trade a clear promotion path for student debt and winter? But the pivot gave me the strategic toolkit and global perspective I needed to reinvent myself as a finance-transformation leader.

Within a year of graduating I was steering my first technology overhaul for a North American bank, swapping month-end marathons for cloud dashboards and teaching analysts to think like product managers. The experience proved to me that the real magic happens when finance stops reporting yesterday and starts shaping tomorrow.

The lesson? Careers aren’t train tracks; they’re sailboats. When the wind changes—whether it’s technology, geography, or personal purpose—you can cling to the old heading or pivot the sails and catch a new breeze. I’ve been in the world of finance strategy and technology ever since, and I’ve never regretted making the switch.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Great teams don’t run on caffeine and quarterly bonuses alone—they run on meaning. Whenever I inherit a new group, the first thing I do is translate the task list into a story that matters. A budget report becomes the compass that keeps families in affordable homes, a three-day sprint to debug an app becomes the difference between small businesses opening their doors or closing them. When people see a clear line from their laptop to someone’s life, even routine work feels electric.

Once that purpose is clear, I step back and let the team chart its own course. Adults hate being micromanaged, so I focus on outcomes and give them the freedom to choose the route—whether that’s brainstorming over coffee at 7 a.m. or knocking out ideas from a kitchen table at midnight. Autonomy sparks creativity, but it also breeds accountability; when people design the plan, they’re far more invested in making it succeed.

Morale also depends on momentum, so learning is non-negotiable. I weave growth into the fabric of the week: a quick “lunch-and-learn” led by a teammate, a mini-course on a new tool, or a chance to shadow a different department. Nothing lifts spirits like the sense that tomorrow you’ll be sharper than you were today. That philosophy scales across generations, too: give seasoned hands the mentoring roles they crave, let new graduates run with fresh ideas, and everyone sees a future that fits.

Celebrations keep the engine humming. A Slack shout-out for a clever solution or a five-second fist-bump in the hallway costs nothing yet pays off in loyalty. And when things do go sideways—as they inevitably will—I drag the misfire into daylight, focus on the lesson, and move on. Transparency turns stumbles into stepping-stones.