Weekly signal index

The Finance Leader Index is a weekly one-number read for Mercury’s GTM team. The front page opens on a single count - how many US companies of 1-500 people named a new finance leader in the most recent 30-day window - with the direction of change against the 30 days before it, the paragraph that makes the number defensible, and a wall of the companies behind it. A second page carries the full method, the exact search parameters, the caveats, and every move in the index as a paged table; clicking a row opens the person and the job change they made.

Trayo supplied every company and every person on the screen. Two trayo_search_job_changes title searches ran with no company named - one for Head of Finance and VP Finance, one for Chief Financial Officer and CFO - each narrowed by destinationFilters to a US-headquartered company Trayo records at 1-500 employees, over the full 90-day detection window. They returned 23 and 25 moves; one person matched both, leaving 47 distinct moves with real names, LinkedIn photos, former employers, titles and detection dates. 23 of them fall in the 30 days to 2026-09-24 against 15 in the 30 days before, which is the headline: +53%. The 23 destination companies and their 38 source companies were then imported with trayo_import_accounts and matched to companies in the background; that match is where the logos come from, and all 23 companies in the logo wall resolved to a domain.

Three things to be plain about. Trayo’s feed had detected no job change after 2026-09-24 when this ran, so the windows end there rather than at today’s date - counting to today would have set a full window against a two-thirds-empty one, and the comparison would have read as a fall. Both searches came back sampled: true, meaning Trayo read part of a large title index, so these are counts of what Trayo saw rather than of every finance hire in the United States; the same sampling applies to both windows, which is what keeps the direction readable even though the level is a floor. And the base is small - 15 in the prior window - so one or two moves move the percentage several points. The Slack post and the Salesforce push are stubs: both open a preview toast naming what would have been sent, and nothing leaves the machine. Mercury’s palette went through the kit’s own brand module, which read both colours, took #010101 as the primary and left #272734 out as a grey; in dark mode it fills the primary with near-white #e8e8e8 because #010101 has no hue, and the page and cards take the derived dark slate rather than Trayo’s cream.