Jay de la Torre’s Post

That's when I rolled up my sleeves. We re-evaluated our processes, integrated new tech, and focused on data accuracy. The result? Our errors dropped by 90%, and we became a top-performing team. 📈 If you're looking to boost your finance function, remember: it's all about embracing change and continuous improvement. And hey, I'm here to help with that! Follow me on LinkedIn for further insights. 😊 #FinanceLeadership #CFOInsights #FinancialOptimization

We had a great conversation last week around the first of my “What tech do you use?" posts, focused on #AccountingTech. This week we'll tackle #FinanceTech & #LegalTech. We'll wrap it up next week w/ Ops & Infrastructure.   Our Finance Tech Stack: 📈 Planning, Reporting & Analysis - Planful: Shocker, right? 😉 The most robust and comprehensive FP&A and consolidation platform on the market, great UX, integrations, scalability. Simply the best combination of feature breadth and depth in the space. Fully automated close & reporting, granular, driver based planning, scenarios - you name it. Will be an AI winner. 💸 Sales Comp & Forecasting - Xactly Corp: Mess up #commissions as a Finance team and it takes years to rebuild that trust with your Sales team. I trust Xactly to get the job done. Flexible to handle complex plans, constant tweaks and one-off items like #SPIFFs. Love the document mgmt (route comp plans for signature) and self service for reps. 📊 BI - Microsoft Power BI: If a data source isn't in Planful and running through Planful Dashboards, we leverage Power BI for data viz.   Our Legal Tech Stack: 📑 Contract Lifecycle Mgmt - LinkSquares: AI-powered contract analytics and management capabilities, does the job it sets out to do and more. Has been powerful for our Legal team to identify and manage #risk, including on very old customer contracts. 💰 Cap Table Mgmt - Carta: I believe they will sort out the recent (troubling) drama. From a product POV I believe Carta is the best in this category. Many years of R&D have gone into building the features that companies with any level of cap table complexity need to self manage their equity programs. The web and phone apps are very solid for the biz users as well as admin. ✅ Privacy and Data Governance - OneTrust: Easy to use, wide array of privacy & data governance features. Strong threat hunting capabilities. Security has always been a massive priority for Planful and we've been a happy OneTrust customer for years. If you're underinvesting in this area as a tech company, get started now! What’s missing? Do you have some #CFOtech that you can’t live without? Agree/disagree with my assessment of these tools? Fire away in the comments.   #Finance #FPandA #Legaltech #Legal #techstack

What needs to change? According to a McKinsey report, RMs typically spend 60 to 70 percent of their time on non-revenue-generating activities amid rising regulatory and compliance obligations. One reason is that most still work with legacy IT systems or even spreadsheets. The other reason is that financial advisors manually handling client portfolios might spend an average of six hours per client on data entry and form processing without even transitioning into data analysis—a significant drain on time and resources. Here is the read on how Trisk tackle the problem https://lnkd.in/gTaehByZ

They'd be a fool not to see how valuable your data team is if you write like this. - It’s time for you to write a quarterly update to your boss. - It’s time to present the project executive sponsor with an update. - It’s time to present the client with a final read-out at the close of the project. - It’s time to pitch the board on an initiative that requires a large financial investment. … You can write about your input. “I billed this many hours” “I hired 5 new team members” … You can write about your outputs. “I delivered a new web application” “We built a new database for reporting” … Or you can write about outcomes. “We decreased customer onboarding time by 35%” “We improved the accuracy end of month financial reporting by 3%” … The first two require the reader to connect lots of dots to get to value. The value of your work is only visible in the third one. Connect the dots for your reader. Don’t make them try to figure out the value you created by giving them a list of inputs and outputs.

Once in awhile, we get a corporate jargon that we didn't know we desperately needed. For me, "gray work" from Quickbase is one such. For years, most (perhaps, all?) of us have suffered non-productive work which Quickbase summarizes into a sort of death spiral as (a) disconnected systems (b) data fragmentation (c) lost productivity (d) employee frustration and (e) delays big and small, with each leading invariably into the next (more about these on the link) Now, I am not sure if the answer to all of these is more technology (Quickbase's low code/no code or otherwise), you be the judge. Having gone through a number of these challenges over decades, I've often wondered where do these emanate from in the first place. What is the source, the root cause, the trigger that launches a hundred meandering emails back and forth, with more people added in cc on each turn, which eventually turn into some sort of corporate village festival? One aspect is that Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are just those, the default way to work. These help companies scale since everyone (at least, on paper) know exactly what to do. But in the world we live in, exceptions occur and that too, frequently, SOPs break down and the unfortunate soul who needs to resolve it has an "I don't know what to do" moment. Their knee-jerk response is to add some colleagues to the mail hoping someone, somewhere would help. However, those on cc are also equally clueless on a resolution, which may require a policy change or an exception approval at the very top. In the RACI model, the cc-ed folks are in the Consulted and Informed mode, but they're rarely Responsible and almost never Accountable. So, more meaningless mails happen until the aggrieved party tires out and gives up OR explodes into a massive fit of rage and throws out a disproportionate response via an escalation to the top. Does this approach work? 1. It works sometimes if you're a customer. Years ago, I wrote to the CEO of a top bank with a detailed grievance on the various ways their revolving door of "relationship managers" have been dropping the ball on several requests over years. Within two days, the regional manager + cohorts landed up at my home saying they got a mail forwarded from ma'am's office. Maybe I was just lucky. 2. It works lesser within an organization what with matrix structures having their own centers and hierarchies of power. You can try escalating, but using shared relationships especially between senior leaders may at least get you to the bottom of the real issue. 3. It hardly works if you're dealing with government agencies. My father used to write long grievance mails to the state government (where he served for some 35 years) on issues around pension, FDs, nominees etc. The outcome? Well, it's been five months since his passing, so it all now forms part of my inheritance and I have kicked all those cans quietly down the road. What does gray work mean for you?

I was talking to my newest customer, CEO of a Gen a.i. SaaS company. He said: "Yesterday a financial services customer blew my mind. We hadn't seen this use case before. If you're in investor relations, hang tight, it's about to get juicy." Tom walked into a meeting that was unscheduled in the office building in the meat packing district. None of his analyst peers were prepared when the head of Trading said, "What's the riskiest holding we have based on recent earnings calls?" After 30 seconds of dead silence and blank stares, Tom shouted [company redacted for privacy] for sure! Their earnings call says they just divested [company redacted for privacy] and every company that has done that has Sh*t the bed 2 quarters later. Trading leader: "How the heck did you know that? That call happened 4 hours ago. I have it on my weekend listen list." Analyst: "I'm beta testing a new tool that does it for me. It even highlighted the paragraph that pertained to the reason for future risk." Trading leader: "If this thing IS REAL, we're all getting a license." Turns out...it's real...it's live, and now they all have it. Tune in next week for another mind blowing use case that we wished we had come up with, but fortunately for us, our customer did for us.

MCO wins Most Innovative Entity Data Hierarchies Approach Award at the 2024 A-Team Innovation Awards. According to MCO’s CEO Brian Fahey, “Our approach to data enables firms to take a holistic level of compliance oversight that’s just not possible with multiple systems. The MyComplianceOffice platform centralizes compliance and data on a singular platform that integrates with other internal systems, providing our client firms with ease of access, consistency and unparalleled risk control.” Fahey adds, “Many thanks to the A-Team Insight, from A-Team Group for recognizing our innovative system.” https://hubs.ly/Q02vv8Ls0

Digital natives are ascending to C-suite and other upper management positions—and they're reshaping data compliance! Now, they're integrating the technological tools and capabilities they grew up with into their workplaces and workflows. The benefits are manifold—and it's absolutely transforming #regulatorycompliance! https://loom.ly/FFIZ4OE

"You do a good job staying in your lane." This was one of the highest compliments I've received from the Linkedin community, from Joe Reis 🤓. But as a data profession, are we collectively staying in our lane? I'm not so sure. In the era of exorbitant cloud computing costs, data teams are put under intense pressure to defend their value. As a result, they're enforcing prioritization frameworks that necessarily assert the data team as the ultimate arbitrator of business value. But here's what I've learned working with sales people and traders, folks with quotas and PnLs : They take on immense personal risk that is unimaginable to those of us on a fixed salary. I don't care where you got your MBA from; if you do not carry any personal risk of consequences, you should not get to decide what is or isn't valuable. Here's a problem that is in our lane as data folks: Spreadsheets have created the illusion that data work is cheap. But when you solve for the three problems spreadsheets fail at (automating updates, automating the maintenance of changes, and scaling to unlimited volumes of data), you have something that is more expensive to implement than software engineering. Great partners to the business stay in their lane. Great partners to the business help those who carry all the risk to understand the costs. Want a partner in crime who will help you do this? Reach out to the team at Assured.

🚀 Are you looking to excel in operations strategy and planning in the FinTech industry? 📈 Check out this article on the 5 essential skills you need to succeed! 💼 🔍 From data analytics to cross-functional collaboration, these skills will set you apart in this rapidly growing field. 💪 🌐 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gjJQMb6e #FinTech #OperationsStrategy #Planning #SkillsForSuccess #CareerGrowth To read this blog click here - https://lnkd.in/gSzqSgS4