FP&A Today

With more than 20 years of experience helping startups scale from seed to series B, Maria Azatyan has built architectures for companies across ai, robotics and the new space economy, translating complex technologies into numbers. This is coupled with her frank perspective as a single mother balancing finance leadership and advising startups.  Sci-fi Dreams Made Real: sharing experiences with Waymo...

Joyce Li, CEO, and chief AI strategist at Averanda Partners, brings a rare combination: CFA charter holder, computer science graduate, MBA from Wharton, Board advisor on AI. She advises on multi-billion dollar investment strategies and works with boards and C-suites on AI strategy, governance, and adoption.  The power of Excel in an AI age The ROI of AI and what boards want to see  15% as the magi...

Rohini Jain leads finance strategy at BILL,  which delivers strategic finance capabilities in one integrated platform including AP, AR, expenses and procurement. She has more than 20 years of experience shaping and leading finance, product, and operations teams at global fintech, payments, and e-commerce companies including at PayPal, eBay, Walmart and General Electric.  She spoke to us ahead of t...

The opening voice on a Lyft earnings call is that of Aurelien Nolf, VP, FP&A and Investor Relations at the ride-hailing firm. He holds a dual role managing the 60-person FP&A, finance analysts, and investor team with access to billions of data points looking at the mode, price,drivers, frequency and demand for current offerings– and much-anticipated future services – such as robotaxis.  In...

Chikako Tyler is the Chief Operating Officer at California Bank & Trust (CB&T). She began her career at the leading California bank in 2010, starting as risk manager, progressing tos trategic planning and analysis (spanning seven revenue divisions and 150 units), before serving seven years as Chief Financial Officer revealing . Here she reveals the strategic leadership as the bank grew, fr...

As a fractional CFO and financial advisor, Carl Seidman, a returning guest, has worked with finance teams at some of the world’s most recognized companies, helping them strengthen forecasting, cash flow management, and strategic decision-making. He also teaches several top-rated online courses including the FP&A Mastery Signature Program.  My first fire-drill, creating a cash flow in one week ...

Peter Lynch is the founder of ASimpleModel.com and serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Stephen Gould. He has worked in private equity for most of his professional career at Rabobank, JP Morgan, Argenta Partners and Hilltop Holdings. But he’s perhaps best known for turning complex financial concepts into clear accessible lessons through ASimpleModel.com. JP Morgan in Buenos Aires Crazy models durin...

Andrew Polito is VP, Controller at Go HQ which provides a suite of back office services, including recruiting to delivery companies. The Fort Worth-based company provides back office support for transportation and logistics, seeing 500% growth in five years, earning a spot on the Inc 5,000 list of fastest- growing private companies in America.  In this episode: From audit to shifting to a private...

Mariya Guttoh is  Director of FP&A and Treasury at PayJoy, a global FinTech company expanding credit access through smartphones to underserved customers in emerging markets. Celebrating 10 years this year , the company has served over 15 million customers and is on track to reach $650 million in revenue and $110 million in profit by the end of 2025. In this episode Mariya traces her steps from...

Akhil Khunger, VP Quantitative Analytics, Barclays, has more than ten years of experience in the field. Akhil develops statistical models to forecast balance sheets, revenue and probability of default. He has experience with time series modeling, statistical modeling, machine learning and building implementation frameworks using Python and other programming languages. Akhil, who has a master’s in...

Esti Levy Dadon, Executive VP Finance, Fiverr ,started in public accounting at Ernst and Young, before leading the finance function at Fiverrr. Since joining the global marketplace in 2016 she steered the company to a successful IPO in 2019. In her words: “In almost 10 years at Fiverr  I’m still waiting for things to be boring and repeatable, but it never happens because things change all the time...

What do FP&A professionals need to understand about data work and BI and the work that BI is doing? Marcos Bento, Director BI, at Wasabi Technologies: “They need to translate business requests in English in a way that the BI folks can translate that into codes. That’s where the magic happens.” In part two of our deep dive with Marcos Bento (BI) and David Suter (FP&A) from Wasabi Technologi...

Wasabi Technologies (a Boston-based cloud storage company with over $530M in funding, a decade of hypergrowth, 450+ team members, and multiple exabytes of storage deployed) sets high standards for its finance and analytics teams.  Both teams are under pressure to deliver fast, accurate, and actionable insights. Marcos Bento, Director Business Intelligence at Wasabi Technologies and David Suter, Di...

Daniel Gardner is operational finance business partner at FirstGroup Plc, a leading UK-based provider of public transport. Daniel brings a unique perspective shaped by a diverse finance career across iconic consumer brands like L’Oreal, the Body Shop and Hunter Boots, where he led major forecasting overhauls and drove commercial transformation. Now at First Group, he is leading the development of...

Sarah Schlott, Senior Director of Finance at Tray, a leading point of sale system in entertainment,  joins Glenn Hopper to tear down the sacred rituals of corporate finance. Rising from billing temp to strategic finance leader, Schlott who has been in corporate finance for 18 years, delivers brutal honesty about what’s broken in FP&A and how to fix it. She challenges everything from annual bud...

Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. Connagh shares her fascinating and unconventional journey from working on the global licensing for  “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to navigating Australia’s energy transformation. In this episode:  Who Wants To be a Millionaire success (powered by Lotus123) The Co...

Matt Hudson became CFO of Grammarly – the popular writing assistant tool –  after the company acquired Coda (a productivity tool)- of which he was a founding member.  Now as CFO at Grammarly he is overseeing rapid change at the company which has over 40 million daily active users and $700m in revenue (and a 50 person finance team). Finance is helping pioneer a company vision of  AI redefining ever...

Lauren Pearl is a Business Strategist and CFO Advisor who helps startup teams build data-driven businesses. The 3x founder with over 13 years of startup leadership experience now serves as CFO, advisor, and instructor for over 300 growing companies. She also runs the podcast “Growth Minded CFO” and offers a free course on financial modeling. In this episode: Financial models at startups Sniffing o...

Today’s guest barely needs an introduction. Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing everything he learns working with Excel training hundreds of finance teams, and had roles including as Data Lead, Remuneration Modeling & Analytics for the New Zealand government.  The 16-time Microsoft MVP runs Chandoo.org , which aims to...

In this special episode Glenn is joined by Nate Saperia to answer the 10 most burning questions in FP&A. Nate brings nearly 20 years of finance experience including at Accordion, Spruce Finance, Hess Corporation and GE. At Saperia Consulting Nate specializes in real-time dashboards, financial planning, and interim CFO/FP&A leadership.  The questions: Q1: How can I use AI in FP&A? Q2: W...

Australian-born Luke Mulcahy started in FP&A at larger businesses including Coates Group (internet leader in Sydney) and manufacturing company Sherwin-Williams. But for nearly 4 years he has loved having “wow” moments of finance insights with smaller companies. closer to the $5-10million range, where powerful insights are taken straight from finance to the CFO. In his words: “You can have thos...

This special episode formed part of  FP&A Con 2025  which saw a record-breaking 1500 registrants.  The guests: Nathan Bell, Managing Partner, VAi Consulting, is among the most in-demand experts. Bell has unique experience– having started in computer science, before leading finance teams at Native American Bank, Digital Media Trends and Gartner– where he advised hundreds of FP&A teams facin...

This episode is 53 minutes packed with practical Excel insights for an FP&A practitioner and Excel advocate at the top of his game. Jeff Gudim is a senior financial analyst, Excel evangelist and hardcore financial model architect at Strategic Education, listed on the NASDAQ and which owns for-profit, online Capella University and Strayer University, Jeff made the leap from private wealth manag...

In this masterclass Shifra Isaacs, developer Relations Advocate at Ascend.io, delves into her experience as data scientist, technical writer, and support lead providing fresh insights for FP&A and finance professionals. In this episode: Data science vs business analytics  Pulling data not yet able to be modeled  Python for Excel  The right models for risk scoring, variance analysis and forecas...

Taylor Otstot, Vice President Finance,  Dashlane joined GoDaddy (now a $30billion valued) domain registry, domain registrar and web hosting company before their IP. In 8 years he climbed to senior Director of Finance running an FP&A team of 14. From this experience and as VP Finance at DashLane he says he hires for 3 things: curiosity, ambition, and finance leaders who are service-oriented. “I...