Acin are an award-winning Fintech company specialising in a data-driven approach to operational risk & control. Acin is the global data

network for operational risk & control with their platform allowing firms to compare themselves to peers by product or region, revealing poor quality data and missing controls with loss / penalty potential.  Backed by global banks, Acin aims to make the financial system safer and transform the industry’s approach to operational risk control through the use of data.

 

Previously, Acin’s Finance Team had to manually produce centralized, top-down budgets in Excel. This proved to be time-consuming and difficult to scale as the business grew. Upon being published, the budgets often needed to be updated and because of the constraints of Excel, it was a time consuming exercise for the finance team.

 

Phil Swords, Finance Director at Acin says, “Before Anaplan, it took many working days to grind out the plans. Each new version would require redrafting and triple-checking. If we wanted to see an assumption or driver change this could take up to a couple of days to populate the changes and get to the revised impact. This was unsustainable because the industry we work in is extremely dynamic and with key assumptions changing from one quarter to the next.

 

Initially we went out to market and looked at the so called ‘3rd Generation FP&A Tools’ but quickly realised they wouldn’t meet our needs as we grew, particularly because they were heavily reliant on ‘Excel Plug Ins’, which we wanted to get away from. We came across Anaplan and it was quickly apparent it was the premium solution in the marketplace that could accommodate our near term and long term needs.”

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With Anaplan and GrowQ’s support, Acin was able to setup automated, real-time plans that capture all of the key drivers of the business. This included an integrated 3 Statement Model, more granular hiring plans, and resource budgets including all people, their roles, their associated capital expenditure driving through to the Cash Flow in real-time. It also included a Management Reporting process that contained the metrics that turn the needle in the business: P&L Performance By Team, ARR – additions, subtractions, churn, and easier comparisons of actuals against forecast and budget with the ability to spin off What If Scenarios.

 

Joseph Swei, Director at GrowQ adds, “Working with Phil and the team was an absolute pleasure. They were able to articulate their key challenges clearly, allowing us to drive and create robust Anaplan designs that simplified, but also optimised their Business Planning Process.

Our approach is to always deliver more, and with a client like Acin who are advocates of transformational change, it made this transition into Anaplan seamless.

Out of the box’ thinking was a key theme to our delivery approach to ensure that we pushed the capabilities of Anaplan to the max. The easiest clients to work with are those who want to leverage Anaplan’s true capability and bring to the table a no limits mindset, which is exactly what Acin delivered!  We were able to implement an E2E FP&A Planning Model that was complimented with Forecasting Driver Sensitivity Analysis, Scenario Planning, MA Reporting Packs, and real time Actualisation impact analysis.”

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From an Anaplan perspective there isn’t much more you can ask for. Pete Dixon, Commercial Manager, Anaplan UK sums it up: “Anaplan is thrilled to be an integral part of Acin’s growth trajectory and I’m happy to see Acin reaping the benefits of our Connected Planning Platform as part of their digital transformation!”

For more information about this article please contact either pete.dixon@anaplan.com or joseph.swei@growq.co.uk

 

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