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.

Many commercial finance or FP&A professionals focus on getting the model right and not enough time considering the how people are going to react to the outcome. This blog sets out a few tips to navigate the politics. In the words of Oscar Wilde ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’.

Bjarte Bogsnes, Senior Advisor Performance Framework at Equinor (formerly Statoil) and Chairman Beyond Budgeting Roundtable, shares how Statoil has embraced the Beyond Budgeting principles to develop an “Ambition to Action Model”.

There are several key components in the FP&A role. The way profitability is analysed and used to improve the business results is one of them. 

Finance professionals can serve in a wide variety of areas within an organization. However, some of these areas have had high demands over the last few years, especially the demand for professionals with specific skill sets and experience in business and financial analysis, and data analytics.