AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches reflects on a nearly 40-year finance career before retiring

Good morning. AT&T’s Pascal Desroches has spent his career thinking of his professional life as a series of chapters, each shaped, he says, “by change, challenge, and the opportunity to help navigate moments that mattered.”

On Dec. 31, he’ll close the AT&T chapter, retiring as CFO after more than five years in the role and nearly four decades in finance. Jennifer Biry, a longtime AT&T finance executive and most recently CFO and COO of McAfee, was named deputy CFO in July and will succeed Desroches on Jan. 1, 2027. There has been a wave of CFO transitions at Fortune 500 companies this year.

When I sat down with Desroches in New York City earlier this month, he explained that he stepped into the CFO role in 2021, during one of the most consequential moments in AT&T’s recent history. During his tenure, AT&T separated DirecTV, divested WarnerMedia, cut its dividend, and refocused on telecom infrastructure—5G and fiber.

“When you’re in the middle of making really hard decisions, you’re never quite sure how it’s going to work out,” Desroches told me. The lesson, he said, was about speed. AT&T sold DirecTV and its Time Warner assets early, before the Federal Reserve’s 2022 rate hikes impacted the value of those deals.

“Had we not done it as early as we did, proceeds would have been less, and the amount that we have to invest back into businesses would have been less,” he said. “That’s probably the thing I am most proud of. We didn’t hesitate.”

That willingness to make difficult decisions was paired with an emphasis on communication. Desroches singled out AT&T CEO John Stankey for communicating both the company’s wins and what it still needed to improve. He called communication “something that is underappreciated.” Stankey said in a recent LinkedIn post that Desroches has been an “exceptional partner and a principled leader.”

The leaders who shaped his career

Born in Haiti and raised in Queens, N.Y., after his family immigrated when he was five, Desroches grew up in a household where excelling in education was non-negotiable. He graduated from St. John’s University and earned his MBA at Columbia Business School.

“From where I started, it was really hard to envision something like this—it was never what I saw as a possibility,” Desroches said. “There weren’t a lot of people who looked like me in these jobs.” He hopes to pay that forward: “I really do hope that people look up and say, ‘Okay, you know what? I want........

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