In July 2019, the International FP&A Board held the 2nd Perth meeting where 35 senior finance practitioners shared their ideas about FP&A Analytical Transformation.

Collaboration is important, as “goes without saying”: “We must collaborate to solve this problem” or “They don’t collaborate!”, about an unsuccessful team. On one hand it is obvious what collaboration means – working together, duh! However, I came across a phrase which defines collaboration clearly and to the point.

What are the key features of a successful FP&A professional? What are the roles of an FP&A team? How do you achieve team synergy? These are the topics that were discussed at the recent FP&A Board meeting in Kuala Lumpur which was sponsored by Michael Page and AFP.

This article highlights some of the common cognitive biases that the author has come across in his career and how awareness and mitigation of these could lead to our becoming better finance and FP&A business partners.

The first FP&A Board in Shanghai was held this week and more than 30 FP&A professionals attended and discussed the latest trends and common challenges in Financial Planning and Analytics.

FP&A professionals have various desirable attributes. This article looks at these attributes from a diamond perspective – cut, colour, clarity and carat – plus culture.

Tokyo FP&A Board meeting was held on the 27th June 2019, and a lot of financial professionals got together to talk about “FP&A Analytical Transformation”, the main theme of the night.

A financial plan is a product used for guiding people’s actions toward the accumulation of wealth. As a product a financial plan is created from a variety of sources. One source used for creating a financial plan is finance.

In the video, Asif Khan, Global FP&A Lead at PayU, shares 5 steps of implementing ML for forecasting in his company and explains why PayU decided to embark on the journey.

Asif also covers the following questions:

• What architecture did the company follow to support the ML-based forecasting?
• How much time did it take to develop a prototype and what were the results?
• What are some lessons and recommendations?

Recently, I have encountered a lot of discussions within the finance (FP&A) professionals community about business partnering. The challenge in such discussions is to move from theoretical reasoning into practical execution.  In this article, I would like to talk about one possible area where cooperation between FP&A and Data management professionals can deliver mutually beneficial results.