Reimagining the Finance Stack: Lucanet CTO Kevin Smith on Cloud, APIs, and AI-Native Innovation

In this exclusive interview with FF News, Kevin Smith, Lucanet’s CTO, shares his unique journey to his role from various engineering roles at Microsoft, to leading transformational tech and product strategies for finance-focused software. Here, in his current role as CTO of Lucanet, Smith discusses the company’s platform re-architecture and overall tech evolution. 

Overall, Smith stresses the need for a cloud-native, API-first architecture to evolve with the current needs a modern finance team expects.

For example, Smith mentions Lucanet’s move from monolithic software releases to smaller releases more frequently, not just to enable flexibility and responsiveness to customer requests, but also to shorten time-to-market while maximizing their iterative and collaborative workflows with customers.

By making APIs the modular building blocks of the platform, Lucanet enables the platform’s deployment to be portable, composable, compatible, extensible, and scalable. This not only keeps data secure as set forth in compliance processes by the C-suite but ultimately positions the company to help CFOs escape from the dreaded “Excel hell” as they seek to streamline and synthesize various processes across their organizations.

As Lucanet moves closer to an AI-native technology strategy, Smith makes an important distinction regarding the ability to avoid data silos with the goal of driving deep integration and consistent automation. For finance leaders living through a digital transformation now and looking to the future, Smith offers one key take-away: invest in true platforms with dependable and credible API stacks and scalability to fit your needs.