Integrated Finance Programme for multi-national Retail Bank

Assisted a large retail bank to transform the group-wide Finance & Risk function to:
• Reduce the total cost of ownership of the Group Finance function
• Enable better financial and risk decision making by establishing a ‘single version of the truth’ of all financial information

This encompassed leading a programme of 6 large projects focused on re-architecting the finance function, simplifying the system landscape, and enabling the resultant processes with the implementation of an integrated platform of best-of-breed COTS applications and an integrated data mart for financial information (including Oracle, Oracle MDM and Ab Initio for Information Management and Delivery; Hyperion for Financial Planning and Control; SAP ERP Accounting Operations to implement the GL and P2P processing; and QRM for Treasury Enablement).

Key elements of this initiative included:
• Standardising the Chart of Accounts (COA) across the Group
• Consolidating the SAP General Ledger and various sub-ledgers across the group by creating an integrated Africa virtual ledger
• Implementing an integrated solution for Financial Planning and Control
• Implementing an integrated solution to enable Liquidity, Interest Rate Risk, Capital and Balance Sheet management
• Standardising and implementing more efficient Finance business processes across the Group to improve turnaround times, throughput, utilisation, quality and cost effectiveness and determine the best manner, location and cost to perform these processes
• Consolidating the legacy systems operated in the finance organisation and reducing the number of interfaces (and their associated costs)
• Consolidating all disparate sources of data (islands of data) into one integrated Finance and Risk data mart environment from trusted and authoritative sources; and providing a capability, with ownership, to ensure the effective delivery of information (and integrity thereof) to the organisation from that data mart environment
• Managing all Finance Master Data, ensuring adherence to enterprise information management (EIM) architecture