Financial Management
Restructuring the finance function: $ Multi-billion financial services company
This $2 billion financial services holding company experienced rapid growth both in its core banking business as well as in its fee-based businesses: asset management, trust, brokerage and insurance. This growth in size and complexity plus the significant additional requirements presented by implementation of Sarbanes Oxley contributed to creating significant additional requirements on the workload of the corporate finance and accounting staff. The result of this growth was a focus on external financial and regulatory reporting to the detriment of neglecting executive management’s significant need for internal profitability reporting and financial analysis.
George led an internal project team in a detailed review of the Finance Organization’s business processes, staffing requirements and information technology support. The result was a restructuring of roles and responsibilities, addition of key skills, and a re-focus of the department to support both the external and regulatory reporting and the internal management reporting essential in support of the Holding Company’s growth.
Re-inventing Finance: $15 billion financial services company
In the early 1990’s, this company's executive management team found that the financial information required for managing the business was significantly flawed. Internal accounting policies, practices and systems had not been updated. The result was a complete lack of confidence in any of the internal management reports or analyses by the line managers being held accountable for the results.
A review of the finance function resulted in a series of recommendations for change in business practices throughout the finance organization. Significant changes included a complete restructuring of the budget process (which eliminated 3 months from the process), the development of management accounting policies and procedures, and the restructuring of the financial systems (general ledger, cost accounting, financial data warehousing and financial reporting software). The completion of this effort resulted in line executives and managers gaining confidence in the internal numbers, and the CFO having comfort that the internal numbers aligned with those provided externally.
Establishing profitablity process: Fidelity Investments
In the late 1980’s Fidelity Investments realized that its growing number of complex businesses required a level of sophistication in its internal financial measurement and reporting that could not be accomplished with the existing software tools and financial processes.
The project team performed a review of the existing financial processes, staffing and information systems in use throughout Fidelity. The recommendations had to accommodate a decentralized financial management structure, yet provide to the CFO the comfort that the internal information would agree with the corporate financials. The resulting implementation was one of the first examples of the use of an information warehouse for financial data to support management reporting and analysis.