Introduction to the Author.

Joris Kersten (1980) is an independent consultant in Business Valuations and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) in medium sized transactions from the Netherlands.

In addition, Joris provides a lot of training in Business Valuation and Financial Modelling all over the world. He provides the training at leading (“bulge bracket”) Investment Banks, Corporates, Financial Institutions and Universities.

Introduction

If you grew up at a time of sci-fi movies like 2001 Space Odyssey or The Terminator you would have thought surely by 2020 these movies would be reality today.

I found 2 interesting blogs that both prove and disprove some of those very early predictions compared to where we are now in 2020.

19 December 2019 Written by Furqan Baig and Lance Rubin

Introduction to the co-author

Furqan Baig (“Furqan”) has historically been working in a range of different sectors from manufacturing and production of textiles, Real Estate Management and Investments as a business consultant and accountant.

Furqan, from the humble but bustling Dundee in Scotland he has recently become the managing director at Instruo Accountants and taken the leap to join the gig economy.

Introduction to the co-author

Matthew Bernath’s (“Matthew”) introduction can be found in a prior article using this link.

Mehdi Assadi – Moghadam (“Mehdi”) has 12 years of corporate finance transactions and an additional 10 years of data-driven application development experience.

Mehdi bridges the disciplines of corporate finance and data analytics and has held senior roles in corporate finance and business development for technology companies in the US and Canada.

Introduction to the co-author

Matthew is an entrepreneur, engineer, CFA® charterholder, trainer and Excel addict with a love for finance, data science, process optimisation, data visualisation and building businesses.

As a qualified engineer, Matthew has consulted to five of the largest South African banks and numerous corporates and parastatal. 

He runs regular, highly rated in-house and public Excel, VBA, financial modelling and dashboards training courses. With practical insight and a broad client base,

Matthew has never been rated less than 5 out of 5 for subject matter expertise.

17 October 2019 written by Ruby Liu and Lance Rubin

Introduction to the co-author

Before joining the KPMG Australia valuation team, Ruby has over 11 years of commercial and training experience from a statistics tutor at the University of Queensland, an authorised trainer for project finance courses, head of KPMG Sydney modelling team, to head of corporate finance at TransGrid.

Her experience covers financial model build and audit, corporate finance, project finance, and infrastructure valuation.

She is currently committed herself in infrastructure value enhancement and joined the KPMG Australia valuation team. She is keen to help her clients to further understand key value drivers of their assets and improve both value growth and dividend yield.

Introduction to the co-authors

Colin Human

My first introduction into financial modelling was in 1978 when I was the Group CEO of an aluminium company in SA. We were expanding the business both geographically and across the product range. This resulted in internal cash generation being insufficient to fund the growth.

Our banker (Conrad Strauss subsequently Chairman of Standard Bank) suggested that we needed to do some longer-term financial planning. Enter my friend Dave Theron.

Dave and his partner Dieter had formed a business called Decision Information (1973) to build financial models. In those years, there was no Lotus 123, or Excel and I seem to recall the use of products such as Quatro Pro and VisiCalc. Subsequently Dave embraced Lotus 123, and I think became the Lotus distributor in SA.

Introduction to the co-author

Cindy is a CPA and FP&A (Financial planning and analysis) practitioner with senior technical and leadership experience, mainly in Canada’s Energy sector.

She has worked at small private companies to larger multinational public companies in various capacities including supporting strategic initiatives, leading budgets and forecasts and implementing business improvement processes.

Introduction to the co-author

Craig lives in the US which is why he says he “spells modeling more efficiently ;) ” and the rest of the article is not written in the Queen’s English.

Craig is an IT executive with strength in systems, but he is no stranger to business and finance. His finance experience started working for a mortgage banker when US interest rates were double digits and debt instruments using the rule of 78s created negative amortization.

INTRODUCTION TO THE CO-AUTHOR

Lisa is a co-founder of a consulting firm that works with management teams to create confident decisions backed by data.  She uses financial modelling as a way to help her clients articulate their vision, bring colour through the numbers and break the strategy down into actionable steps.

Her company name, Effigy Consulting, is based around our belief that a financial model is a representation of the business:  The model is a safe space where you can test a business model and assumptions rather than destroying the actual business.

Typically in finance we have a particular type of cadence.

This cadence is largely consistent across different organisations no matter what the industry you support. We are likely to have some or all of these:

1. Monthly reporting,

2. Quarterly reporting and forecasting,

3. Half year reporting (if listed),

4. Annual statutory reporting and tax filing (we all have this one),

5. Annual budget process and

6. Longer range strategic planning for 3 to 5 years.

Now that's a pretty full dance card if you ask me.

So how do we keep up with all those requirements whilst making sure that we are not just hitting the deadlines but actually accelerating the value that we add to the business.

Read our latest blog for more insight without the big price tag attached.

Very few 😬 finance professionals have what it takes to build a good financial model, but if you use a few short steps you can find 👀 those diamonds👷 in the rough.

It's like changing someones title to Finance Business Partner and expect them 😁 to suddenly add value and build good models.

It doesn't work 👎that way, never will!

Without the right training and hiring you will just be running on the same tredmill 😵 with the same people with the same skills gap😱.

Being an advanced excel user📈(not that anyone can succintly explain exactly what that means) helps, but its certainly not the only criteria.☝

Forecasting does not guarantee you will be great at financial modelling. 😱

Just because you can drive a car doesn't mean you can be a Formula 1 race car driver. 🚗

Playing T20 cricket doesn't guarantee you will be a great test cricketer. 😁

The same goes for forecasting and financial modelling. 📊 📈 📉

#FinancialModelling #Finance #FutureofFinance

Is all this tech talk and Finance Transformation getting a bit much? 😵

Where do you start and stop? 🚦

There is so much on offer from RPA to Analytics to Modelling. 📈

Read my co-authored 🙌 article with Anders to learn more and demystify all the jargon and pick some practical solutions you can try. 👍

#finance #futureoffinance #analytics #Excel #cloud #digitization #FinancialModelling

I often get direct messages on LinkedIn from people asking me for either a job, career advice or helping them understand financial modelling and how do they apply for jobs in Australia, thinking Australia is immune to accountants losing jobs or unable to get them.

I wrote this blog to help the many that are lost in this fast evolving work force.

I became an accountant thinking I would have a job for life.  All companies need one,  so safe..right? 

Wrong. 

Many accountants are struggling to find jobs equivalent to their years of experience, if at all, in some ever increasing examples.

What I feared is now becoming fast a reality.

What I feared too for many years was my father's fight for life with cancer. He survived 32 years fighting until he lost his battle recently.

His legacy was helping many people, including strangers,  I hope with this post you too learn from an amazingly positive thinking individual.

I see lots of linkages in what he was able to navigate, similar to many accountants facing   challenging times of survival.

I hope too that the many cancer fighters and their families and friends learn too how our minds and outlook has such a big part to play in living.

3 years ago I stepped out of the corporate world and became, what I didn't realise at the time, a virtual CFO for Banjo (Fintech lender).

I don't really like the word VCFO but it's what we have for now so let's just roll with it. Probably a blog on its own.

This post is some more tips and tricks I learnt along the way and especially clearly proving the Power of One = Power of None.

I hope you can learn from my mistakes.

Over the past year I've met many finance professionals as part of our FOFM world tour and future of finance workshops.

Despite all the hype of digital finance transformation and the rise of analytics and advanced AI and ML there is one thing that still concerns me deeply about our ability to adopt change, innovation and better Excel skills.

I'm not even referring to adopting new tools and technologies (many of which will radically change our work today and are here now) but changing how we use our existing tools.

This is a technical architectural blog on the best system archicture for future of finance. It has to be Agile and yes, have a bit of Excel mixed in the middle.

Enjoy

This is a passionate topic of mine so join me in a jousting sessions with Christopher Argent and Andrew Codd on a video recorded podcast - Strength in the Numbers show.

It is guaranteed to be a blast !