Some years ago, Maurice Kuykendoll was simply an attendee at the AFROTECH™ Conference. Now in its eighth year, he will approach the annual tech affair as an official speaker on the Executive Stage.

It’s not lost on him that when he attended the conference, he was responsible for global expense management at insurance company Prudential, with one of its largest expenses being technology. During the transformation, he notes how vital the event was to his leadership development.

“I was transforming my team simultaneously, so it was an area of development for me,” Kuykendoll said in an interview with AFROTECH™. “So, a couple of days at this conference, where there’s Black people, and they know all about technology, I was like, ‘I’ll go and see if this can be one of the things I put on my calendar every year to make sure that I am developing this essential part of what’s going on in the world.’”

After sitting in many rooms alongside founders and talking to them about their latest products and innovations, he knew it was a place where he and his Prudential team needed to be.

In his role today, Kuykendoll, CFO, Prudential Group Insurance, aims to share how Prudential is keeping pace with tech innovations. Finance leaders have a unique role when it comes to planning, investing, deploying, and leveraging technology.

“My role is to allocate the company’s cash and capital to ensure that our business performs optimally,” he explained. “Simply said, I make sure we make money with the money we can get from corporate. I also think it’s important in the role of CFO to be the chief storyteller, I call it, about our business because the people who impact our business aren’t finance people. They’re the people who are on the front lines, serving our customers every day, selling our products, and building our new systems. Everyone needs to understand how our business works so that they can contribute to the outcomes that we need.”

Kuykendoll’s No. 1 piece of advice to the future generations of tech enthusiasts and leaders is to not opt out of learning finance and accounting.

“What I see a lot of people do, who are innovators and who are technologists, is they opt out or they outsource the understanding of the financials,” he explained. “But that, to me, is very dangerous because all of the people who have money that founders want to get, or that technologists want to get investments from, or the profit pools that you want to go after so that your ideas can be most successful, all of those people speak finance and accounting. Alongside staying literate in digital and machine learning and AI, stay literate in how financials work.”

As someone who’s been at an insurance company for his entire career, Kuykendoll understands that the space he’s in doesn’t really look like a tech space, but he has also noticed that he consistently finds meaningful investments in technology. 

“I think it’s important to do the reverse of what I’m suggesting tech people do; I’m not doing my job as a finance person, as a head of expense, as a CFO, if I don’t understand one of the biggest things we’re spending our money on. That intellectual curiosity, combined with the business imperative, is why I spend so much time trying to keep abreast of what’s happening in the tech world.”

Along with Kuykendoll, other tech leaders from various walks of life will hit the Main and Executive stages to chat about everything from the future of digital transformation technology like VR/AR and artificial intelligence (AI) to content creation, the business of the music industry, and more.

Beyond the panels and discussions, attendees have networking opportunities and concerts to look forward to, as well as the chance to access exclusive lounges, curated receptions (based on ticket type), and more.

“AFROTECH™ is the only place, as far as I’m concerned, that brings together all the right people and content. I think it’s important that it’s both of those things,” Kuykendoll concluded. “It is a legitimate tech conference, but the unique challenges and opportunities of being Black in technology are also appropriately addressed. The people who are there, who are recruiting, know that it’s a place to get diverse talent. The people there who are presenting know that it’s a place where specifically Black people, but all kinds of people, gather around this topic, and in our country and our community, we’ve always needed spaces like that. I’m delighted that AFROTECH™ has become that space.”

The 2024 AFROTECH™ Conference will be held Nov. 13-16 in Houston, TX. The Main and Executive stages will return, but attendees have new stages and experiences to look forward to as well this year.