finance business partner case study

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Key competencies for finance business partnering

• Strategy and innovation
• Future of finance

A s companies worldwide struggle with rapid geopolitical, demographic, technological, and competitive changes, finance business partnering offers an opportunity to create a strategic advantage.

The complex and volatile environment forces midlevel managers to make more operational decisions that can impact performance. In a 2018 global Gartner study , 61% of business decision-makers and finance executives reported an increase in the number of operational decisions in the past three years. More than half (57% of respondents) said operational decisions have financial implications and impact profitability.

The Gartner study suggests that poor operational decision-making could compromise upwards of 3% of operating profit before depreciation, and that is not a small number.

It is then no surprise that business leaders need and seek active partnership and collaboration from finance professionals who can understand the goals and overarching strategies of the business, analyse financial and nonfinancial information, and present recommendations to support their decision-making.

While business leaders are happy for the finance team to continue playing the roles of operator (FP&A, core finance, etc.) and steward (compliance, controls, etc.), today's leaders want finance team members to increasingly focus on being strategists (collaborate with business folks to support strategy formulation and decision-making) and catalysts (challenge the status quo and champion finance as well as enterprise-level transformation).

In a loose way, the latter two roles form the essence of finance playing the business partner role.

Finance business partnering is what finance teams do when they create value by providing insights (often data-led), thus influencing their business counterparts to make better decisions.

The leadership hats I wore at Walt Disney Southeast Asia (and in companies I worked for before Disney) — including business operations, sales and distribution, general management, strategy and business development, and, of course, my core area, finance — convinced me of the difference such partnering can make to the business and, indeed, to one's own career.

Now, as a leadership coach and corporate trainer, I like to champion this partnering through workshops, where I am often asked what skillsets equip a finance professional to be a good finance business partner. My response is that it requires a set of new and enhanced skills and a change in our mindset.

But ahead of all that, it is critical to get the basics right: Do the steward and operator roles really well; deliver timely, error-free financial and operating results with unquestionable data quality. Without high-quality systems and data, you will get bogged down in reconciliations and lose insight opportunities, draining your time and credibility as an effective partner.

Next, work on the key competencies required for a finance business partner. From my own experience on both sides of the partnership and my extensive work with business leaders, I have developed a road map that I frequently use in my workshops (see the chart, "Key Competencies for a Finance Business Partner").

Key competencies for a finance business partner

These eight skillsets and six mindsets, based on my experience and conversations I have had with other CFOs, are at the very heart of successful business partnering and crucial for aspiring finance business partners.

To illustrate, a finance business partner who grasps the larger goals of the business and appreciates the changing market landscape will be able to work with the CEO and business unit heads to determine the key drivers for success in each line of business. From that, the finance business partner will arrive at a common understanding of the key performance indicators to be tracked and how they are to be computed.

If we were to think about which of the 14 competencies are flexed in this instance, those that come to mind include intellectual curiosity, commercial acumen, strategic thinking, business insight through analytics, stretching beyond the comfort zone, bias for action, and probably a few others. Depending on the industry and the specific role a finance team member plays, some of these competencies may be more important than others.

How finance business partnering worked at Disney

Here's an anonymised example of finance business partnering with sales that occurred regularly during my time at Disney:

The business case

The brand licensing business (where franchise characters are licensed to third-party merchandise brands) was facing pressure from a key customer for substantially lower royalty rates and more favourable terms for a contract renewal because of growth in volume of business over the years.

The finance business partner team partnered with the sales team to examine the merits of the customer's ask and put together a well-substantiated and compelling counterproposal by:

• Doing a market analysis (using secondary data) to substantiate this customer's market share claimed in different segments and how that had been trending, to verify the growing importance and further potential of this customer.
• Working internally with our content team across multiple lines of business to aggregate information on ongoing and planned investments to increase the appeal of the particular franchise characters (those that this customer sought to license and others we could recommend that they add on) among the target markets. This included (1) future content pipeline and marketing plans for movies/TV shows involving these characters; (2) our consumer insights team adding trend data on how consumer recall scores for these characters have gone up during the existing contract tenure with this customer; and (3) sales putting these in a presentation to show the customer how much they stand to gain by partnering with the highly saleable characters, and thereby aiding the sales team in fending off customers' aggressive ask for lower royalty rates.
• Collecting market intelligence on estimated royalty pricing by competitors (this required some sleuthing, working hand-in-hand with the sales team) and on royalty rates charged by our counterparts in other geographies for licensing the characters to similar product groups, for benchmarking purposes.
• Helping the sales team come up with a well-substantiated counteroffer that was compelling to the customer yet equitable for the company. An example would be to use multiple scenarios of step-down royalty percentages and link them to incremental sales as a win-win proposition and to compute the impact on revenue forecasts to help sales decide the baseline terms and our aspirational terms, ie, our initial offer. Or you could use your cost understanding to identify schemes and marketing support programmes that offer high value to the customer at low marginal cost to us.
• Better still (if the finance business partner has well-honed negotiation skills), supporting the sales team by participating in the actual negotiations with the customer.

Skills to learn

If you wish to equip yourself with these competencies and become an effective finance business partner, here's what you can do, starting today:

• Work to improve your commercial acumen. Understand the value chain of your organisation, and update yourself on industry developments, the competition, the economy, etc. Step out from behind your computer to walk the shop or retail floor, spend time getting to know members of the operating and sales teams, take on projects that give you cross-functional exposure, and follow trade publications and podcasts.
• Network with fellow professionals outside your organisation to share war stories and learn from each other. Join offline and online forums to learn how the latest technological developments can be leveraged to improve finance department productivity and help your business counterparts.
• Seek opportunities to learn and practise your written communication and presentation skills.

And my bonus tip for you is to reflect on what you are going to start doing to add more value and what you are going to stop doing to free up time and mind-space.

Raju Venkataraman, FCMA, CGMA , was CFO and head of strategy and business development for Disney in Southeast Asia before he became a leadership coach and corporate trainer who offers his services globally. He lives in Singapore. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Sabine Vollmer, an FM magazine senior editor, at [email protected] .

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Finance Business Partnering: How To Set Your Finance Team As A Business Partner?

Today, finance is expected to flexibly adjust to changing dynamics while consistently furnishing the organization with pertinent guidance. Moreover, it must continually enhance its capabilities to effectively address any forthcoming queries.

This underscores the significance of the ' Finance Business Partnering ' paradigm. A finance business partner (FBP), closely aligned with the business, possesses an acute awareness of ongoing operations and possesses the competence to respond adeptly.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

- Defining finance business partner (FBP)

- Why should you set finance as the proactive business partner?

- What’s the role of a finance business partner (FBP)?

- The values that FBPs bring in

- Steps to establishing your finance team as a business partner

- Final thoughts

Let’s dive right in.

Defining finance business partner (FBP)

Finance business partners encompass financial and accounting experts collaborating with the business to monitor financial performance. They offer financial data, forecasts, and analyses to steer decision-making and strategic development.

These partners offer both assistance and constructive scrutiny, ensuring ongoing alignment of business strategies with financial objectives.

Why should you set finance as the proactive business partner?

Whether it is FP&A, control, or compliance, the finance team has long focused on these traditional areas. Today, they increasingly partner with business functions to spearhead strategic decision-making and enterprise-wide transformation. As a true business partner, finance teams generate value by helping other departments make data-backed decisions.

💡 According to PWC , some characteristics that make finance the essential business partner include analytical skills, communication, relation management skills, and business knowledge.

What’s the role of a finance business partner (FBP)?

Focus on value-add activities.

Organizations that excel beyond their counterparts allocate a significant portion (23%) of their time to business partners. Flourishing finance departments collaborate more closely with the wider organization, highlighting the significance of the business partner role. Forward-thinking organizations recognize finance's importance in contributing to the achievement of the organization's commercial objectives.

Convert opportunities and threats into business drivers

Effective financial business partners, characterized by their ability to optimize costs, ensure dependability, and generate superior insights, can transform external opportunities and threats into catalysts for business collaboration.

Make use of enablers and predict constraints

Finance business partners need to possess the skill to leverage appropriate facilitators (like maintaining consistent and up-to-the-minute data) while foreseeing limitations (such as excessive emphasis on activities with limited value addition).

Look into the future

Effective FBPs should seek opportunities to generate fresh insights through thorough analysis and skillfully convey them to stakeholders. This enables a comprehensive evaluation of business performance.

The values that FBPs bring in

What makes finance professionals excel in a business partner role? Let's delve into the key reasons why they are particularly effective in fulfilling this role.

Data-driven decision-making: The foundation of solid decision-making is data, not assumptions. Data offers a transparent look into a company's performance, enabling executives to make informed choices. Finance business partners eliminate guesswork, replacing it with concrete evidence that lends credibility to decisions. By harnessing their expertise, organizations streamline decision-making, enhance clarity, and reduce uncertainty.

Comprehensive insight into operations: Progress assessment is contingent upon a holistic understanding of a company's financial landscape. Without this overview, steering an organization in the right direction becomes challenging. A finance business partner provides a panoramic view of financials, a perspective vital for effective navigation. These partners effectively communicate insights to all sectors, fostering strategic thinking and enhancing business planning across teams.

Shaping critical decisions: In a swiftly evolving market, the ability to react promptly and prepare for unforeseen shifts is paramount. Executives often face tight timelines for pivotal choices. Rapid adaptation and market anticipation grant organizations a competitive edge, allowing them to emerge stronger from uncertain periods. Finance business partners aid in swift responses and market foresight, contributing to resilient decision-making.

Enhanced operational efficiency: When heads of business units spend less time dissecting raw data, they can dedicate more effort to strategic endeavors. By realigning focus toward strategy, management allocates resources to projects that truly drive progress. Collaborative interactions among teams nurture productive relationships, concurrently enabling each function to enhance efficiency and productivity within their respective domains.

Steps to establishing your finance team as a business partner

#1 automate manual processes.

Finance teams have undergone a transformation that has engendered a demand for real-time, top-notch, and auditable data. The manual collection of external data, pivotal for identifying the forces propelling the organization forward, is challenging and prone to errors.

This is where the automation of finance processes, including tasks like data preparation, importing data from various business sources and integrations, and conducting comprehensive what-if scenarios, comes into play. This automation saves time and empowers teams to concentrate on tasks that generate value.

#2 Standardize data and definitions of data

If finance relies on spreadsheets to gather data for ad hoc analysis, it will consume a big chunk of time. Subsequently, standardizing the data collection and analysis becomes a challenge.

To address this, organizations are adopting cloud-based financial observability tools like Bluecopa. These tools consolidate data from various sources, establishing a singular source of truth that uncovers trends between diverse data types, which might have been overlooked or previously considered uncorrelated.

#3 Augment cross-functional collaboration

For finance to truly serve as a value-driven entity and a genuine partner for all functions, immediate access to information and analysis is indispensable.

This ensures seamless alignment with departments like sales, IT, HR, and tech, enabling finance to act as a strategic counterpart rather than learning about decisions after implementation. Achieving this requires finance to adopt cross-functional collaboration, eradicating decision silos.

Final thoughts

Effective finance business partners bring strong leadership qualities to the table and possess the ability to navigate complex financial processes with finesse. If you're looking to streamline your internal operations and elevate your business to new heights, consider incorporating a finance business partner into your cadre of business leaders.

This leader can serve as a guiding hand in managing the intricacies of a successful business while also providing invaluable financial insights that contribute to informed decision-making. Their expertise can be the bridge between operational excellence and financial soundness, helping your business thrive in a competitive landscape.

If you're looking to build a forward-looking finance function, we should talk! Sign up for a demo .

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• Case Studies

Finance Business Partner — Life Insurance Specialist

Results at a glance.

• The placed candidate had an immediate impact on the finance division resulting in the finance division receiving an increased engagement score on their most recent internal survey

Focus Areas

• Finance Business Partner

Executive Summary

This leading life insurance business wanted to better integrate their finance division into the business. They wanted to create a culture that focused on value-add decision support for the business’ leadership. To assist the change, the Australian CFO introduced a newly created role for a finance business partner to bridge the gap between central finance and the operational functions of the business.

Client Profile

A specialist provider of life insurance and retirement solutions, this global business partners with employers and super funds to help more Australians create a lifestyle they love. Founded over 145 years ago, this global business has 65,000 employees across offices in more than 40 countries worldwide, working together to make a difference to the lives of their customers when they need it most.

The business was looking to expand into a variety of new markets and required an added level of industry knowledge and commerciality to support the leadership decision process. The Australian CFO introduced the newly created role of finance business partner to bridge the gap between central finance and the operational functions of the business. Without this new role the business faced a lack of commercial insight as they expanded their operations. The candidate required experience in statutory finance with progression into a commercial/analytical focus. Key product knowledge of the business portfolio and outstanding interpersonal/business partnership skills were also required. Having been placed in their current role by Allegis Partners (an Allegis Group company), the CFO was aware of the expertise and knowledge that Aston Carter had to offer, and invited us to tender for the requirement. Aston Carter prepared a successful competitive tender that addressed key requirements including targeted sourcing strategies, market intelligence on remuneration expectations and a detailed project timeline to ensure the role was filled in time, thereby minimising ongoing risk to the business.

Our Solution

The CFO requested to see a broad scope of candidates with insurance industry experience, and a variety of product backgrounds to assist them in better understanding the key requirements they needed in the new role. Utilising a targeted market mapping exercise to identify suitable candidates in the market in similar positions, Aston Carter selected a number of candidates with strong industry knowledge that would suit the business’ requirements. References on each potential candidate were conducted early, with details provided to the hiring panel when the candidates were presented for consideration. These references allowed the hiring panel to identify key areas for consideration, allowing them to conduct more insightful interviews with each candidate than may have otherwise been achieved. Aston Carter also leveraged their longstanding relationships with the business’ Marketing group to better understand the culture, ensuring that each candidate aligned perfectly with the values and culture of the business.

Newly created roles can be challenging to source due to uncertainty regarding key requirements needed to support the business. In presenting a broad shortlist of prequalified and referenced candidates, Aston Carter was able to share various insights and intelligence around the market in this space, providing the business with further certainty on the key requirements of the role. With better insight into what they were looking for, the business proceeded to offer one of the candidates initially presented, who was able to commence in the role within the agreed project timeframes. The candidate has made an immediate impact on the finance division and how they engage with the functional business, resulting in the finance division receiving an increased engagement score on their most recent internal survey. Aston Carter has continued to support the finance team with a number of exclusive requirements as they continue to transform their culture and engagement with the wider business.

More Case Studies

Case Study: Becoming a Finance Business Partner

• By Anders Liu-Lindberg
• Published: 4/1/2014

Most finance functions today spend their time on transactional tasks, less on analytical tasks and even less on partnering with the business. But before you start thinking about how to change the time allocation, you need to change the perception of you and your team from bean counters to business ...

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AstraZeneca – Defining a global model for finance partnering

As part of a far-reaching finance transformation programme, AstraZeneca sought to drive more value from their business-facing finance teams in all countries and sites around the world.

How we helped our client

• Defined global model for finance business partnering: which business decisions to prioritise; characteristics of great business partners; how to free up time; and what roles and capabilities are needed
• Launched business partnering programme at global finance leaders summit with best practice assessment and gap analysis for 10 countries, including China, Japan, U.S.A.
• ‘Deep-dive’ in Russia to re-design the finance organisation and develop a practical road-map of improvements
• Worked with the finance leadership team to identify the priority finance transformation initiatives to deliver tens of millions of dollars of cost reduction
• Developed a new approach to pricing in Europe and changed the role of finance to deliver business value in pricing
• Created and ran summits to launch finance business partnering in Eastern Europe and Latin America to mobilise finance directors into action

Business outcomes

• Separate finance business partner organisation, distinct from transaction or specialist finance, with clear roles, skills and career paths
• Business partners performing at or close to the top 10% of externally benchmarked peer organisations
• Finance business partners operate as peers on management teams driving strategy and decision making, and managing business performance
• Significant uplift in capabilities through knowledge sharing, targeted education and business briefings
• Awarded Finance Business Partner organisation of the year by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

Arcus Consulting have played an invaluable role in our 2-year journey to transform finance business partnering across the globe. They helped us to set the vision and direction for business partnering; they’ve conducted practical improvement projects on-the-ground in Europe and Russia; and they’ve been successful at mobilising our finance directors into action in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Arcus Consulting are seasoned consultants who are able to work effectively with our senior business and finance leaders; they operate at a strategic level as well as ‘rolling-up their sleeves’ to tackle practical operational issues; they are highly collaborative with our teams and very successful at making change happen in our organisation.

Privacy | Cookies | Terms Copyright 2018 Arcus Consulting Limited ©

By  Harish Maheshwari , Director - Finance Transformation and Analytics at Thomson Reuters

Power of Strategic Business Partnership (SBP)

There is no better approach to solving challenges than the famous saying "two brains are better than one." The financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function is evolving to meet growing demands from the business and is increasingly expected to take on a value-added, ‘business partnering’ role, to help other parts of the business improve their decision-making. 

Gartner’s 2018 study suggests that the right FP&A business partnership can foster a decision-making process which could result in X% of profits. This justifies why it is so critical and how staying ahead of the competition requires FP&A to become a strategic business partner. A strategic finance business partnership would primarily focus on making the whole company stronger and would lead the finance department into a profit centre.

5 Steps Process to Evolve FP&A Business Partnering

Finance and Business - both are highly agile and result-driven functions and are symbiotically connected with a healthy P&L. To create real value, financial planning & analysis professionals need to work as thought partners with business management by demonstrating strong collaboration skills , financial aptitude, excellent business intuition, and capability to work at multiple levels to drive key strategic and tactical decisions in following areas. Here is the evolution of FP&A business partnership weighted in Business Value (Y-Axis) and Mindset (X-Axis) .

Step 1 - Reporter: Focus on bookkeeping and reporting to the business by supplying information on what is happening

• KPI Reporting: Interpret data, order and assess its value and then present the findings to the relevant stakeholders in a clear and concise way.
• Incremental Forecast: Prepare a budget using a previous period's budget or actual performance as a basis with incremental amounts added for the new budget period. The allocation of resources is based upon allocations from the previous period.
• Variance Analysis : Review actual revenue/cost against the forecast ones and determine how business performance is being impacted.

Step 2 - Controller: Focus on understanding the business and controlling the cost under budget with accuracy

• Historical Analysis: Learn from the past but stay future-orientated. Use ‘big’ and ‘small’ data, selecting the appropriate tools to manipulate, analyse and interpret it in sophisticated, audience-appropriate ways
• Problem Solving: Think logically and find solutions to difficult or complex issues.
• Rolling Forecast : Enable organisations to continuously plan over a set time horizon. For example, a rolling forecast will re-forecast the next twelve months (NTM) at the end of each quarter. This differs from the traditional approach of a static annual forecast that only creates new forecasts towards the end of the year.

Step 3 - Advisor: Focus on strong acumen and building relationships to contribute to the decision

• Communication: Simplify complexity when communicating an advanced analytics message. Communicate to executives to make sure the insight and foresight provided have an impactful effect at the executive level.
• Stakeholder Management: Work with all internal and external stakeholders. Companies with strong stakeholder relationships are more profitable and sustainable than companies whose focus is exclusively on the bottom line. 
• Collaborative Planning: Use best practices in your rolling forecast process, incorporate lessons learnt and empower the finance team to actively influence day to day decisions.
• Financial Modeling : Perform a “what-if” analysis on the impact of various business decisions. Financial models represent the financial situation by taking into consideration the different business factors/conditions and risks and assumptions of the future.

Step 4 - Influencer: Focus on using the right information to influence and challenge decisions

• Relationship: Build trust with the stakeholders. Influence starts with relationships and trust. There is a direct correlation between the quality of your relationships and your influence. 
• Business Performance: Influence and challenge day to day decisions across the business to ensure processes and activities are geared for maximum performance.
• Benchmarking: Analyse how your company is performing against peers and competitors.
• Driver-Based Forecasting: Promote driver-based planning on identifying an organisation’s key business and value drivers and then creating business plans and budgets based on these key drivers. The goal is highly valuable in helping executives understand the true value drivers or levers of their business, and how changes in these drivers can impact future business outcomes.

Step 5 - Strategic Partner: Focus on sharing insights and predictions to impact the strategic decisions

• Business Acumen: Understand how changes across lines of the business impact the performance of the competitive landscape, and how industrial and economic factors weight in.
• Strategic Decision : Shape strategy and the direction of the business using cross-functional leadership. Act as a key stakeholder in the decision-making process by providing risk-adjusted financial information and analysis. 
• Predictive and Prescriptive Analysis : Utilise advanced analytics for unbiased forecasting, long-range modelling, and prediction of future events. Analytical modelling will deliver deep visibility into the business. These forward-looking insights give the ability to quantify trade-offs realistically in order to drive strategy, all before any decisions are actually made and implemented!
• Execution Roadmap: Drive major strategic or tactical initiatives such as cost savings or revenue optimisation projects. Act as a catalyst in driving initiatives critical to delivering the strategy.
• Scenario Planning : Promote this approach to make flexible long-term plans. Every single decision in an organisation is a choice under a degree of uncertainty. In practice, we end up basing our choices on possible outcomes and best-case predictions. Scenario planning is used to identify a specific set of uncertainties – different drivers may impact certain results – and protect businesses from unnecessary risk.

Conclusion: FP&A business partners play a key role in making sure that there is a clear link between the strategy, the priorities, the operational execution and the company resource allocation behind those priorities. A strategic business partnership has dual responsibility, which creates long-term business relationships focused on creating joint value for organisations and utilising managerial levers to maximise an organisation's profitability. 

FP&A business partner equipped with the right mindset and skills can contribute to both sections of the P&L: Boosting growth by working on the strategy for incremental growth of revenue and controlling costs to improve the bottom line. A successful FP&A business partnership transforms the finance function into the profit centre.   

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How Deloitte Is Helping Companies Bring Their Finance Functions Into the Future

Sponsor content from Deloitte.

Organizational investments in new technologies such as predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation have allowed finance functions to increasingly deliver business value through greater accuracy, efficiency, and strategic insights.

But a company’s ability to reap all the benefits of corporate digital strategies depends on more than just investing in leading-edge technology. Organizations are learning that their finance workforce must elevate and differentiate their capabilities—both the hard technical skills and the softer communication and collaboration skills—so they can create more value for the companies they support and help drive business growth.

Deloitte is working with many companies across industries to help their finance function create strategies for and adopt ways of working and thinking digitally. Here are a few of those stories.

Case Study: Upskilling with Impact

A fast-growing client with outlets across the nation was struggling with the roles and responsibilities of their finance business partners within the commercial finance function. The client had worked to make sure that Finance had the skills and mindset to work effectively with other units of the company in order to help drive decisions and unlock new value, but they knew they needed to dig deeper.

Finance employees reported feeling hampered by the lack of definition of their roles and expectations as well as insufficient data, tools, and processes. Employees were compelled to do work that didn’t add value to the business, such as tedious manual transaction processing and generating reports that could be automated.

The client knew it needed to invest more strategically in Finance and help employees truly see what was possible in their roles—and for Finance.

Working with the client, we helped develop an ideal future state for Finance, including what “great” would look like. We worked with Finance to understand their current capabilities, and from that we built a road map to get to that future state.

We identified the skills that needed to be enhanced, and our findings were surprising; while Finance employees’ technical skills were critical, it was the soft skills like communicating, building relationships, and presenting with impact that business stakeholders really valued. Understanding these needs, we then built a playbook and created a set of “business partner” personas to form the basis of a capability uplift program. These were delivered via a two-day workshop that was rolled out to multiple teams over two years. Today, more than 120 finance employees have gone through the training, and Finance has improved qualitative performance rating, rapidly built stronger relationships with internal customers, and raised its profile across the enterprise.

This transformation was a cultural shift as well as skills training, and we were fortunate to have buy-in at all levels to make it happen. We are continuing to work with the client, creating future sessions and workshops to build a centralized learning hub for Finance. By investing in their finance workers, this client has doubled down on providing business insights, paving a path to the future for employees, Finance, and the enterprise.

Case Study: Fulfilling the Need for Speed in Finance

Another large global client had a slow, antiquated finance function and wanted to update its technologies, methods, and workforce. Leaders knew that Finance did not have access to leading-edge automation or visualization technologies, but there was demand across the business to reduce costs, create trusted insights more rapidly and adapt to a major business transformation.

The client operated several shared service centers that focused on transactional finance activities, but seeing the potential for cost savings, the organization wanted these workers to tackle management accounting, controlling, and planning as well.

The client knew that the tasks of management accounting, controlling, and planning took higher skills and better problem-solving abilities than more repetitive tasks demanded, so they decided to create centers of expertise, where workers could better develop these skills. We helped the client identify the activities that should be performed in those centers as well as identify the talent who had the right skills in the different shared service centers.

We then worked with the client to build a finance digital lab to introduce robotics, automation, visualization, and other technologies that could help finance workers perform their jobs more thoughtfully and efficiently. We also developed a digital finance academy that provided workers with training courses in each technology and at every level. So far, the client has been able to realize $35 million in savings, and more than 1,000 workers have benefited from the training—with more people and more ideas in the pipeline.

In working with organizations, we’ve learned that upskilling is a key component in Finance’s ability to innovate and the company’s ability to transform. Developing a strategic approach rather than relying on incremental tweaks can unleash the power of new technologies and the Finance unit together.

For this client, an internal effort that started off shaky resulted in a robust workforce change, significant cost savings, and a finance function that was brought into the future.

Click here to read more Deloitte case studies on digital transformation in the finance function.

• Connecting Human Insights With Technology For Impact

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Specialisms

• Advisory and consultancy
• Audit and assurance
• Financial and business reporting
• Financial management
• Performance management
• Risk management
• Sustainability

Capabilities

Collaboration

• SKILL LEVEL :

Finance business partner

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What is a finance business partner and what do they do?

Finance business partners are accountants who work alongside different business departments/units, creating a real and active partnership with both operations and management. They provide financial information, tools, analysis and insight to executives, challenging their thinking, helping them make more informed decisions and driving business strategy. Their role is to provide real-time support and analysis, to be a trusted advisor and to add value that will assist in decision-making. As most unit managers and staff are not finance professionals, it is important that they have an ability to communicate their message, to understand their audience and deliver the information in a clear and user-friendly manner.

Key responsibilities

Responsibilities may vary but duties could include: 

• building partnerships and strong relationships with all senior managers and their teams, and providing financial support to commercial decision- making
• delivering analysis and insight on business opportunities 
• providing options and scenarios for business decisions 
• conducting market research studies and analysis to assess current market trends 
• presenting financial performance, full-year forecasts and budget variances, including understanding financial opportunities and risk 
• challenging current ways of working 
• driving efficiencies and cost savings wherever possible 
• assisting with year-end audit 
• dealing with and working through issues of conflict and operational challenges with project teams and other stakeholders 
• understanding the cost drivers of the business and providing insight to non-finance members.

Person specification

Finance business partners must have excellent interpersonal skills, with the ability to build strong relationships and communicate effectively in order to explain financial concepts to and collaborate with non-finance staff. They should be able to influence key decision-makers and think strategically. Excellent commercial acumen giving clear business insight, along with expertise in project management and digital analytical skills, are also required for this role.

Why are they important?

Finance business partners are an important bridge between the finance function, management and other areas of the business. They deliver financial information, tools, analysis and insight to executives across the business, which equips them with the information they need to make informed decisions that align with company objectives. The finance business partner role is important in providing the insight that allows managers to challenge, coach and motivate their teams. Often embedded in the business unit itself, they reduce the silo effect that exists in organisations where finance is a separate department.

While the accountancy profession offers diverse career options and paths, the core capabilities required to perform at the highest standards remain the same - irrespective of skill level or job role.

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Finance 2030: Four imperatives for the next decade

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May 10, 2024

In the time since this article was first published, McKinsey has continued to explore the topics it covers. Read on to explore why its insights hold true.

In 2020 we wrote about the changes we expected to see in finance over the coming decade, and explored four critical moves for delivering greater real-time insights, minimizing human error and biases, and driving speed in workflows and decision-making as organizations sought to reduce costs and achieve even higher levels of effectiveness.

As we fast approach the midpoint in that decade, several trends impacting finance professionals have emerged—not least the arrival of generative AI—highlighting a need for reskilling and upskilling finance professionals to be able to respond to the fast-moving macroeconomic context. At the same time, we believe the four imperatives in this article hold true as leaders prepare for the second half of the decade.

Given this context, it is more important than ever for organizations to achieve a renewed focus on ensuring high quality data, reinvestments in finance staff capability building, and developing more fluid working models to capture the promise of technologies such as GenAI that have occurred since the article was first published. Minor updates have been made to the article that follows to reflect these developments.

The trade-off between cost reduction and increased effectiveness of the finance function is a false choice. Leading finance departments are guardians of enterprise value creation, demonstrating stewardship of their own spend by lowering absolute costs and shifting work towards more value-added activities.

We have analyzed the finance functions of hundreds of companies to understand how cost and effectiveness have evolved over the past ten years. After controlling for differences in sector, scale, and geographic footprint, several findings emerged:

• Finance organizations have, on average, decreased their cost by 29 percent.
• The most efficient cohort of finance departments (“finance leaders”) achieved similar cost improvement to the level shown by average performers—an impressive feat given that the finance leaders started from a lower cost base.
• Finance leaders spent 19 percent more time on value-added (versus transaction-processing) activities than a typical finance department did.

What can companies do differently to join the finance leaders? The research points toward four imperatives. The first is to cast a wider net for new efficiency opportunities , reaching beyond the transactional activities that have long been the primary focus of attention. Second, boost finance’s role in managing data , whether consolidating, simplifying, or controlling the flood of information flowing across the organization. Third, strengthen decision-making through widespread adoption of data-visualization, advanced-analytics, and debiasing techniques. Finally, reimagine the finance operating model so that it fosters new skills and capabilities.

These steps are already enabling companies to join the finance-function elite—while cutting audit costs by double-digit percentages, improving data quality (and reducing wasteful data-cleaning efforts), upskilling finance teams, and enabling the function to guide better decisions throughout the enterprise.

A decade of efficiency gains

While the magnitude of improvement varied among sectors, ranging from 15 to 35 percent over the ten-year period, the decline in the cost of finance departments is consistent across industries (Exhibit 1).

More significant, however, were the gains among the finance leaders, whose improvement rate was slightly higher (26 percent versus 25 percent) despite a leaner starting point—demonstrating the value of continuing to focus on finance-function efficiency regardless of previous gains.

Finance leaders further differentiate themselves by spending a greater portion of their time on value-added activities, such as financial planning and analysis (FP&A), strategic planning, treasury, operational-risk management, and policy setting. Today’s finance leaders spend 19 percent more of total finance-staff bandwidth on value-added activities than the average company did ten years ago (Exhibit 2). This prioritization enables finance leaders to build deeper capabilities in value-additive areas, creating a positive feedback loop that could result in even greater advantages in the future.

The finance department of the future

Achieving the next frontier in finance efficiency and effectiveness will likely require finance executives to shift their thinking from the priorities of the past. Four moves are especially critical for delivering greater real-time insights, minimizing human error and biases, and driving speed in workflows and decision-making.

Imperative #1: Look beyond transactional activities

Many leading organizations have substantially increased efficiency in transactional functions—by 39 percent or more—including areas such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, and other core accounting areas. While most companies have room for further improvement, subsequent efficiency efforts will almost inevitably show diminishing returns as the cost base for these activities continues to shrink.

In contrast, our research found fewer efficiency improvements in the more strategic areas of finance, such as FP&A, optimizing capital structures, tax planning, controllership, internal audit, and financial-risk management. This appears likely to change.

With advances in computing power, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) can increasingly be applied to complex tasks, building on the lead started by robotic process automation (RPA) and similar technologies that are used to automate transactional activities. One high-tech manufacturer is now using machine-learning algorithms and analytics to monitor financial and business-continuity risks. These technologies have allowed audits to focus on the units that pose the greatest risks, and to reduce staff time needed to complete each audit. As a result, the manufacturer has reduced the total cost of internal audits by 15 to 20 percent.

Likewise, a global consumer-package-goods company used natural-language generation (NLG) to provide an initial draft of the management discussion and analysis for its monthly operational review. This technology converts structured data into meaningful financial prose that summarizes and synthesizes insights. Automating portions of the reports freed up the time of highly skilled finance staff allowing them more time to resolve risks and pursue opportunities.

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The rise of big data has increased demand for workers with analytical skills, such as data scientists and machine-learning engineers. While demand continues to outpace supply, the pool of talent is increasing as a result of higher pay, upgrades in universities’ computer-science curricula, increased availability of free online AI resources, and private-sector investments in training.

These converging forces of advanced processes and a skilled work force are creating an environment to unlock efficiency in the value-adding areas of finance. To pursue this imperative, CFOs can:

• Shift focus from low-end to high-end automation. Instead of focusing solely on mature, first-wave automation approaches such as RPA, a few leading companies are using machine learning, generative AI , and similar advanced technologies in “second-wave” automation use cases in capital allocation, financial planning, and audit. The complexity of these technologies should not be underestimated, however. Several companies have stumbled in their use of AI. It is critical that CFOs overinvest in piloting these technologies to identify the right use cases, and be prepared to change direction if initial experiments fail.
• Make better use of staff time spent on value-added activities. Finance staff’s time is valuable, and best devoted to analyses that drive actual business performance. Leaders can help their teams by ensuring that requests for more information are grounded in a solid understanding of an agreed-upon set of drivers of business financial performance. CFOs can also set specific guidelines on where finance staff spend their time. For example, rather than performing reactive analyses of historical data to explain past performance, consider adopting a guideline that at least 80 percent of analyses focus on prescribing future courses of action.
• Align with the wider enterprise on AI and machine-learning technologies. The technical landscape has changed over the past few years, with some platforms growing in popularity while others have lost users. Having an enterprise-wide strategy on which of the myriad technologies to employ not only allows more focused investments, it also encourages further collaboration between finance and other functions.
• Equip staff in critical roles with the necessary level of experience, leadership mind-sets, and authority to influence the business. While pursuing cost efficiency is a constant imperative, staff nevertheless need continual capability building if they are to successfully perform their roles as advisors and counterweights to senior executives in steering the financial trajectory of the business. Skills development is particularly important for those staff in senior FP&A and finance business-partnering roles, as discussed in more detail below under imperatives 3 and 4.

Imperative #2: Help finance lead in data

The size, complexity, and importance of data is growing at a record pace. The amount of data in the world is anticipated to reach 175 zettabytes (175 billion terabytes) by 2025, for an annual growth rate of approximately 66 percent over 2018 levels. The data that the finance department will use to create competitive advantages and remain compliant is no exception. The exponential growth poses a significant challenge for finance teams as they seek to distill ever larger and more complex data sets into a single source of truth that provides actionable information and insights to the rest of the organization.

Finance departments need a clearly defined master data-management strategy to guide the collection, storage, and interrogation of the rising volume of data needed to perform the types of analytics the business requires. This has become even more important for making good use of emergent technologies such as generative AI, which requires highly trusted sources of data to use techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation to improve response accuracy. To support the business—whether through more nuanced financial-scenario planning, insight into how to better manage liquidity, or improved guidance on where to best deploy assets—finance must be able to quickly marshal high-quality, trusted data.

Owing to its central role, the finance function is uniquely positioned to help define the master data strategy for the enterprise. As part of the function’s responsibility to consolidate, simplify, and control company-wide data, finance leaders can:

• Prioritize data quality and consistency. The first step is setting high standards on data structure, entry, aggregation, storage, and protection across the company. CFOs can also take a larger role in driving enterprise-wide transformation—historically, less than half of CFOs have led those efforts. By steering the development of data governance and data operating-model decisions, CFOs can reinforce change-management practices not only within the finance organization, but also in adjacent functions that produce much of the data finance consumes.
• Help lead data-standard alignment across departments. Although in many organizations the chief data officer is part of the IT function, the CFO has a unique perspective as both a major consumer and provider of consistent information across the company. Indeed, the CFO is often well-positioned to marshal resources across departments to address the topic of data standards and raise it to the top of the corporate agenda. While finance cannot drive enterprise data efforts alone, it can promote collaboration among the leaders of the IT, digital, customer-facing, and operational functions—especially by developing robust business cases that articulate quantifiable returns on investment for the associated improvements in data quality.
• Invest in an agile, tech-enabled data backbone. CFOs can advocate for adopting a layered architecture, with a common data layer that is flexible enough to accommodate changing business needs while preserving a single source of truth.
• Allocate finance-staff capacity to clean data. Investing finance-staff capacity to validate and clean data at the point of entry is far more efficient than addressing data-quality issues after they have occurred. In parallel, finance staff will likely need additional capabilities to understand the limitations of data and how to resolve them.
• Deploy technology for better-quality data. Data cleaning has always been essential but until recently it involved tedious and time-consuming manual work. Today, machine-learning algorithms can help cross-reference and validate data, which can reduce errors and the time needed to ensure data are correct when ingested.

Reimagine: Preparing for SG&A in the next normal

Imperative #3: improve decision-making.

The use of advanced analytical techniques to solve pressing business problems is increasingly a requirement for finance departments. Two years ago, our colleagues found that over half of the CFOs they surveyed wanted to use advanced analytics to improve the accuracy of cash-flow forecasts .

These sorts of efforts are gathering pace . A North American consumer-goods company, for example, is building a forecasting tool that will gather and analyze data including macroeconomic conditions, geographic factors, demographics, and other variables. Armed with this information, business leaders hope to be able to alter pricing decisions on the fly, as needed.

Beyond providing analytical insights, the finance department is also responsible for framing discussions on company performance and the actions needed to improve it. To be effective, finance staff need to be able to provide:

• Clearer insights, by communicating performance unambiguously, highlighting shortfalls against expected outcomes, as well as the underlying factors and context that informs why these gaps occurred.
• Faster insights, so that management can understand recent performance and make decisions to change its trajectory quickly and decisively.
• Richer insights, based on more robust datasets from a wider variety of sources, providing broader perspectives than those based only on internal financial data. For example, profit projections can be contextualized against the overall sector’s performance. By basing insights on multifactor datasets that include both internal and external data sources, organizations gain a more realistic view of likely performance outcomes and reduce the chance that unexpected shocks will render projections inaccurate. Finance organizations that can simulate multiple scenarios are better equipped for black-swan events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two further actions can help improve insight generation and the decisions it informs. The first centers on training, particularly in analytical, data-visualization, and debiasing techniques and technologies. In industries where these tools are new, the potential competitive advantage they offer is high—but so is the required commitment. Other sectors can provide inspiration on how best to upskill staff. For instance, a leading telecom player found that almost half of its back-office staff lacked the technical skills needed to achieve future goals, and 42 percent were in roles that were unlikely to exist in a decade. Rather than eliminate staff, the company encouraged employees to assess their own capability gaps and learn new skills. In its first year, the program enabled the company to fill 40 percent of new job openings with internal candidates.

The second action companies can take is to increase the quality and stature of senior finance business-partnering roles . The people in these positions need deep experience and perspective to drill into the causes of underperformance, and to push back against over-optimistic or unnecessarily conservative financial assumptions that may get baked into business plans. Matching true high performers to these critical roles is an essential component of translating analytic capabilities into realizable business outcomes.

Imperative #4: Reimagine the finance operating model with new capabilities

Finance organizations are moving toward a new operating model that allows staff to adjust their work quickly and dynamically so they can focus on the most pressing topics facing their organization. This requires not only a different way of organizing how work gets done, but also a different type of finance professional .

To reduce the effort involved in operational tasks, the new finance operating model starts from a leaner core, with tighter data standards, new data-management practices, enhanced automation, and integration with a wide range of related digital technologies. Implementing this model involves a series of changes.

• Break traditional hierarchies into flat networks of teams. The network model allows finance business partners to draw on a shared pool of analysts, who are assigned to specific work items based on well-defined and agreed-upon business priorities.
• Mobilize temporary teams to deliver deeper insights into business problems. Creating this capacity follows agile working principles , such as instituting sprints to identify, design, and implement financial analyses that provide insights into business challenges.
• Embed digital skills across the finance organization. These capabilities may include programing bot algorithms, using analytics software, or learning how to translate business data into actionable insights.
• Develop a core of business-savvy finance leaders with the stature to engage company leaders as peers. Strengthening job rotations, both within finance and between finance and the business, builds a cadre of skilled professionals who can move easily throughout the organization. For rotations within finance, one automotive company requires executives to have worked in a minimum of two divisions, two finance functions, and two countries before ascending to senior roles. Another automotive company requires senior finance leaders to rotate through non-finance roles. In both cases the emphasis on building operational and leadership—as well as technical finance—capabilities is the important differentiating factor.
• Bolster finance skills by developing a rigorous, transparent competency matrix. This detailed set of standards helps ground discussions about finance talent in objective criteria, and enables managers and individuals to choose among explicit capability-building actions to support career progression. For example, advanced practitioners in a given skillset may be required to spend at least ten percent of their time helping develop the skills of other staff.
• Create formal and informal incentives for skill development. Examples include tying incentives to knowledge and capability development, setting explicit targets for internal promotions to finance leadership positions, and explicitly recognizing the accomplishments of managers who foster skill development by coaching their teams.

These steps came together recently at a global consumer-goods manufacturer developing a new performance-management system. The effort built a set of standard key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to the organization’s overall value-creation roadmap and cascaded to each layer of the management structure. After harmonizing these measures across multiple business and geographic entities, the company then implemented a data lake to house all the metrics, populating the information in real time. In turn, the data lake supported real-time dashboards displaying KPI and financial-performance data from the general ledger, and allowed for drill-down capability. The initiative succeeded in reducing the time that the FP&A team spent on data capture, presentation, and manipulation by as much as 65 percent.

At the frontiers of effectiveness, finance leaders deliver far more than core financial skills: their work guides the functioning of the entire organization every day. Through four imperatives, the next-generation finance function can build the insights, performance, and planning capabilities leaders will need to support dynamic decision-making through the next decade.

Ankur Agrawal is a partner in McKinsey’s New York office; Steven Eklund is a partner in the Stamford office, where Josh Waite is a consultant and Ed Woodcock is a senior expert.

The authors would like to thank Nikita Agarwal, Purna Choudhary, Tim Koller, Victoria Lee, Jorge Machado, Sahil Mehta, and Dhruv Sharma for their contributions to this article.

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Finance business partnering guide

Thought leadership report

Published: 02 Sep 2014 Updated: 03 May 2023 Update History

Latest research

Effective finance business partners have been around for over 50 years. The involvement of finance professionals in business decision making, strategy development and driving performance is nothing new. However, we are still asked for guidance on how finance can make a greater contribution to organisational performance.

Our report,  Finance business partnering: a guide provides practical advice for those considering business partnering initiatives and those looking to improve their approach. Here we provide a brief summary of some of the ideas covered – even shorter than the executive summary.

Understanding the business is a fundamental pre-requisite for effective business partnering. Such understanding is gained through ongoing conversations, observation, research and action – action is required to gain feedback and test understanding.

Based on sound business understanding, an objective assessment of finance’s capabilities and the level of demand for business partnering services, a high-level strategy for developing the finance department can be developed, (see Figure 1).

While it may be obvious, it needs to be emphasised that finance’s capability depends on people, organisational structures, systems and processes. The report discusses how key business partnering knowledge, skills and attitudes can be developed, including commerciality and communication skills. We argue that decentralised approaches to finance business partnering better enable business support but increase the risks of finance losing its objectivity.  We also argue that finance needs to be actively involved in system and process developments across the organisation.

Finance business partnering is not necessarily right for all organisations and demand for such services is not a given.  The best way of generating demand is for finance to solve an important business issue but we also discuss some other helpful approaches.

Concerns that finance business partners may get too close to the business remain and need to be guarded against. Personal integrity, senior management support, culture, enforced value statements, whistleblowing and effective controls all have a part to play.

Successful business partners will need both perseverance and adaptability to build and maintain their influence. Perseverance to cope with inherent tensions in the role and to overcome inevitable setbacks.  And adaptability to deal with increasing demands for organisational sustainability, new approaches to outsourcing and developments in big data and analytics.

Our report  is based on discussions with members and experts, reviewing practitioner and academic research and our own experience.  As well as advice and food for thought it also includes a number of case studies.  We hope you find it useful. If you would like to comment on this report or discuss the content further, please email [email protected] .

• Download the full report

The ICAEW Library & Information Service provides access to leading business, finance and management journals.

Further reading on business partnering is available through the articles below.

• 01 Dec 2023
• Daniel Butcher
• Strategic Finance
• 01 Nov 2022
• Rebecca G.Fay, Kenneth Herbst, Josh Lobs, Norma R.Montague
• 01 Aug 2019
• Andrew Jepson
• 20 Mar 2019
• CFO Innovation Asia

You are permitted to access articles subject to the terms of use set by our suppliers and any restrictions imposed by individual publishers. Please see individual supplier pages  for full terms of use.

Finance business partnering: a guide

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Why HR and finance need to join forces

Accountants and data scientists - collaborating for success

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• Update History 02 Sep 2014 (12: 00 AM BST) First published 03 May 2023 (12: 00 AM BST) Page updated with Latest research section, adding further articles on business partnering. These new articles provide fresh insights, case studies and perspectives on this topic. Please note that the original article from 2014 has not undergone any review or updates.

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Finance Business Partner Training

Who is it for, for individuals and small teams.

We offer a new type of finance business partner training you’ve never seen before. We show your employees everything we learned in sales and marketing that we wish we’d known when we were finance directors.

With our options, you’ll build a full in-house training program for all levels, including Advance for analysts and managers, NEXTFD for future leaders. We ignite development plans, capability frameworks, video lessons, live Zoom workshops, insights psychometrics, and 1:1 coaching options. You can build the perfect academy with our training programs. And everything’s done online (with optional in-person). It’s easy and fast to roll out – you could literally start next week!

What We Offer

The finance business partner training.

We offer the following programs for you and your employees:

FBP In-House Advance

In this program, we’ll show you everything we wish we’d learned in sales and marketing. No one taught us these concepts. We had to learn them through experience, the hard way. Now, we’ve put our knowledge together to share with you and your employees.

Our In-House program is perfect for all setups. We’ll give your employees capability surveys, on-demand video lessons, live Zoom application workshops, and INSIGHTS®. We covered all the bases.

Your employees will learn how to build relationships, turn data points into insights, and bring numbers to life.

All the content in this program is from our flagship in-house FBP Advance, customised for your team. Here’s an overview of what’s covered:

• The FBP Mindset
• Bring Numbers to Life
• Turn Data into Insights
• Relationships & Challenge
• Super-Hero Influence
• Telling Stories with Data
• Present & Communicate
• Insights Psychometrics
• FBP Ignite Post Evaluation

You and your team will learn to turn data points into inspiring messages with our finance business partner training.

Public Advance

Our Public Advance program is for individuals and small teams. You’ll learn to build relationships, turn data into insights, and bring numbers to life.

Over 7,000 people have graduated from our FBP Advance in the last 7 years, across 200 businesses worldwide. We’ve gone the extra mile to perfect our new online model and trained over 1,000 people so far.

Here’s what you’ll be doing in this program:

FBP Ignite Development Plan

Start with our FBP Ignite online survey to see where you sit against our 16 behaviours of World Class FBPs.

We use the results of this survey to customise the rest of the program; plus, you take it again at the end to measure improvement and set new ongoing development goals.

7 On-Demand Video Lessons

Here, you’ll learn about the principles, tools, and models in over 7 hours of on-demand video lessons, with case studies, examples, and self-study exercises. All of this work can be done at your own speed.

All the content from our Advance is available in stand-alone video FBP Online On-Demand course. It’s perfect for individuals and teams.

Online on Demand

Take our stand-alone 7-module on-demand video course and receive all the core content from our flagship in-house FBP Advance.

This program is perfect for all companies. It works for individuals and teams. For individuals, you can develop your career, taking it to new levels. It’s also a cost-effective training course for teams.

Our seven stand-alone module course contains all the content from our flagship in-house FBP course. You choose to add insights profiling and 1:1 Zoom coaching to create a bespoke experience.

Your team will be forever changed for the best with our finance business partner training.

Here’s what’s included in this program:

Individuals

All seven x 1 hour on-demand video lessons from our flagship FBP Advance. The course includes self-study exercises, case studies, and real-life examples.

With immediate lifetime access and up to four days CPD for ICAEW, ACCA, CIMA, and more, it offers great value.

Our FBP On Demand video course is the perfect, cost-effective solution to upskill your team quickly. The on-demand video course is easy to deploy across large, global teams with full LMS reporting. We offer a customised branded portal for larger teams.

Create a cost-effective program by adding INSIGHTS to your team video course and transform your communication.

Your team receives all in-depth psychometric profiles and attends 2 x 90-minute live Zoom workshops that will change the way they think forever.

Why On-Demand Video?

Our on-demand video program for those taking our finance business partner training is a great option. For one thing, it’s designed for individual learning and all the content from our in-house FBP Advance in seven hours of on-demand video. You’ll learn how to build relationships, turn data into insights, bring numbers to life, and influence decisions.

This course easily covers your entire CPD needs for the year. In addition, our lessons are delivered by Andy Shambrook, in the same way he delivers in person. You won’t be listening to a boring PowerPoint presentation.

What’s more, you and your team will have lifetime access to this course. Once you buy it, the course is yours forever. It includes valuable case studies and self-study exercises. All can be viewed from the comfort of home.

Your team will learn how to be the best they can possibly be with our finance business partner training.

Why Choose Us for your Finance Business Partner Training?

We work with individuals and teams across the globe and with large brands. We’re set up to take the strain out of designing and running big programs. We work with businesses of any size, so if you’ve got more than six people on your team, get in touch!

And if you’re looking for an individual course, our FBP On Demand is a stand-alone video course available to buy online today and includes all the content and exercises from our in-house FBP Advance. There is an option here for everyone, whatever your budget.

In addition, we’ve also designed and delivered customised finance business partner training and leadership development all over the world on behalf of ICAEW in the US and CAANZ in Australia & New Zealand for more than seven years. We’re also members of either ICAEW, CAANZ, or CIMA ourselves!

What Are You Waiting For?

Get started.

So, why not take our finance business partner training? If you’d like to learn more about our courses, contact us today. We’re happy to answer any questions you may have about our program and courses. Let us know how we can help you and your team reach the next level!.

Berry Seriens

CFO SVP, CHEP North America

Andy is a great communicator and provides a broader perspective on how finance interacts with different stakeholders and how finance could interact differently with the many business partners. I highly recommend him and his team to develop our broad finance teams.

Steve Harris

CFO, Barts Charity

Andy worked with our finance business partner team and has transformed the way we approach the role. By emphasising the importance of relationship building and looking at things from the perspective of our stakeholders the team are now able to provide significantly better service.

Kane Laurence

FP&A Director, CMS Legal

I have worked with Andy and the team twice and have been very impressed with his ability to deliver relevant content in a way that is engaging from start to finish. Andy’s unique sales and finance background really brings something to the table and I would thoroughly recommend his expertise to develop any business partnering capability.

Wes Burrage-Jones

Group CFO, Metamorph

Andy has taken me & our team on a journey of self learning, enabling a transformation which has resulted in turning dull, low value information into insight and influence. The learning has opened our eyes to a different way of communication and we are excited to continue this journey and see what we can achieve – thanks Andy!

Get to know you

What's your influence style.

Calculator, Dashboard, Coach, or Leader?

Take our FBP Ignite survey to learn more about your FBP style and create your personalised development plan