Trintech Chief Partner Officer: Adding "Flavor" to Core KPIs
At Trintech, an AI-driven financial close solutions provider, Chief Partner Officer Mekaela Davis believes that partner officers and CFOs must stay aligned. She notes that while partnership-related KPIs remain within traditional frameworks, the partner officer perspective adds "new flavor" to them, emphasizing the need to break down partners' actual contributions within standard metrics like sales pipelines to reduce uncertainty in external partnerships.
Partnerships are a key pathway for enterprises to achieve substantial growth or create value. At Trintech, a provider of AI-driven financial close solutions, the focus of Mekaela Davis, Chief Partner Officer (CPO), is precisely on this.
This means she needs to sit at the same table as other core business leaders such as the CFO, and help these leaders understand the unique perspective that an expert focused on partnerships can bring to the review of key performance indicators (KPIs). Davis said in an interview that this does not mean KPIs around partnerships necessarily differ from traditional metrics, but rather that a role like the CPO brings "perhaps a little new flavor" to them.
"The CFO and CPO really need to stay in sync on this, because we have to ensure the CFO understands: 'Why do we view these things from a slightly different angle, and what are the nuances?'" she said.
Diving into the details
According to her LinkedIn profile, Davis has served as CPO of the financial close solutions provider, headquartered in Plano, Texas, since 2024. Before joining Trintech as Vice President of Global Consulting in 2021, she spent eight years at Grant Thornton, holding roles including Managing Director, and previously worked at several SaaS industry companies, including MarketSphere Consulting, an Oracle business practice acquired by Grant Thornton, and Data Systems International.
The Chief Partner Officer role is one of the fastest-growing positions in the modern C-suite. Hockey Stick Advisory found in a 2025 blog post that the growth rate of this role has outpaced that of positions such as Chief Marketing Officer or Chief Revenue Officer.
Companies including Microsoft and Dell Technologies have appointed executives to CPO roles in recent years. According to their respective LinkedIn profiles, Denise Millard has served as CPO at Dell since 2024, while Nicole Dezen took on the newly created CPO role at Microsoft in 2022.
Davis said that an executive focused on partnerships or a CPO "almost feels like running a small company within the company." "We feel that way because it is crucial to grasp the KPIs and core priorities of other functional leaders within the organization. We have to understand those," she added.
However, finance leaders also need to understand how the CPO views KPIs within the enterprise. While standard KPIs may not necessarily change, "the 'flavor' does differ slightly when we talk about partnerships," Davis said. "What we really want to do is drill down more deeply into some of the standard KPIs we track in contexts like the sales function."
For example, when discussing the sales pipeline, "from the partner perspective, we would analyze very specifically how that pipeline was generated," she said. "Was it entirely sourced by partners? Or merely influenced by partners? If influenced by partners, then how exactly was it influenced?"
Easing partnership pain points
Ensuring open dialogue between the CPO and CFO helps alleviate many of the pain points or pressures that companies may face when advancing new strategic initiatives or decisions. For example, on the CFO side, the unpredictability of external partners or third parties is often unsettling, "so when you have a seasoned partner executive by your side who has truly mastered this pattern recognition over the years, it makes the CFO's job much less stressful," Davis said.
Additionally, on the partner side, open communication with finance leaders is essential to ensuring partnerships continue to run smoothly. Many CFOs today are taking on responsibility for procurement decisions within the company: software company G2 found in a 2024 report that 79% of finance leaders have final say in software purchasing.
Often, the tools being considered are solutions provided by the company's partners, "so whenever possible, we really want to ensure that the vendors and solutions we choose are ones we already have partnerships with, rather than their competitors," Davis said. "So, maintaining a very close relationship with the CFO helps you get into that conversation faster, allowing you to identify risks and avoid major missteps that, frankly, could quickly ruin a partnership."