Small businesses would not normally have a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for the company. On paper the CFO would probably be the business owner or the Chief Executive Officer or CEO.

A CFO would be employed when the CEO has a poor or bad credit history and is unable obtain unsecured business lines of credit.

The CFO’s strong credit profile is presented to the banks and lending institutions as application for business card cards in the name of the company. These credit cards will come from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and other lenders.

As these are corporate lines of credit, they do not appear on the CFO’s personal credit history.

The CFO can be a friend, relative, business associate or any trusted individual of the CEO. As it’s the CFO credit report that is used to obtain the unsecured lines of credit, they are issued in his or her name.

In our program the first lines issued are a Bank of America Platinum Visa. The Platinum Visa and checks will arrive with the CFO and company name on them. At this point only the CFO is authorized to use them.

This would be a good time for the CEO to separate personal credit from business credit card debt. Small business owners tend to use to personal assets to launch the start up. With the availability of the credit lines, the CEO can start transferring the company’s debt from the personal side into the corporation. This places the credit card debt where it belongs, in the corporation, and will probably improve the CEO’s personal credit score.