Buyer Persona: Banking Industry/CFO
Finance or GL
Transformation
My focus has changed from getting the numbers right to influencing big decisions and now to actually leading strategy.
It’s my job to think about performance of the business over 10 years, to think about the robustness of our business model to support long term value creation.
My background is process improvement.
I'm a Six Sigma who is heavily involved in change management.
My job is to challenge the status quo and pull the entire finance function together.
CEO
The key quantitative benchmark is finance expense as a percent of revenue.
We need to keep that under 1%
But I’m also measured qualitatively, which means that I’m expected to be an active and visible member of executive management. One important qualitative metric is my ability to express known truths in a computational way so that our internal customers know how to weigh them and make good decisions.
Consultants:
Deloitte
Price Waterhouse Coopers
Ernst & Young
Accenture
Bain
McKinsey
Corporate Executive Board
SEC Conferences & Lunches
* This Persona is intended to be applicable for all Geos. It is based on field work conducted in NA. The persona-building methodology tells us whether a particular Persona is applicable for more than one Geo (or Industry, or Role/LoB). That process has ascertained that this Persona is applicable for Geos in EMEA, NA and LAC.
Buyer Persona
Description
Insight #1
Priority Initiative
© 2014 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
Insight #2
Success Definition
Insight #3
Perceived Barrier
Insight #4
Decision Criteria
Insight #5
Buyer’s Journey
Internal and Confidential

Buyer Persona: Banking Industry/CFO
Insight #1 - Priority Initiative: What priorities or business environment triggers the buyers investment in this type of solution?
The regulators are pushing hard for a lot of additional information and the required turnaround time is getting shorter so we have to start investing today. The bigger and older the bank is, the bigger the issue. If you got a small bank, it can be relatively easy to dissect the data. But if the bigger banks don't have uniform systems, and they have legacy systems, that's where you get the issues. So it's not automatically linked to size, it's more linked to the systems and their age.
###
It’s all about regulatory pressure. These systems are the backbone of getting us good results on stress tests. The four super center banks and some others continue to be exposed to stress tests that change every quarter. And as they do, the scrambling that happens behind the scenes to get the right data... it's pretty massive.
Buyer Persona
Description
Insight #1
Priority Initiative
© 2014 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
Is IFRS a driver? Yes, but that's not the main driver. The critical piece is you want standardized data management ... a single source of truth. You want data entered into a system once and only once. You want nothing but systemic handling of the data subsequent to that.
You want to go for a very low touch automated solution.
###
Ever since the financial crisis there's a lot of reporting requirements to securities and investment portfolios that come out of risk systems, which don't automatically reconcile to the GL. When you report to external sources, they say, "Well, this is what we see in your financial reporting and this is what we see in your risk data, and how do you control your risk if those numbers don't really reconcile ?“
Insight #2
Success Definition
Insight #3
Perceived Barrier
Compliance with US GAAP and IFRS standards, finance transformation, while it's been going on for quite a while, has become a key thing at big banks because they have to meet increasing reporting and regulatory requirements in an era of flat to negative revenue environment.
###
Everybody expects that all the banks will increase profits of 10%, 15%, 20% each year. That's not sustainable. That's why this is in focus now.
###
Reality is, the business does not generate as much revenue as it used to, and as a result there's more cost pressure today than there has ever been.
Insight #4
Decision Criteria
Insight #5
Buyer’s Journey
Internal and Confidential

Buyer Persona: Banking Industry/CFO
Insight # 2 - Success Definition: What results or outcomes does this buyer persona expect from a new investment in this type of solution?
The big point is about making sure we're compliant with Basel. We have a team of people in Tampa working with businesses in operations technology.
###
A stronger financial control system (multi-
GAAP, multi-currency, w/one version of the truth for internal, external reporting).
We’ll have the efficiency of a single approved source so you don't have to do multiple instances of data entry, input, reporting, and reconciliations.
###
It needs to give us more efficiency, better standardization, more accurate reporting, and be cheaper.
We expect to cut cost in finance dramatically by reducing redundant roles and moving non-client facing roles to lowcost locations.
###
It's been a stated goal since the beginning: finance expenses year over year need to go down, and the amount we produce goes up. That's been going on now for several years, and that's going to continue to be the case. And my guess is you'll hear the same thing out of anybody at JP Morgan, US Bank, Wells
Fargo or any one of the big banks
.
###
We are committed to having a 10% reduction in FTE year over year.
Convert North American consumer banking systems (credit cards, branch banking, commercial banking, mortgages, other lending) to one database. The dashboard is the centerpiece of everything: Transactions feed the product processor. The product processor feeds the ledger. The ledger feeds a global corporate system.
###
Have one place where people can go to do all of the necessary accounting, reporting, tax and analysis.
Buyer Persona
Description
Insight #1
Priority Initiative
© 2014 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
Insight #2
Success Definition
Insight #3
Perceived Barrier
Insight #4
Decision Criteria
Insight #5
Buyer’s Journey
Internal and Confidential

Buyer Persona: Banking Industry/CFO
Insight #3 - Perceived Barriers: What attitudes or concerns prevent this buyer from addressing this priority, or from purchasing this solution from SAP?
The big challenge is the whole data governance aspect of getting the data...
Finding the data, validating the data, agreeing on what that structure is going to capture.
###
The more details you want, the more details you need, the more complex it becomes. And the more complex it becomes, the more of an overhead it is to the process. And the more overhead it is, the more resistance you have from the organizations.
###
It is difficult for us to state the process elements of the data truth in any coherent manner.
Buyer Persona
Description
Insight #1
Priority Initiative
© 2014 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
The challenge is that every organization has their own view of what that truth should be and what their business requirements are. You can't really go out and purchase this in a box and install it.
###
The different people watching out for these regulation changes, the statutes, the way the policies are written...there are specialized groups, both in the
Accounting group as well as in the Risk
Compliance and Legal groups. Any time you expand your scope it gets messy.
And large banks have an especially messy way of doing things.
###
It is difficult because the mortgage business has a different set of requirements than the credit card business, and then there is another different set for retail banking.
Insight #2
Success Definition
Insight #3
Perceived Barrier
When you just have to deal with multiple exchange rates (like smaller banks), that's not too hard. It's when you have multiple regulatory environments... Now you're starting to get into something that's challenging. What we might call revenue, and would properly report under
US GAAP as revenue, could be an expense in Japan. It's complicated.
###
Is this really important? If you don't have international business you wouldn't spend the time and money to do it at this point. You would just follow the natural convergence task flow. There's not going to be a single version of IFRS. There's going to be the US adopted version of
IFRS, which may or may not be the same as what the UK uses and everybody else.
Insight #4
Decision Criteria
Insight #5
Buyer’s Journey
Internal and Confidential

Buyer Persona: Banking Industry/CFO
Insight #4 - Decision Criteria: Which aspects of the solution or vendor does this buyer persona evaluate as they compare alternative approaches/vendors?
While you're combining silos, it doesn't mean that the silos here are constant.
And our view of the organization today is not what our view of the organization is going to be down the road. And so our decision is based on its flexibility to accommodate future changes without starting over again.
###
We selected a solution based on which one really understood where we wanted to get to and gave the best roadmap to get there. We needed a partner and not just a system.
There's going to be multiple flavors of
IFRS so it's extremely important that any system have the ability to handle multiple sets of books seamlessly.
###
Must link into Sarbanes-Oxley, all kinds of control grids, and a risk-related framework that maps our past exposure and newer pieces of regulations.
SAP and Oracle are both important vendors and so selecting one is going to hurt our relationship with the other.
Ultimately, it is the CEO's call.
We work with each team, figure out what their needs are and then try to balance that with the corporate objective of standardizing the account structure across the company.
###
We had technical requirements and functional requirements...two assessment streams that ultimately came together.
###
You can't have 15 unique systems. You have to have one system that all 15 businesses can use.
Buyer Persona
Description
Insight #1
Priority Initiative
© 2014 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
Insight #2
Success Definition
Insight #3
Perceived Barrier
Insight #4
Decision Criteria
Insight #5
Buyer’s Journey
Internal and Confidential

Buyer Persona: Banking Industry/CFO
Insight #5 – Buyer’s Journey: What is this buyer persona's role in this decision and who else will be involved?
We were taking re-engineering to another level. We created a standalone group to run the projects. We appointed global process owners for key pieces of financial processes. This combined force drives strategy, policy, initiatives projects.
Everything that supports and stands behind our bank's day-to-day numbers, we run.
###
Aiding us was an internal group called
Accounting Policy which was dedicated to studying the US GAAP and any adverse standards. These five people were exclusively focused on this.
###
The stakeholders: For each country, there is a financial organization responsible for both local and consolidated reporting. And then our technology groups that exist both on a corporate basis and on a local jurisdiction basis had to be involved.
We mapped every single process, came up with control points, sat down with our finance people, wrote down things, built maps, put them in our enterprise system..
###
We looked at the financial management reporting systems across the globe and embarked on projects to improve them.
###
We got project support from Deloitte and other big four firms to look at how various systems feed the ledgers, making sure that in fixing all of this or refurbishing, we didn't break anything.
We had committees that represented the business units. The CIO and CFO noted different needs of their different organizations and their perspective. In a typical project, IT would have basically taken a mandate from a senior sponsor and run with that. In this case, it was getting consensus across the entire technology organization, which is 8,000 people globally.
###
When you're getting into the hard decisions on what system to buy, how to implement it, the most influential people are the consultants. Probably Deloitte
Global more than any, PwC, second,
Ernst & Young, KPMG, Accenture. I find those guys actually to be the more influential than the Oracles of the world,
SAS, whoever else. Once you make a decision, it's usually done with the consultants.
Buyer Persona
Description
Insight #1
Priority Initiative
© 2014 SAP AG. All rights reserved.
Insight #2
Success Definition
Insight #3
Perceived Barrier
Insight #4
Decision Criteria
Insight #5
Buyer’s Journey
Internal and Confidential