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Data-driven finance is becoming an essential function of CFOs and other business leaders who must leverage the power of technology to enhance company insights and strategy. Knowing how to use and customise your FP&A solutions and other analytic tools will depend on your company's goals.
As a result, figuring out where to start can be the biggest challenge, but thankfully we have many pioneers across multiple disciplines from whom we can draw inspiration.
Learn how seven business professionals are leading the charge on data-driven finance to help power business growth.
As the CFO of Current Health, John McLean understands that other metrics available in today's business environment greatly influence a company's financial state.
Current Health is a healthcare company with the goal of delivering patient care to people when they are away from the doctor's office. John pays special attention to data on customer satisfaction with respect to their wearable devices because he knows the cost of acquiring business. This means he monitors customer use and adherence to their products.
He believes that a strong focus on customer experience and satisfaction takes precedence over sales and growth numbers.
In the automotive industry, raw data can be overwhelming to consume and use for decision making because of the many points of the business--including vehicle purchase, maintenance, repairs, warranty programs and more.
David Horan is the VP of Finance for NextGear Capital and focuses on strategic planning. He uses an internal-risk scoring algorithm and data visualisation dashboards to streamline data for addressing core needs such as determining price points, accurately predicting business risks and finding opportunities in the wholesale automotive marketplace.
Kevin Ingram is the CFO of FM Global, a commercial property insurance company. Like most companies, profit is a top priority and indicator of success. However, he realises that the measure of profit requires a nuanced data approach.
The company relies on the combined ratio metric to account for overall profitability by factoring insured loss costs and expenses with the company's earned premium. They review this metric monthly and on three to five-year time horizons.
Source: PwC
Vena automates time-consuming financial close processes, e.g., data collection, account reconciliation and inter-company transactions.
After an extensive career as a data scientist, in 2020, John Collins became the Finance Chief of LivePerson, a brand-to-consumer messaging company. The company supports businesses by helping them measure the impact of their brand and manage customer signals as they happen.
In the short term, his focus is on addressing data connection issues that can offload, extract, transform and load (ETL) tasks for his finance team, most of which automate the reconciliation of accounts for things such as cash flow reporting.
His long-term mission for the company's system layer, however, is to expand the reach of its data. His hope is for people, regardless of skill sets, to be able to explore financial or other data of interest in a conversational way. In other words, they don't need to be data scientists to obtain and understand key business information.
As a self-described digital CFO, Ilan Cohen has led several different data projects in various applications. For example, he leveraged the access to data from open banking to develop a product that would help lending companies predict a loan applicant's likelihood of funding based on creditworthiness. This data-based approach resulted in a 300% increase in funded loans.
Additionally, Ilan used other data frameworks to help a company intervene in customer relationships to improve retention rates, noting the value of keeping existing customers over finding new ones.
Source: EBizCharge
Senior Financial Controller Edwin Ang for Foodpanda, a food delivery company, has seen its dashboard, which provides several data points for addressing profit and loss, as one of the company's greatest internal achievements.
The dashboard's real-time data provided insight into the effectiveness of user incentives, pricing, new customer reach and other metrics. The immediacy of the data allows the company to proactively make decisions instead of waiting for the month to close and relying on old data.
Interim CFO for Data and Analytics Ben Goodband at the London Stock Exchange Group uses cloud-based software and machine learning predictive analytics to increase the accuracy of forecasts on sales data.
He noted the adoption transition for this new technology system was challenging because of old processes but said the key was collaboration among team members in traditionally siloed aspects of the company, such as finance and data science. What's more, Ben believes the CFO is a necessary bridge between these groups through their ability to frame and contextualise questions about company strategy.
At Vena, we want to help you take your financial and operational analysis to the next level with our Complete Planning platform, which automatically connects disparate data from across your business so you can drive more agile and informed cross-functional decision making. We offer a wide range of solutions in FP&A, extended planning, close financial management and other business planning functions. Specifically, our products can improve your collection and use of data in the following ways:
Vena Complete Planning can benefit all industries, but we offer tailored pre-configured solutions for SaaS, banking, insurance, higher education, professional sports, healthcare and many others.
