1183: Enter the Blockchain CFO: Reshaping Capital Markets | Macrina Kgil, CFO, Figure
CFO Macrina Gill of Figure discusses her career journey from engineering in Korea to PwC, Fortress Investment Group, and Springleaf Financial, before landing in blockchain-based capital markets. She explains how Figure uses blockchain technology to create a transparent, efficient marketplace for loan origination and trading. The conversation covers her views on AI in finance, blockchain adoption challenges, and her priorities as a newly public company CFO.
Summary
Macrina Gill, CFO of Figure, traces her career from an engineering background in Korea to PwC in Seoul and New York, where she worked with CFOs of private equity portfolio companies on complex financial transactions including IPOs and public debt raises. Her work helping Fortress Investment Group go public as the first alternative investment manager to do so sparked her passion for capital transactions. She then moved to Fortress's private equity team after proactively pitching the CFO on the value of having an internal finance resource for portfolio companies, crediting her father's entrepreneurial spirit for giving her the courage to advocate for herself.
At Springleaf Financial (now OneMain), Gill took on her first CFO role after being recruited by a portfolio company CEO she had been advising. Despite feeling underqualified, she led the company through significant growth from under $3 billion to $14 billion in loans over four years, executing major acquisitions including from Citigroup and merging with OneMain in a merger-of-equals. She emphasized that this period taught her about risk management, due diligence discipline, and the complexity of cultural integration during M&A.
Gill's exposure to blockchain began around 2012-2013, though she initially found the technology difficult to grasp. She later joined blockchain.com as CFO, where her strategic insight was to bring traditional finance governance, regulatory compliance, and risk management guardrails into a crypto company at a time when the industry was developing a poor reputation. She credits this disciplined approach with blockchain.com's continued survival and success among early crypto firms.
At Figure, founded in 2018, Gill describes the company as one of the few to successfully commercialize blockchain technology in capital markets. Figure operates a marketplace where loans are tokenized on a public blockchain, enabling transparency of ownership, standardized agreements across all buyers, and dramatically faster loan closing times — five days versus an industry average of 45 days. This eliminates problems like double pledging of loans and reduces reliance on expensive third-party validators. The company has expanded from HELOCs and mortgages into auto loans through a partnership with Agora Data.
On AI, Gill describes it as a key operational pillar at Figure, enabling her to run a finance team of approximately 30 people compared to 130 at Springleaf. The team is automating journal entries and underwriting processes using AI. She sees AI as a current efficiency driver but remains uncertain about its future role in higher-order strategic decision-making, such as autonomously drafting 10-K filings. She notes that AI and blockchain complement each other well due to their shared reliance on standardized data inputs.
Gill's CFO priorities for the next 12 months center on: (1) stabilizing Figure's narrative and investor messaging as a newly public company operating in an unfamiliar category; (2) disciplined capital allocation given the company's profitability and positive free cash flow; and (3) continuing to drive AI and automation transformation to free the team for more strategic work.
About this episode
<p>Macrina Kgil recalls a moment when she first encountered blockchain technology and “could not grasp whatever it was trying to do,” she tells us. Even with an engineering background, the concept felt distant and unclear. Yet that early confusion would later become a defining thread in her career.</p><p>Years later, when the opportunity arose to join Figure, Kgil recognized something different. The company had moved beyond theory—it was actively commercializing blockchain to reshape capital markets. That realization, she tells us, drew her in. What she saw was an intersection between consumer lending and blockchain innovation, two domains she had come to understand deeply through prior roles.</p><p>At Figure, that intersection takes form as a capital marketplace where loans can be originated and sold with greater speed and transparency. Traditional processes, she explains, required extensive validation and negotiation across multiple parties. By contrast, blockchain enables a standardized system where loan ownership is visible and singular—“you can only have one owner,” she tells us—reducing inefficiencies and risks like double pledging.</p><p>This progression—from uncertainty to conviction—mirrors Kgil’s broader strategic mindset. Rather than waiting for technologies to mature, she leans into complexity, learning from within. Her decision to engage with blockchain early reflects a willingness to navigate ambiguity in pursuit of long-term impact.</p><p>For Kgil, innovation is not simply about adopting new tools. It is about applying them in ways that improve outcomes—making financial systems faster, clearer, and ultimately more effective for those who depend on them.</p>
Key Insights
- Gill argues that blockchain adoption in financial services is fundamentally harder than past technology waves like cloud or smartphones because it directly disrupts core financial systems and cross-border transactions rather than peripheral lifestyle tools.
- Gill claims Figure reduces mortgage and HELOC closing times from an industry average of 45 days to just 5 days by using blockchain to standardize loan data and eliminate the need for third-party validators.
- Gill contends that putting loan ownership on a public blockchain solves the industry problem of double pledging — where the same loan is fraudulently sold to multiple parties — because each loan can only have a single verifiable owner at any time.
- Gill attributes blockchain.com's longevity in the volatile crypto industry specifically to the decision to proactively import traditional finance governance, regulatory compliance frameworks, and risk management practices before regulators mandated it.
- Gill describes her finance team at Figure as approximately 30 people compared to 130 at Springleaf, arguing that AI and automation make this dramatic reduction in headcount possible without sacrificing financial control.
- Gill argues that the CFO role at Figure is explicitly strategic rather than purely accounting-focused, citing cross-departmental investment decisions involving product, technology, capital markets, legal, and regulatory teams rather than finance alone.
- Gill identifies her uncertainty about AI as residing specifically in its future capacity for high-order strategic thinking — such as autonomously populating a 10-K — rather than in its current applications for repetitive tasks like journal entries and underwriting.
- Gill frames her unsolicited pitch to the Fortress CFO — proposing to serve as an internal finance resource for portfolio companies to reduce third-party advisory costs — as a deliberate career-shaping move inspired by her father's advice to demonstrate value and advocate for oneself.
Topics
Transcript
CFO Thought Leader is made possible by SAGE, high-performance finance software, and Intuit QuickBooks Bill Pay. Say goodbye to manual bill entry. Hello, this is Blake Grayson, CFO of DocuSign, and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1183. Because adoption in the past, like cloud technology or a phone, iPhone, BlackBerry, all of that didn't have anything to really do with the financial services industry. Those were more around like hardware, software, how you live. But then blockchain technology really gets to the core of financial systems and cross-border transactions. And I was thinking, this is going to be pretty hard. But do I want to be part of the innovation? Or do I…
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