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.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are already impacting our everyday lives but it is also becoming a valuable tool for FP&A. The technology is evolving at an incredibly rapid paste and it is challenging to keep track of all trends and innovations.

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.

It is difficult to think of another business process that is as universally detested as annual budgeting. The list of complaints will be familiar to anyone who has run a budget process or has been subjected to one…and that probably means everyone reading this article.

For progressive and competitive organizations of all sizes, accessing smarter, leaner and faster information to drive a successful business strategy can only be achieved with real-time insights into their customer’s needs and buying behaviours.

Heuristics are rules of thumb.  Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer believes heuristics are a necessary part of an individual’s decision making process.  Heuristics can be used in FP&A as a way to make decisions about how organizations earn revenues and incur expenses. Here is a heuristic that I use to make decisions about how organizations earn revenues:

The dusk of Management Taylorism is the dawn for the strategic CxO. Constant cooperation, communication and deep business process knowledge are the answer to digitalization, data lakes and disruptive threats. The opportunity for Finance is to extend resource allocation and financial planning towards becoming the trusted strategic advisor beyond the mere financials. How can FP&A support this achievement? 

Business Partnering, the very essence of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), continues to prove one of the most challenging aspects of the FP&A professional’s role.