1144: Rewiring Finance for AI, Data, and Business Impact | Michael Bourque, CFO & EVP, , Convera

Jack Welch’s binder hit the floor before Michael Bourque 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.” 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.”