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Lorna Mason, Chief Financial Officer of IMPT
Photograph · Ní Riain

Lorna Mason — Chief Financial Officer, IMPT.

The job of a CFO has always been to translate ambition into numbers that hold. What changes, in a company operating across 195 countries on technology that is rewriting how value moves, is the complexity of the translation.

01

The role

Lorna Mason is the Chief Financial Officer of IMPT — a Dublin-headquartered travel, retail, and carbon platform that retires verified carbon credits on-chain for every transaction its customers make. The scale is real: approximately eight million properties, a live debit-card product on Mastercard and Visa rails, a retail layer spanning more than twenty thousand partner merchants, and a public funding milestone of $30 million raised in March 2025 to fund global expansion. The business operates across multiple tax jurisdictions, multiple asset classes, and a technology stack that includes both conventional payment infrastructure and Ethereum-based on-chain settlement.

Her role sits at the intersection of all of it.

02

What the role demands

A working view of five demanding domains

The conventional description of a CFO covers capital allocation, financial reporting, risk, and control. That description remains accurate but insufficient for a company like IMPT. The finance function here is required to hold a working view of:

  • Multi-jurisdiction indirect tax — Ireland VAT, the EU One-Stop Shop scheme, UK VAT for cross-border sales, US state economic nexus rules, import duty frameworks (DDP and DAP), DAC7 platform reporting obligations, and the liability implications of merchant-of-record status. These are not edge cases. They are the daily operating environment of a platform doing business in nearly every country on earth.
  • Token economics — IMPT runs a native token. Treating it correctly in treasury and on the balance sheet, navigating the evolving regulatory perimeter under MiCA and equivalent frameworks, and managing the audit implications of on-chain settlement are live questions that standard accounting frameworks were not written to answer.
  • Travel inventory economics — the cost structure of global hotel and travel distribution is unusual: content sourced through multiple channels, look-to-book ratios that determine API infrastructure cost, caching strategy, and a settlement cycle that differs structurally from standard retail.
  • Card and payments infrastructure — the IMPT Card introduces a separate cost architecture: programme fees, interchange economics, card-load costs, and the capital allocation question of how much of the float to hold versus recycle.
  • Carbon as an asset class — on-chain carbon credit retirement creates a new accounting object. Credits are purchased, held briefly, and retired permanently in the customer's name. The financial treatment — acquisition cost, recognition timing, retirement as a service delivery event — requires precise rules, not improvisation.

The synthesis of these streams is what makes the role genuinely difficult. Each one alone would fill a conventional finance department's agenda. Running them in parallel, against the backdrop of a funded growth phase and a global regulatory environment in motion, requires a finance function that is as much architect as auditor.

03

The thesis

The finance function is in the middle of a structural re-design — not a software upgrade, but a change in what the function is.

Three forces are driving it.

  • Blockchain and on-chain settlement

    These are replacing some of the plumbing of finance — the reconciliation, the settlement lag, the counterparty uncertainty — with cryptographic proof. IMPT retires carbon credits on Ethereum in the customer's name. The transaction is final, auditable without a third-party intermediary, and timestamped with precision no paper ledger ever achieved. For the CFO, this creates a new discipline: understanding the accounting treatment of on-chain assets, the custody architecture, and the audit requirements around proof-of-reserves — and doing so before the regulators have finished writing the rules.

  • Artificial intelligence

    AI is changing what the finance team can produce, and at what speed. Continuous forecasting becomes operationally feasible when models run against live data. Anomaly detection runs faster and more comprehensively than any manual sampling regime. The implication is not that the finance team shrinks; it is that it re-allocates its effort toward judgment, governance, and the questions AI cannot answer: what does this number mean, and what should we do about it.

  • Global commerce at scale

    A platform operating in 195 countries is subject to tax rules, currency risk, card network requirements, and platform reporting obligations that cannot be managed jurisdiction by jurisdiction with a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder. The finance function needs systems, not workarounds.

The synthesis of these three forces is the modern CFO's real agenda: to build a finance function that is controlled, automated where automation is reliable, and genuinely capable of operating at the pace and complexity of a global digital business.

04

Areas of focus

Four standing priorities.

  • Regulatory architecture

    MiCA compliance, VAT/OSS registration strategy, DAC7 reporting, cross-border duty configuration, and the evolving audit requirements around digital assets. Keeping the compliance posture ahead of the growth curve, not catching up to it.

  • Capital discipline

    The $30M raise in March 2025 funds a defined expansion programme. Allocating that capital against measurable milestones, maintaining the unit economics of each business line — travel, retail, carbon, card — and managing the burn rate against the growth targets is the core financial governance work of the current phase.

  • Finance function design

    How the team is structured, what it automates, where it spends human judgment, and what the controls architecture looks like as the business scales — including the technology stack and the data architecture that feeds it.

  • Token treasury

    Holding a native token on the balance sheet requires treasury policies that most finance teams have never written: valuation methodology, hedging approach, liquidity management, and the disclosure obligations under applicable frameworks. Getting this right, before it becomes urgent, is the kind of work that prevents a crisis rather than managing one.

05

The writing

Frameworks, written for practitioners

The essays on this site represent Lorna's thinking on the questions she considers most consequential for finance professionals working at the intersection of blockchain, AI, and global commerce. They are not forecasts. They are frameworks — the kind that have proven useful in practice, written for CFOs and senior finance professionals who are working through the same questions.

Read the writing

Lorna Mason is the Chief Financial Officer of IMPT. She is based in Dublin, Ireland.

Contact: lorna@impt.io