Close your eyes and picture your professional future. If the letters C-F-O come into focus, this is for you.

Why future CFOs? Because the opportunities you’re going to inherit—as well as the persistent challenges and complexities—will be very different from those of today’s, and especially yesterday’s, chief financial officers.

We believe we have something to help you take on these new responsibilities. That’s because our approach to analytics—and our decision intelligence platform—have in many ways been built as a response to the needs of those overseeing the financial well-being of some of the world’s largest and most complex organizations.

Here’s a bit of that story.

Creating the Vision to Solve Pervasive Problems

At the start of my career, I landed a job as a financial analyst for a top-tier multinational bank. Among other (often tedious) work, I was frequently required to do manual, spreadsheet-based data analysis. Not surprisingly, I quickly saw issues with data accuracy and consistency, and these problems went right to the very top. I was able to implement an early business intelligence solution, a precursor to the types of solutions we have today. Still, before long, executive leadership had learned my name and began coming to me directly to get answers to the questions driving the business operations from the financial analytics system I had built.

I eventually enrolled at Yale with an ambitious idea—to bring this type of capability to other business users and use cases. I had seen firsthand the transformative power of applying sophisticated analytics to financial data, as well as the lack of an accessible analytics tool to make it possible.

After developing a specific BI solution for healthcare in the US, I partnered with two people who shared my convictions to take it to ANY type of business—Herbert Ochtman and Omri Kohl—and the rest is history (or history in the making).

Free Your Inner Accountant

The challenges that I witnessed back then are still common, though the particulars have changed. More data is waiting to be analyzed than ever, along with a seemingly endless choice of BI tools that claim to help do so. However, the senior accountants and controllers on the path to CFO still can’t seem to navigate the host of IT- and culture-related challenges that prevent their teams from becoming truly data-driven.

Deloitte and the Association of Accountants and Financial Professionals in Business (IMA) describe the current situation as a “battle”:

[C]ontrollers are often trapped in a box of traditional tasks that anchors them to a less valued brand and prevents them from stepping out to deliver greater value.

Sound familiar? Whether you can admit it or not, my guess is that it does. The great news is that there is a better way.

If you’re interested, then take a look at our new guidebook, Free Your Inner Accountant: Helping aspiring CFOs make intelligent decisions. You’ll learn about how your peers in the industry are solving these finance-related challenges with the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform.

Or, if you prefer a conversation, let’s set up a time to chat. We would love to hear about your own challenges, how you’re solving them, and how Pyramid might help.