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Anthony Latino, CPA, is the Controller at VaynerX, a global company combining creative, media, consulting, commerce, and production across its multiple agencies to deliver a modern marketing approach.
During our interview, Anthony shared why audit remains a vital springboard to a successful career in finance, how his role at VaynerX has evolved, and the importance of automated processes being underpinned with appropriate guardrails.
Foundational Debits, Credits, and Early Mentors
Nick Levine: To kick things off, what first led you down the path of getting into accounting and finance? It’s not most people’s dream to become an accountant. I say that as a fellow accountant myself.
Anthony Latino: I was in school in Baltimore, Maryland, at Loyola College (now Loyola University), and had a general interest in the business world, the market, and the many career options that finance could become. Talking with early mentors and relationships I valued, I always asked what would get me the best foundation for long-term success. It kept coming back to the foundation of debits and credits and a full understanding of the financial playbook that accounting brought.
Public Accounting as a Career Accelerant
Nick Levine: After college, you spent seven years inside PwC. Why do you think audit is still such a powerful launchpad for a career in finance?
Anthony Latino: Audit accelerates your learning because you are immediately dropped into the inner workings of so many different businesses and projects. Because of that exposure, the audit discipline allows you to develop your accounting framework and foundation.
For me, the best part (and one that helped to develop my financial acumen) was the ability to gain exposure to many different financial roles and processes across a range of companies in a short period of time. It’s like drinking from a fire hose! Not only do you learn how to interpret 10-K and 10-Q reports or navigate financial controls, but you also see it across different company sizes and shapes. You gain a better sense of how to apply that when you jump to the industry side.
Nick Levine: Seven years is a long time to stick around in public accounting when a lot of people don’t. What kept you there that long, and what eventually made you decide to leave?
Anthony Latino: It was twofold. First, like most people who stick around that long, I loved the people and the culture. The networking alone was unmatched, across your team, the client, and the firm.
Early on, I was genuinely evaluating the partner track and was confident I could succeed at it. The role kept improving with more mentorship, managing teams, and exposure to new clients. But as the world changed, including on the regulatory side of audit, I became very interested in wanting to build something more from the ground up. Leaving as an experienced manager allowed me to feel ready to take that leap of faith.
The Leap to VaynerX: Trading Corporate Structure for High Growth
Nick Levine: After building that rock-solid foundation at PwC, you decided to transition out of the corporate compliance environment. What informed your choice to join a high-growth, innovative, and creative media agency like VaynerX?
Anthony Latino: After seven years in public accounting, you understand the financial framework deeply, but you want to see how those numbers drive business strategy and key decisions. Corporate roles give you a strong structural box, but stepping into a fast-moving, high-growth global agency like VaynerX allows you to take off the “auditor hat” and apply data and process directly to a company trying to operate at scale.
Nick Levine: For those outside the media world, it can be hard to track what an agency actually does day-to-day. How do you describe VaynerX as an organization, and how has your own role evolved since making that switch?
Anthony Latino: VaynerX is at the center of the modern agency, built to seamlessly deliver our clients’ advertising, marketing, and branding needs. We support our clients across multiple platforms and campaign types, ensuring that we handle strategy, creative, media, and increasingly production, too. When I first joined, my mandate was relatively broad, helping navigate our rapid commercial growth cycles and keeping a handle on financial systems across day-to-day, weekly, and monthly operations.
Over time, my role shifted from generalist oversight to building our back-office and financial infrastructure. We’ve gone from five to ten generalists to specialized pillars, including Treasury, FP&A, and commercial finance. The finance team has grown to about 70 people worldwide. What started as a US-based team is now truly global. I also strongly believe the role of a CFO has shifted toward technology and reporting in a way that didn’t exist when I first got here, and definitely not when my career first started. It’s increasingly about automation and insights, not just oversight.
From Manual Entry to Meaningful Automation
Nick Levine: That brings me nicely to the next section on automation. How do you approach workflow modernization, and can you share an example of how you’ve automated a manual process?
Anthony Latino: The simplest example is our accounts payable process, which is a multi-step process as we continue to evolve. We were initially very reliant on people manually entering large volumes of data from vendor bills. Someone would get a PDF invoice via email, go into NetSuite, and type it in line by line. That got especially painful with our media invoicing, where a single campaign could generate a huge volume of transactions.
The easy win was taking that vendor data, pulled from Excel-based formats we’d get via email, and turning it into a readable, writable CSV file for upload straight into the ERP to generate the vendor bill record. That one change kicked off a lot more downstream automation around payment and reconciliation, leveraging new systems (and partners) and continuing to enhance our process.
Nick Levine: That makes total sense for standardizing your baseline. Looking ahead, where do you see the next big frontier for automation strategy?
Anthony Latino: We aim to introduce additional tools to further streamline and refine the way our systems push and pull data with each other so that we can eliminate more manual work. For a lot of our people, the endpoint of their role shouldn’t be manual entry; it needs to become quality control, reviewing rather than doing.
I’d add a caution, though: I’m wary of “real-time” when it comes to financial data. It’s tempting to just layer a dashboard on top of a data set and call it real-time, but you need to define your actual reporting rhythm and cadence, with the right cutoffs and controls in place. Without this, people may make decisions based on a data set with the wrong assumptions baked in.
If you’ve enjoyed Anthony’s career journey from a Big Four accountant to leading the strategy at a high-growth agency, check out the other articles in our Next Gen Finance Leaders series.
