1140: The EQ Playbook for Post-Merger Reality | Niels Boon, CFO, Cint

The moment that stayed with him began at a marketplace where sales dashboards showed 40% gross margin—yet finance closed the books at 20%, Boon tells us. The gap, he discovered, lived in the shadows: rebates, discounts, and “free” services that never touched operational metrics. He manually traced economics to the client level and found margins many considered healthy were thin—or nonexistent. One customer representing roughly 30% of revenue delivered 0% gross margin, Boon tells us.

That scene explains his broader path. He started in London investment banking “working on deals 24/7,” then spent five years at McKinsey across Europe on corporate finance and strategy. At Zalando he founded Strategic Finance to ready the company for IPO—tightening the P&L and working capital. Hypergrowth taught him that unchecked hiring breeds overlap and data drift, so ownership and reporting must evolve with scale, Boon tells us.

He gravitates to complexity. At his current company—public since 2021 and combined with a U.S. competitor bought for “about a billion USD”—systems sprawl and legacy platforms made accuracy difficult while two-thirds of revenue came from the U.S., across 130 countries with people in 14, Boon tells us. He cut legal entities from 28 to 14, moved to one ERP, and shortened the monthly close from “15 days” to “five or six days,” Boon tells us. Two efficiency programs, a 120 million refinancing, and a rights issue 60% oversubscribed rebuilt credibility.

Back at the marketplace, he installed a pricing director reporting to finance, killed blanket rebates, and tied commissions to net revenue. Within 12 months, margin rose from 20% to 40%, Boon tells us—proof that disciplined economics, not dashboards, drive durable turnarounds.