Accelerating Growth: The Role of Technology in Fast-Growing Businesses

In the world of a fast-growing business, speed is everything. Amidst the maelstrom of rapid growth it’s those who can act swiftly on their ideas that are able to get ahead and stay ahead. 

When every second counts, technology has a vital role to play in shaping the trajectory of organisations. It's not merely a tool for incremental improvements; it's the driving force behind transformational change, redefining business models, and unlocking new possibilities.

We recently sat down with finance leaders from across Europe to understand the significant role technology plays when time is of the essence. From using data analytics as the basis for strategic decisions, to embracing emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, progressive CFOs know that technology can act as both a catalyst and a compass, guiding organisations through complexity while simultaneously propelling them forwards.

One team, one perspective

Simon Gatland is the chief accounting officer and global head of finance at Apex Group. Founded 20 years ago, it’s a Bermuda-based fund administration business providing professional services to hedge funds. The vision of its CEO and founder, Peter Hughes, was to become the number one independent fund administrator in the world. Since 2017, it has been on an M&A growth trajectory, averaging an acquisition every 45 days and completing 43 in the last 5 years. It now employs 12,000 people across 97 offices, in more than 30 countries.

Apex Group hasn’t had a centralised platform before which has made life difficult for Gatland and his team. He gives the example of a business Apex recently acquired in Luxembourg, and the complexity this brought to his organisation. “We bought them five years ago and we’re still in a process whereby we're manually extracting hundreds of thousands of transactions from their banking ledgers into what is essentially an Excel-based process. We then pivot that up, and import that through at least five different steps to put it into our current ERP system and then surface all that data. We're at a position, at the moment, whereby we have to do that with nearly every single acquisition because we haven't been able to ingest that data in a seamless manner.” 

Gatland’s role is to support the CFO, trying to analyse the financial performance of all the businesses within the group. The problem he faces is that each acquisition comes with their own financial, HR and CRM systems and so it’s partnering with Workday to re-platform its whole business and look at a much more consistent way of working across all these different businesses.

Gatland sees Workday as the key part of the jigsaw in terms of turning the finance team into strategic advisors who can create value for the business. “At the moment, it takes us about a month to close the books properly. And so obviously, the finance teams are endlessly doing month end.” This makes it harder to create value for the organisation Gatland says, “because all we're doing is bookkeeping and all we're doing is that financial reporting piece - it becomes quite hard to be the business partner and actually try and drive the success of that business.” Gatland says the same is true from an HR perspective. “We've got 73 different payroll providers. Each of those have manual processes. So what Workday gives us is the ability to bolt in all these different services and have it in one coherent system so we can surface trends and use all the tools in a much more seamless manner across the campus.”

Removing friction

Man Group is a well established organisation, grounded in tradition. Many years ago, it used to be the supplier of rum to the Navy but today it’s an alternative investment manager. It went live with Workday in 2019, initially, with Workday Financial Management and Human Capital Management. Since then, it’s added more including Workday Adaptive Planning and Talent Management. 

Tim Perkins is in charge of the company’s corporate technology, which includes a number of different areas of the business including finance and HR. He’s had around 20 years’ experience of working with accounting software. When Man Group went through the selection process for a new Finance and HR platform, Tim and his team looked at most of the things on the market, he said. “They looked pretty similar to the systems that I was implementing 20 years ago, with the exception of Workday, which looked different and was clearly architected differently. It had a much better story in terms of that underlying architecture, and you could see that it was one product. When I spoke to the other vendors, you could see that it was things bolted together that had been acquired over the years.”

How has Workday made it easier for Man Group to grow? When it comes to organic growth, Tim says it’s all about removing friction. “There's plenty of things that slow you down. You don't want one of those to be your HR system or your finance side. One of the elements of Workday that's particularly powerful is its business process framework. We've been able to use that to design optimal processes so that we've got the key approvals, the key steps, architected correctly.”

And when it comes to growth through acquisition, Tim says the integration framework is helping to make that quicker. “It provides a very good way of getting data into the system. Workday's got a very extensive library of data uploads and when you're acquiring a new company, being able to get that data in quickly is extremely valuable.” He also cites the data model as something that helps to accelerate acquisitions. “I've worked with a lot of other systems and when you set up a new company, you've got to replicate all of the static data, which is a chore, as well as making the system much less efficient for queries. Whereas with Workday, company is another attribute, albeit one with some particular characteristics. But it means that it's much more efficient for us to acquire new companies.”

The unexpected benefits of unity

Before moving to Workday, Man Group had separate finance and HR systems. And at the start of the implementation, Tim looked at the interactions between the two old systems and found they were relatively limited - there was some integration around payroll feeds and expenses, but not much else, he said. “When we started the Workday implementation, I thought, it's going to be nice to have them on the same platform, but not really transformative. But actually, the reality has been very different, and the synergies that we've had have been much greater than I was expecting.”

He highlights the obvious benefits, like users having one login for both systems and having a consistent view of headcount between finance and HR, but says they uncovered unexpected benefits as they went forward. “So for example, for approvals around invoices and procurement card transactions, if something's been outstanding for a while, we can then escalate that up through the management chain, which is a very efficient way of actually getting those approvals done.” It’s also made it easier for Tim and his team to plan better for growth. “Our financial, people and headcount modeling is much more integrated. So we can get a better feel for the effect of hiring more people or headcount growth within the budget cycle than we would have been able to before.”

Sam Allen, the finance transformation director at Checkout.com, agrees. The payment service has been around since 2009, and currently employs 2,000 people with offices all over the world. It counts some of the world’s biggest businesses amongst its customers, including Netflix, Sony and Sainsbury's.

Checkout.com first went live with Workday Financial Management in January of 2022. A few months after that, it bought Workday Accounting Centre and went live with the first use case in September of 2022. A few weeks after that, it went live with Workday Adaptive Planning for its budgeting and forecasting processes. And then about a week later, it went live with Workday HCM.

As a full suite Workday customer since 2022, Allen says that Checkout.com has reaped similar benefits before highlighting how it’s helped to bring different parts of the business closer together. “I know I've gotten a lot closer to the HR team who are even here today because we're on the same platform and in the same tenant. The things that they do impact us, and the things that we do impact them. So we need to stay quite close and be talking about what each other's doing. We can learn from each other around how we're managing the Workday platforms in our respective areas, which I've found really helpful.”

Unlocking future growth

For Simon Gatland it’s all about making Apex Group as efficient as it can be. As a private equity-backed group, it’s important to have a platform that will enable it to exit in the near future. “And the way to do that is to be really efficient,” he says.

As a professional services organisation, efficiency largely means being able to match revenue with the work done by employees. “The nirvana we're trying to work to, is we've got a pipeline of sales in Salesforce and we want to be able to feed that through and, in real-time, match that to our resource allocations. So we're taking our sales data, looking at our pipeline, looking at our probability, looking at our geographical split for that, taking that all the way through Workday, looking at that in Adaptive Planning, looking at that from a resource planning perspective, and linking that in with the HR hiring decisions.”

That would enable Apex Group to launch a new client and accurately see in real time where it needs to upskill or add resource, he says. "This is a journey that we're going on and the end vision is to make sure we can join everything together and present a unified picture to the board who, on a near-real-time basis, are then able to act on the information.”

At Checkout.com, Sam Allen says he is looking to make the organisation as agile as it can be. “You put in place these strategies and plans and system architectures that can be looking forward two, three, sometimes five years. But within that, you need to be able to flex to changes in the business and in the industry.” He says that Checkout.com can change a lot day-to-day. “We need to be able to flex our implementations and transformation programs accordingly so that we can make sure that we're meeting and addressing those business needs.