What makes a world-class FP&A professional? Are self-service analytics important for FP&A? And can machine learning improve forecast accuracy? Read the new issue of the FP&A Trends Digest to discover the answers to these questions and more.

Most recently, I have been observing significant changes in business models in many organisations around the globe.  

Many FP&A Board members say the future can no longer be predicted based on only historical data since we are living in an environment of “Unknown Unknowns”. 

One of the most damaging management practices in business today is the individual bonus – “do this and get that”, a practice that now has also found its way into the public sector

One of my favorite sayings is – “if you say it enough times, it becomes true”. Within my organization, I’ve heard many sayings I know are simply not true that become believed.

May is over, Theresa fell too, and so too did the Index of Britain’s health.

Takeshi Murakami, Group Controller at Microsoft, shares an interesting case study on leveraging AI/ML in decision-making. Microsoft Finance enhanced forecast accuracy by using ML instead of the traditional bottom-up process.

FP&A teams are using AI to drive step changes in business performance, pushing their influence beyond their traditional areas of analyses.

As financial professionals we Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) professionals spend a lot of timing learning - learning the basics of accounting and finance, learning the business and learning about the impacts business decisions have on budgets and forecasts.

On 21st May 2019, 35 senior finance professionals gathered in the heart of Geneva for discussing “Power of FP&A Predictive Analytics”. Two days later there was a Zurich FP&A Board meeting which was devoted to the same subject.

The pressure of globalization and agile decision-making requires companies to improve their business modeling.  They must integrate big data in real-time, synthesize that data to identify causal relationships and value-drivers, and ultimately use the findings to make high-impact business decisions.