Business Planning Manager
TechAccess FZ LLC
Total years of experience :7 years, 4 Months
TechAccess is a leading value-added IT distributor, providing end-to-end business solutions to the enterprise and mid-market sectors with operations in over 16 countries across the Middle East, Levant and North Africa.
Key Job Responsibilities:
Directly reporting to the COO, my role as Business Planning Manager included:
•Annual Operating Plan (Budgeting & Forecasting): Preparation and review of Annual Operating Plan including end-to-end budgeting and forecasting for the entire company along with handling quarterly, half-yearly and yearly business reviews with Geo-Heads/Management and champion key business initiatives across TechAccess.
•Monitoring Performance: Act as a gate-keeper by continuously monitoring and analyzing the sales and financial performance of Tech Access Business Group and highlighting alarming trends to Management.
•Meeting Annual Targets: Work jointly with all TA departments and offices to ensure meeting annual targets with critical analysis on key business indicators. Also, work with Finance and Sales departments on the requirements from banks and other institutions.
•Assisting COO in taking decisions for TA: Carrying out several analyses and keeping track of company progress from various financial and strategic aspects while analyzing business cases and helping management to take sound business decisions and judgements.
Because of my steep learning curve and exceptional performance, in Aug’16 I was moved to Group Business Performance team and handled Costs (including Budgets/Forecasts) for ENBD Group.
Key Job Responsibilities (Group Business Performance):
•Budgeting & Forecasting: Budgeting and forecasting for various support units of ENBD- Risk, Finance, Marketing, Compliance, Legal, CEO Office, ITO International Support units etc.
•Actuals Comparisons against Budget and MoM: Monitoring costs across ENBD units by analyzing movements in costs on a daily basis. Writing daily PL cost commentaries to be circulated to Top Management.
•Preparation of packs/decks and commentaries: Monthly preparation of packs and decks to be circulated to Executive Committee on a monthly basis including Flash comments for comparison for MoM variances and against the budget. Preparation of other decks such as Staff Cost analysis for all ENBD subsidiaries.
Key Job Responsibilities (Wealth Management Finance):
•Segments and Products Performance Analysis: Monitoring and analyzing actual performance against annual financial plans and budgets using various MIS reports and tools for WM entities.
•Decks and Dashboards: Preparing monthly performance decks and dashboards for Flash reports, Finance Digests, RM Performance, CEO packs etc.
•NNM Analysis: Analyzing Net New Money numbers including deposits, advances, investments, share of fee income, share of NII, total revenue etc. brought in by various RMs.
•RM Performance Analysis: Releasing the monthly RM performance report after considering the out-of-book adjustments provided by the RMs (due to NNM outflow/withdrawal which happened beyond their control). Preparation of RM Performance Target presentations on a monthly basis for review by top management.
•Financial Planning Analysis: Assisting in Budgeting, forecasting and preparing/consolidating the financial plans for the WM entities at a Group Level.
•Monthly reports and trackers: Preparing several ad-hoc reports such as Fee Income Accounts balances on a weekly basis, shadow entries, one-off entries over the month, MARS recon, accruals revenue from structured products, various types of comparisons, introducer fee workings, handling invoices for their payments etc.
Directly reporting to AVP, developed myself as the subject-matter expert for HSBC MENA Region in global management processes, systems & compliance.
Key Job Responsibilities (MI & Financial Reporting):
•Month End-Reporting: Manage month-end close reporting for (5 out of 10) Middle Eastern countries, including production of profit & loss statements, balance sheets, end-of-month statements, volume forecast and analysis reports, responsibility matrix, monthly plan of action reports, training reports etc.
•Financial Statements Overview: Review balance sheets and P&L accounts from trial balances with the sub ledgers on a monthly basis to identify mismatches before closure of books during month-ends.
•Monthly MIS: Maintain MIS for the Middle East entities by conducting activities such as management of cost center, cost center statistics, FTE statistics, product serials, value types, credit facilities, market sectors, customer management & reporting, recharges related activities and understanding the nuances of HSBC Universal Banking system (HUB) which is the GL System.
•Financial Planning: Support the Financial Controller in Financial Planning & Analysis in terms of consolidation and submission of Annual Operating Plan for the next year, monthly forecasting and variance analysis of Actual v/s Forecast.
•Supporting Decision Making: Review reports covering MoM actual and YTD budget, forecast v/s actual variance analysis, provide adequate comments and assist in business decision making for improving business profitability.
•New MI Solutions and SOPs: Design new MI Reporting solutions as per business requirements. Ensure that a robust management information system is in place to cater to the needs of the business segments of the Bank. Prepare detailed SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures) for the processes.
•Managing Change Requests: Manage complex, non-routine processing and change requests. Provide functional and technical expertise to support the “go live” and “post go live” activities including training, troubleshooting and issue resolution.
Project Management:
•MENA Region:
•Implemented from scratch the reporting process for Jordan, Algeria & Egypt for seamless group reporting and received accolades from management for exemplary performance.
•Project Lead for various projects such as cost reports implementation, new FTE structure implementation, notional cost recovery project and products standardization across Middle Eastern entities which helped in saving as much as 75-80 hours per week for the team.
•Singapore Region: Was given an opportunity to implement business processes in Singapore region. Implemented 20-25 new activities in the process for seamless business reporting each month.
•Global Financial Center: Selected for independently and exclusively working on a ‘Travel Cost Rationalization’ project for GFC, headed by the Vice-President of the Vertical. The agenda of the project was to minimize the travel costs incurred by the Centre by implementing cost rationalization policies for the staff members and the travel desk. Managed to save approximately USD 20, 000 per quarter through this particular project.
involved researching key areas of consumer behavior (qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic) and then producing deliverables based on the findings.
Key Job Responsibilities (Consulting and Research):
•Thought Partner to Clients: Served as a thought partner to consultants and supported them in their research needs spanning all industries, through problem solving sessions to weigh the hypotheses, gauge the depth of available information, devise alternatives and develop recommendations in areas such as market entry, strategy and value chain analysis
•Primary and Secondary Research: Conduct significant amount of primary and secondary research including company insight analysis, root-cause analysis, competitor benchmarking, tracking and SWOT Analysis. Understanding profitability margins and assessing the impact of macroeconomic trends on businesses.
•Studying Several Industries: Understand consumer market questions by generating hypothesis, sizing various industries, analyzing sizeable shares of major players, searching data evidence to produce insights and research papers.
•Company Analysis: Analyze several companies in the Middle East by studying their financial statistics, marketing dynamics, entry/exit strategies, possible M&A deals, partnerships, joint ventures, etc. and prepare analysis to prove hypothesis by problem solving with them to arrive at concrete results.
Did a summer Internship project as part of MBA on the topic "Relationship between Earnings Surprise and the Stock Price Volatility" and got A grade for the same.
