INTHEBLACK November 2026 - Magazine - Page 33
Anne La Fontaine FCPA
has spent her career at the
forefront of finance technology
transformation.
Her guiding principle is to
use technology to strengthen
governance rather than simply
cut costs.
She sees the future CFO role as
less about mastering technology
and more about translating
complexity into clarity.
LEADERS AND INNOVATORS
Tech,
transformation
and tenacity
Anne La Fontaine FCPA has made a career at the intersection of finance,
technology and organisational change. What interests her now is not
the technology itself, but the new possibilities it creates for organisations
to do things differently.
Words Megan Breen
Photography Jarrod Barnes
WHEN ANNE LA FONTAINE FCPA
joined business automation software company
UiPath in 2019, she found herself confronting
a problem familiar to any finance team: how
to get better governance and visibility over
value-added tax and sales tax across a growing
volume of transactions. What was different
was the organisation she was working for.
UiPath was building its business around
robotic process automation, and La Fontaine
was its first finance hire in the Asia-Pacific
region. Instead of adding more people to work
through the transactions, she began exploring
whether bots could take on some of the
workload instead — reviewing information,
flagging potential issues, strengthening
governance and identifying where the
business might have a claim.
“It meant that I had to understand some
of the fundamentals around the particular
technology,” she says.
The experience is characteristic of the way
La Fontaine has approached technology
throughout her career. She does not start
intheblack.cpaaustralia.com.au
33
