The Physics of Wall Street by James Owen Weatherall is an interesting story about the influence of physics in finance.  FP&A practitioners can find material in this book to help them improve their work.  For me three areas of the book serve as meaningful reference material.

For quite some time CFOs and the finance community have been talking about transforming the finance function, becoming better business partners and focusing on the value-add, strategic activities. At the core of that transformation is FP&A, as activities like business planning, business unit strategy, investment allocation and predictive analytics become important to fulfil finance’s new, expanded position within the company.

Interview with founder of the International FP&A Board Larysa Melnychuk. The global trend for FP&A is surprisingly singular; apparently, we all want to know how to influence and predict our financial future. At the International FP&A Boards, professionals from all over are eagerly sharing and learning about how to get there.

A couple of weeks ago I joined the meeting of the Amsterdam FP&A Board where we discussed the subject of the FP&A analytical transformation. In the course of the meeting the participants mentioned their current main concerns, some of which such as Data ownership, Data quality, and Business Glossary (‘Speaking the same language’). This surprised me.