Building Commercial Finance and Data Management

01

The mandate

At SHBFinance, my remit as Unit Head covered building Commercial Finance and Data Management. The two capabilities needed to support product planning, performance analysis and executive decisions with a consistent view of the underlying economics.

This was a function-building assignment as well as an analytical one. The required output included financial models and management reporting, supported by data foundations that could be used across recurring decisions.

02

My ownership

I built and led the capabilities, establishing planning and reporting foundations, centralized decision data and financial frameworks. The scope included product projections, long-term planning and the use of lifetime value and contract-level profitability in Board-level discussions.

My role was to connect the analysis with the management question and make the product economics usable. Building contract-level P&L is evidence of this decision-support scope; it does not imply ownership of the company’s full P&L.

03

Connecting the foundations

• Planning: connect product assumptions, volume expectations and economics in scenarios for launches and longer-term decisions.
• Data: establish a centralized foundation for management information and recurring reporting.
• Economics: use contract-level P&L and LTV to make the implications of product choices visible.
• Management reporting: frame the analysis around the decision, its alternatives and the assumptions that matter.

04

The practical trade-off

Building a new capability requires both useful outputs and a foundation that supports the next request. Financial analysis needs enough detail to expose the economics, while a management discussion needs a clear view of the choice and its implications.

The connection between Commercial Finance and Data Management was important here: data and reporting supported the economic analysis, and the business questions helped define what the information foundation needed to provide.

05

What changed

The work established planning, management reporting and centralized decision-data capabilities. LTV and contract-level P&L were introduced into Board-level product and investment decisions, with financial models supporting product launches and long-term planning.

The evidence in this case is the capability built and its use in management decisions. I do not attribute a portfolio profit uplift to the function without a separate evaluation that supports that claim.

06

The transferable lesson

A finance or data function becomes more useful when its mandate names the decisions it must improve. Team design, data requirements and reporting cadence can then be organized around those decisions.

This experience informs my product transformation work: agree the economic question, establish the information needed to answer it, and connect the output to a decision owner.