Share with your CFO
Rydoo’s Aidana Zhakupbekova formally became the company’s Chief Operating and Financial Officer in January, formalizing a scope that had already expanded well beyond the traditional finance remit to include FP&A, business intelligence, revenue operations, and legal. The COFO structure shaped Rydoo’s recent acquisition of Semine, giving one executive cross-functional visibility at the integration seams where most deals actually break. Zhakupbekova argues scaling companies will adopt this model more broadly as the CFO’s strategic mandate keeps expanding.
What this means for your business
The relevant question for any scaling-company CFO is not whether the COFO title sounds appealing, but whether the scope already exists without the authority. Zhakupbekova’s point is that titles lagged reality at Rydoo by roughly a year, and that gap creates organizational friction: unclear ownership, slower decisions, and an operating picture that looks cleaner on the org chart than it runs in practice. If you’re already informally arbitrating between revenue operations, legal, and commercial teams, the structure just admits what’s true.
The Semine integration argument is the strongest case in the piece. M&A integration consistently fails at the boundary between finance and operations, not inside either function in isolation. When the executive overseeing financial modeling of a deal also owns the operational processes being merged, the feedback loops that normally require coordination across two C-suite offices compress into one decision point. That’s not a leadership style preference; it’s a structural speed advantage that compounds during the 90-day window when integrations are most fragile.
Zhakupbekova’s observation that human capital allocation is “just as important, and often harder to get right” than financial capital allocation is where this post gets genuinely interesting for CFOs who haven’t crossed the operational line yet. Traditional finance metrics tell you how money moves; they don’t surface whether your best operators are spending 60 percent of their time on reactive firefighting versus strategic priorities. That visibility gap is what an operational remit closes, and it’s also the thing AI-assisted workforce analytics tools are now selling against. If you’re evaluating those tools without operational accountability, you’re buying insight you can’t act on.
Based on reporting from How Rydoo’s CFO transitioned to a COFO role, originally published 2026-08-06 08:29:00.
