EVOLVING TOWARDS THE FINANCE OF THE FUTURE THROUGH DATA AND ANALYTICS

Nantes Kirsten, Director of Financial Analytics CoE, and Matthew MacEwen, VP of Finance Transformation, detail Finance’s change catalysts via data and analytics

Bell is Canada’s largest communications company, providing advanced broadband wireless, TV, Internet, media and business communication services throughout the country. Their purpose is to advance how Canadians connect with each other and the world, enabled by a strategy that builds on their competitive strengths and embraces the new opportunities of the integrated digital future.

Founded in Montréal in 1880, Bell has a long history of connecting Canadians to the people and things that matter. From their earliest days, starting with the telephone, Bell continues to bring generations of Canadians together with the latest technology. Today, Bell is delivering the future to customers with an unmatched infrastructure investment in the best broadband fibre and wireless technologies, including the growing 5G network.

Through Bell for Better, they are investing to create “a better today and a better tomorrow”, by supporting the social and economic prosperity of their communities with a commitment to the highest environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards. This includes the Bell Let’s Talk initiative, which promotes Canadian mental health with national awareness and anti-stigma campaigns like Bell Let’s Talk Day, and significant Bell funding of community care and access, research and workplace leadership initiatives throughout the country.

Transformations through Data and Analytics

Beginning their finance transformation journey back in 2019 – Bell Finance saw the potential emerging technologies have to fundamentally transform the way that they work and the services that they provide, discerning that data and analytics (D&A) is core to what they do as a finance function. So fundamental, in fact, that they consider D&A and technology adoption to be a cornerstone of their entire transformation, if not the chief driving force behind it.

If you stop to consider what a finance department or an accounting function actually is, you’ll quickly realise that it begins and ends with data and information – and the packaging up of that information to either produce new insights on performance, help develop business forecasts, or to ultimately provide strategic recommendations and services to the organisation as a whole.

“It's really about being able to develop a leading edge practice by moving away from a traditionally federated approach, to instead managing data and analytics by channelling it into a centralised team and a centralised system,” says Matthew MacEwen, VP of Finance, and lead of Finance Transformation initiative at Bell, including the Finance Data and Analytics work stream. “This has really helped our finance function to accelerate its transformation and to have a specific focus, ensuring our entire finance community has access to all of the data that they need in order to carry out their day-to-day jobs, and help drive automation of manual processes.”

In 2019, MacEwen was asked by the CFO to help lead their finance transformation initiative, and to help develop their future state roadmap. At that time, the company had started centralising their CoE and MacEwen was – and still is – the leader of that group. In his D&A role, he leads finance transformation, as well as supporting