Netflix Names Accounting Chief as It Reins In Spending

Netflix has a new chief accountant, former Electronic Arts SVP of Finance Ken Barker, who starts June 27, according to a regulatory filing.

Barker, who takes over as the company’s Principal Accounting Officer from CFO Spencer Neuman, will report to Neumann and oversee Netflix’s ledger as it reevaluates its spending.

The new accounting boss comes to Netflix after 19 years at EA, where he was the interim CFO and Chief Accounting Officer before settling into his most recent role as the video game giant’s SVP of Finance. Before that, Barker was a finance executive at Sun Microsystems and an audit partner at Deloitte.

Barker arrives at Netflix as the company and the streaming market as a whole experiences some turbulence. Last quarter, Netflix revealed its first net loss of subscribers in over a decade and slowing revenue growth, which has pushed the company to conduct layoffs, ax upcoming planned series and reevaluate its business model.

In the company’s most recent earnings call, Neumann revealed that Netflix would pull back on some of its spend growth across its content and non-content spend. This is where Barker comes in, as his accounting expertise will help the company identify additional areas for cost savings and help Netflix balance its books as it tries to jump start slowing growth with an ad-supported streaming tier.

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