Flash Group, an African financial technology (fintech) company, provides access to digital products and services to everyone, everywhere, by connecting buyers and sellers of digital products and services through tailored technology solutions. This end-to-end solution portfolio can complicate company-wide financial planning. Adopting Anaplan enabled Flash to accelerate processes, build data-powered scenarios to support decision-making, and create a transparent, comprehensive view of Flash’s financial outlook.

Flash Group provides access to digital products and services to everyone, everywhere. Its end-to-end financial technology (fintech) solutions focus on three areas: accelerating economic inclusion for consumers, providing business tools and networks to small and medium businesses, and delivering seamless technology integrations to corporate partners.  “The purpose of what we do is to make people’s lives easier,” says Michael Snow, Business Process Automation Specialist at Flash.

“We need to keep ahead of our competitors by using cutting-edge technologies and offering the best deals to our customers,” adds Yaseen Enos, Senior Finance Planning, Innovations, and Automations Manager at Flash. “New contracts and deals are always being structured differently.” But that constant change — coupled with the company’s multiple service lines, which operate independently and follow their own processes — made it challenging to capture a complete picture of company performance. Financial planners at headquarters worked late at night to prepare reports and budgets before board meetings. But in spite of those efforts, business leaders had questions around how changes in contracts affected working capital and cash flow.

Taking a fresh perspective

To better understand current and future company performance, Flash implemented Anaplan for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and budgeting. Enos and his team now create income statements and conduct driver-based reporting for Flash verticals, down to the individual product level, using Anaplan. “You can combine so much information in Anaplan to create very rich insights and ‘what-if’ analyses for a range of different scenarios,” notes Snow. “It helps our teams add value to the business.” 

While Flash uses Anaplan in the finance department, the platform’s impact ripples throughout the business. “Every type of planning that we do has a financial impact, so we integrate with the rest of the business,” explains Enos. “Our goal is to have our entire business on Anaplan so that, when a decision is made one business unit, we can see what means for our cash flow, our financial performance, and our balance sheet.”

Getting a complete picture

Using Anaplan, Flash’s financial analysts can work faster, more accurately, and in greater detail, even as the company’s offerings and the business environment changes. “We are able to complete our financial forecast cycles much, much quicker,” Enos says. “Working in Anaplan has vastly improved the accuracy of our forecasts and enabled us to forecast in much more detail than we could in the past.”

Having a unified financial platform also makes the work more pleasant. “We recently completed our three-year plan in Anaplan, and I’ve never seen a planning cycle go so smoothly,” Enos says. “In the past we had to reconcile the numbers after the board meetings,” but those tasks are no longer necessary because the teams can process the data in real time.

Looking ahead, the Flash team sees the value of bringing more of the business onto Anaplan. “Data enables our company to make better decisions, and with Anaplan we can connect financial and operational data for a single source of truth,” concludes Enos. “I’m looking forward to connecting even more of the Flash Group on Anaplan so we have a complete, end-to-end view of our business.”