This April, we have opened a new chapter of the International FP&A Board in San Francisco. This is our 16th chapter globally and the 3rd one in North America (after New York and Boston).

The Board gathered in a beautiful Spaces venue in the financial district of San Francisco. 30 senior finance practitioners, representatives of leading organizations including  Visa, Nielsen, Uber, Equinix, BNP Paribas, Hitachi, Wells Fargo, Pearson, Thermo Fisher, etc., discussed the latest trends in modern FP&A.

The meeting agenda was the following:

• Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A). Key definitions and developments.
• Interactive discussion on latest trends in analytics, planning, modelling and systems.
• FP&A Analytics Maturity Model. Group work.
• Conclusions and recommendations.

In the heart of the Silicon Valley, FP&A is evolving rapidly and the interest in FP&A best practices is very high.

Once again, the traditional budgeting culture was named as the biggest barrier to modern FP&A. Other big challenges are outdated FP&A systems and lack of investments in modern tools.

The biggest FP&A trends are the following:

• driver-based planning, 
• deriving insights from the ocean of data,
• ability to play scenarios quickly, 
• using automation and AI/ML.

You can find more articles covering these trends on our website. 

We are very grateful to our global partners and sponsors CCH® Tagetik and Spaces / The Regus Group for their great support.