The CFO Code: Perfios’ Prashant Mahagaonkar On Balancing Founder Ambition With Financial Discipline

Getting an acquisition across the finish line can take months of negotiations, due diligence, paperwork and financial scrutiny. But closing the deal is only half the battle. The real challenge comes when you integrate the business, unlock synergies, and deliver the value that justified the deal in the first place.

Much of this heavy lifting falls on CFOs, who are expected to go beyond balancing the books to evaluate acquisition targets, assess financial risks, structure deals and ensure the business derives long-term value from the transaction.

This is part of a broader shift in the CFO’s role, from financial oversight to strategic decision-making. Whether determining how to extract value from an acquisition or assessing if an investment in AI will deliver adequate returns, finance leaders are making critical capital-allocation decisions while ensuring the business stays on track to meet its growth ambitions.

At Perfios, a B2B SaaS fintech serving more than 1,000 financial institutions across multiple geographies, Group CFO Prashant Mahagaonkar sits at the heart of these decisions. 

With more than 25 years of experience across traditional finance, multinational companies, M&A and venture-backed businesses, Mahagaonkar’s career has given him a front-row seat to the changing nature of the finance function. 

For the concluding edition of The CFO Code series, Inc42 caught up with Mahagaonkar to discuss his experiences and learnings from decades of building finance systems, integrating acquisitions and working alongside founders and CEOs.

Speaking with Inc42, Mahagaonkar broke down how his role has evolved, what he has learnt from acquisitions, why CFOs need to question technology spending, and what he believes will define the next generation of finance leaders.

Walking The Tightrope Between Risk and Reward

Mahagaonkar’s career began in 1999 at Tata Motors, but he soon realised traditional audit and compliance work wasn’t where he wanted to build his career.

In 2022, Mahagaonkar joined Givaudan India, a Swiss flavour and fragrance major where he got his first real exposure to what a well-built financial system looked like. For Mahagaonkar, the experience became an education in how large organisations build systems and roll them out across markets.

Mahagaonkar then shifted to Essilor India, a spectacle lens manufacturing company, where he was exposed to acquisitions and moved from traditional finance to a more M&A- and business-oriented role. 

He later joined venture-backed Amba Research, where he raised capital, worked with investors across geographies and eventually managed an exit. Moody’s acquired the company. Mahagaonkar moved to CitiusTech, where he became the company’s first CFO and worked closely with the founder-CEO to scale revenue from roughly $60 Mn to $500 Mn. 

“Working with the founders to scale the team was a great learning experience for me. I realised how different a founder’s mindset is from that of a professional CEO. Their risk-taking appetite is very different, and they bring perspectives that a traditional professional may find difficult to act on,” said Mahagaonkar. 

As Mahagaonkar puts it, the experience taught him how to keep the company business-friendly while also protecting it financially. According to him, while founders may be willing to offer more flexibility to win a customer, the finance leader’s job is to ensure the company is adequately protected. 

“But the solution was not always to take the most conservative position. Instead, the finance team had to establish a playbook that clearly defined what it would agree to and where it would draw the line,” said Mahagaonkar. 

He added that finding “the art of the possible” within an accepted compliance framework is one of the most important skills he has developed over time.

Making Acquisitions Work Beyond The Deal

Mahagaonkar’s M&A experience proved valuable when he joined Perfios in July 2025. By then, the company had completed three acquisitions, and his mandate was to integrate the acquired businesses into a cohesive organisation.

Perfios acquired an eFRM (Enterprise Fraud Risk Management) business, a segment it had not historically operated in. In another acquisition, it added a collections company, adjacent to its existing loan origination, approval, and credit underwriting businesses. Each acquisition required a different integration strategy.

Mahagaonkar shared that his task was to determine what should be fully integrated into Perfios, what should retain its independence and how each business could contribute to the broader ecosystem. All this had to be done while ensuring that every entity remained compliant with the applicable regulatory and reporting requirements.

Smaller companies often lack the same level of compliance infrastructure as a private equity-backed or larger organisation. “Therefore, the integration process involved bringing acquired businesses up to Perfios’ standards across areas such as information security, contracts, insurance, risk and statutory compliance,” the CFO said.

However, amid all the finance and integration of compliance functions, what generally gets understated and undermined is the integration of people and cultures. 

Mahagaonkar argues that people integration is also a finance responsibility because acquisitions can easily leave redundant roles and overlapping functions in place.

“You need to put it together and be part of those discussions to help and make sure that we build that one organisation which is required,” he said.

AI Spend Under CFO’s Scanner

The expanding role of the CFO is particularly evident in capital allocation, where Mahagaonkar believes AI has fundamentally changed how technology investments are evaluated and prioritised.

“Today, product life cycles have shortened so much that companies may have just six months, rather than two years, to get ahead of competitors before they develop similar products,” he said.

For the CFO, this means asking harder questions about whether the company is deploying its capital into the right assets and whether its innovation engine is moving quickly enough to match the pace of competitors. 

But in this chase, increasing AI spend may seem like the obvious choice for almost every problem, and Mahagaonkar believes companies need to look before they leap. 

“Not every problem needs AI, particularly when a simple automation can do the job,” Mahagaonkar said.

At Perfios, the company has built an ROI matrix around its usage that monitors productivity gains, potential changes in hiring requirements and whether a particular use case should use AI at all, instead of automation or machine learning. 

Becoming The CEO’s Co-Pilot

With the changing relationship between finance and technology, Mahagaonkar believes the CFO has moved from being a backroom player to becoming a co-pilot to the CEO or founder. He also mentioned that being a co-pilot to the CEO does not mean becoming the de facto CEO.

Mahagaonkar estimates that around 40% of a CFO’s decisions today require forward-looking judgement rather than relying solely on historical financial data. 

When asked about the skill sets that will matter most for the next generation of CFOs, he said, “We must accept that today’s young people often know more than we do. They have greater access to information, and they can process and apply it much faster. The real test for the next generation of leaders, not just CFOs, will be managing such high-calibre talent, helping them find meaning in their work and creating an environment where they can succeed.”

According to Mahagaonkar, finance leaders of the past could succeed by knowing the numbers better than everyone else, but CFOs of the future will have to understand the numbers, the business, the technology and, increasingly, the people behind the decisions.

[Edited By Shishir Parasher]

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