1144: Rewiring Finance for AI, Data, and Business Impact | Michael Bourque, CFO, Convera
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Jack Welch’s binder hit the floor before Michael Borque had time to react. At just 23, he sat in a Honeywell acquisition review meeting as the “keeper of the numbers,” rifling through a binder he knew didn’t contain the EPS detail Welch demanded. When the answer didn’t come, Welch “swept his binder off the table, threw it across the room, and got up and left,” Bourque tells us. The moment stayed with him—not only the need to anticipate every question, but the feeling of “how I was treated,” a lesson he carried forward.
That early scene captures the intensity of Bourque’s 15 years at GE, where he rotated every four months on the corporate audit staff, learned to understand a business model quickly, and moved across countries from Mexico to Italy to Canada. He tells us those experiences became “a massive accelerator” but also showed him what he did not want: senior lives “lived 90 days at a time.”
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Leaving GE led him into Ocwen, where regulatory pressure mounted immediately. Advisers warned him to “run for the hills,” yet he stayed, tracking cash daily and absorbing public blows from the New York DFS. The experience, he tells us, taught him “how to navigate a crisis and try to keep your cool.”
At LendingHome (later Kiavi), he applied that calm to redesign the business around two customer cohorts—first-timers and professionals doing “eight or more” flips a year—and anchored decisions in unit economics. That discipline would shape his leadership at Convera, where he now steers a global payments network and pushes teams to adopt AI tools that “help them… get clarity on that next operational step.”
CFOTL: Tell us about Convera. What is the company about, and what are its offerings?
Bourque: Convera is a global leader in commercial payments, specifically focused on cross-border payments. The business has been around, in one form or another, for more than 30 years. Its recent formation came from a private-equity carve-out of Western Union Business Solutions back in 2022, and it took about 18 months to get that deal closed.
The idea was to take a business with a rich risk, compliance, and regulatory history—serving tens of thousands of customers around the world—and bring a more modern technology approach across the firm. That foundation lets us continue helping small businesses, in particular, navigate the cross-border payments landscape.
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Today we serve what we call our core B2B clients, typically more SMBs than large corporates, though we do have some of those as well. A simple example of a use case would be a manufacturer in the UK with a supplier in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe who needs to send or receive funds across currencies. We sit in the middle and help facilitate that.
We also have a segment focused on financial institutions. A tier-two or tier-three bank or a credit union in the Western world can use Convera’s rails on a white-label basis to help its clients move money globally. Another segment supports education payments—international students from all over the world paying universities in Australia, Canada, the UK, or the U.S.
Roughly 70% of our business comes from these core payment flows. The remaining 30% centers on risk-management offerings, where we provide hedging solutions and related products, assuming there’s a business need and the customer is suitable.
Overall, we have about 2,000 employees across 31 offices in 200 countries or territories. It’s a truly global business—and with this year’s tariff shifts, trade-flow questions, inflation, and currency swings, it has been an especially dynamic place to operate.
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Convera | www.convera.com | Seattle, WA
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