Workday Podcast | The Data Equation: Solving for Speed, Scale, and Accuracy in Business Transformation

Nicole Carillo: Welcome to today's episode of Workday Shift: Moving Financial Services Forward. Today, we're diving into the operational complexities of business transformation, particularly around data. As the business terrain shifts rapidly and opportunities demand lightning speed reactions, the ability to quickly extract intelligence from financial data has become a critical competitive advantage. It's about transforming raw numbers into actionable insights and getting that golden nugget of information into the hands of the CFO, pronto.

Carillo: Success depends on data integrity, but there's more data than ever, particularly when businesses scale fast. CIOs are at the forefront of this challenge, tasked with ensuring data quality and accessibility while meeting ever tightening reporting deadlines. We'll explore the systems, tools and strategies they can use to maintain data integrity without sacrificing speed. We'll look at ways financial leaders can enhance data coherence, making it actionable and accessible at a moment's notice.

Carillo: And we'll examine how they're leveraging technology to not just manage increased data volumes, but for strategic advantage. I'm Nicole Carillo, managing director for financial services at workday. And I cannot wait to welcome my guest for this episode. Lee Vanderpool. Lee is CIO at General Atlantic, where his strategic role gives him a bird's eye view of growth as, and before it happens.

Carillo: His 18 years in finance and accounting has included advising on mergers, acquisitions, and capital raises at PwC, principally in the private equity and technology sector. General Atlantic is a leading global investor with 45 years of experience providing capital and strategic support for over 540 growth companies and counting. Today, General Atlantic manages approximately $ 103 billion in assets under management, inclusive of all strategies, as of the end of 2024, with more than 900 professionals in 20 countries across five regions.

Carillo: Welcome, Lee. Do you want to tell us some more about yourself, your background, and General Atlantic? 

Lee Vanderpool: Sure. Thanks for having me today, Nicole. As you mentioned, I'm Lee Vanderpool. I'm the chief accounting officer and global controller at GE. I joined the firm just under four years ago before there. As you mentioned, I was a partner in the deals practice and focused heavily on advising companies in the TMT and pharma/life sciences sectors that were undertaking M&A divestitures, JVs and IPO transactions.

Vanderpool: GE was actually one of my clients pretty seamless transition over from PwC to GA. And I think you did a great job providing an overview of the firm. Just a couple other things that that I'd want to add. So, we were actually founded in 1980, and we have a history spanning 45 years of investment excellence, company building experience, and a track record for really driving innovation.

Vanderpool: I think since our founding, we've provided capital and strategic support to about 830 different companies and are generally viewed as a trusted partner to visionary founders and investors. And we help them build dynamic businesses and really create long term, sustainable value. Our platform today really consists of five different investment strategies. So we have growth equity, which is our largest and really what the firms most known for.

Vanderpool: We now have credit climate infrastructure and capital solutions, capital solutions really being more GP led secondary transactions. And with our infrastructure strategy that's pretty new to GA. We acquired a leading sustainable infrastructure investor, Actis, to become our exclusive sustainable infrastructure strategy on October 1st of this year. So, a lot happening here and it's been a really fun time to to be a GA.

Carillo: Yeah, I know I've really enjoyed getting to know more about GA as I've dug into the partnership with workday as well. And I'm excited for our listeners to be able to hear more about  you guys and how you're approaching things today. So maybe we can start with that recent acquisition of Actis by General Atlantic.

Carillo: It was a move that really enhanced GA’s capability in that energy transition and sustainable infrastructure landscape. Considering the significant impact on both process integration and team dynamics, how did you tackle the operational challenges of such a rapid expansion? I understand you guys nearly doubled your employee count overnight. Is that right? 

Vanderpool: Yes, we increased it about 50% of what it was before. But you're right, it's definitely we've done one acquisition before that was much smaller than Actis. This one's particularly challenging considering a couple of different factors. So the first is usually their entire finance team sits in India in Delhi. And so we have a small part of our accounting team that sits in Mumbai. But our mothership operates out of New York and Connecticut.

Vanderpool: And bridging that geographical divide has been challenging and really required careful and deliberate coordination internally here at GA, but also with the Actis team. Second, they've historically used Microsoft Division as their general ledger, and they were getting ready to do an upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics, we're Workday shop. And so we needed to really accelerate their transition from division to Workday financials.

Vanderpool: And I would say one of the things that have been maybe most complicated with that, beyond just getting them onto Workday financials, has been the training process. And, the location and the time zone differences in particular have made that particularly tricky. But we managed to get them live on Workday eight days after the transaction closed, much to the delight of our auditor, Deloitte.

Vanderpool: And, we're continuing to build the teams capabilities in workday with each passing month. And then lastly, we're a private company, but we hold ourselves to really high reporting standards. We operate on public company timelines, we're subject to PCAOB level audit procedures. We report under U.S. GAAP, they're domiciled in Luxembourg, so they generally prepare financial statements following Luxembourg GAAP.

Vanderpool: We've had to convert them to U.S. GAAP. We're in the process of really enhancing their internal controls that we've had to have them just adopt US standards more broadly. And with that, they're now subject to heightened precision. Each quarter for management and external reporting. And so, it's been a big shift for them. We're off to a really good start.

Carillo: Yeah. It sounds like you guys not only did this quickly, but now you're enhancing quality and productivity to under new, a lot of new requirements for them. I know with rapid growth like that, one of the first tangible consequences we often see for financial services organizations is that increase in transaction volume. And along with that comes a host of increased challenges like technology and data accuracy, compliance, streamlining processes.

Carillo: Can you talk to us a little bit more about your priorities as a CAO? Amongst those challenges, maybe particularly in terms of integrating those financial data systems? 

Vanderpool: That's spot on. Nicole. So my priorities center are around making sure that our financial systems and our processes are evolving at the same pace of the firm while maintaining that speed, that precision, that efficiency and the general control.

Vanderpool: A couple things that I'm really focused on right now, what I would call my key priorities. So one is really building a scalable, integrated financial architecture for, you know, the corporate aspect of the firm. We've grown from 55 billion AUM to 103, just since I joined the firm, and I expect that it'll just continue to go up from there.

Vanderpool: Our ability to consolidate and automate data flows across systems is really important. We've been actively working to bring financial information from our many different source systems, our third party administrators, our investment sub ledgers into Prism so that we can prepare consolidated accounts inside of Workday. That's a little bit different than the way that a lot of our peers approach it, in that they rely on consolidation solutions that sit on top of Workday.

Vanderpool: So they're bringing that data into a different solution that's outside of their general ledger, so that they can accomplish the objective of preparing consolidated accounts. We see a strategic benefit to housing all that key data inside of Workday, particularly when considering the reporting capabilities that are native to Workday financials. The other thing that I've been incredibly focused on is leveraging as much automation as we can, so that we can make sure that we're really accurate and that we're complying with all of our applicable standards.

Vanderpool: And so, as you mentioned earlier, as we've grown and our transaction volumes have increased significantly. Manual reconciliations of data just isn't really viable. And so we've done a couple of different things. One, if we can use native functionality inside of Workday to do that, we do. Where we can't, we're using Alteryx so that we can automate account reconciliations outside of Workday, and then feeding that data into Workday.

Vanderpool: And the benefit of doing that is we have more accurate reporting. We're doing a better job from a compliance standpoint, but we also are able to free up our team. We can take hours and hours, hundreds of hours, in many cases of work that they were performing historically to do reconciliations and really refocus them on more strategic value added work.

Vanderpool: We're also really focused on driving process standardization as much as possible across all of GA. And as we bring Actis into the fold, making sure that we're really consistent in terms of our financial reporting and the control framework across the organization is really paramount. And so right now we're focused on aligning accounting policies, streamlining and, where possible, conforming workflows, and ensuring that our financial data is structured in a consistent way so that we can support it as close to real time decision making as possible for the leaders of our firm across all strategies.

Vanderpool: Another key initiative that we stood up this fall is, implementing a centralized data strategy for the firm. We think that's really important so that we can be able to enable real time insights across the firm. We're using our data lake to be able to do that by implementing a master data management system with really strong governance, we think will be able to support cross-functional reporting across the firm, both firm level and investor level reporting, and give our leadership team really granular visibility into all of that.

Vanderpool: We think this is really important for us, in particular, since our investor-level information doesn't sit in Workday, and I don't see a future state where it does. We're a really ambitious firm. There's always multiple strategic initiatives that are going on at any given time to be effective in my role I also have to be able to anticipate the impact of those in new initiatives and what they'll have on the business.

Vanderpool: And so my default approach is generally to take all of those new initiatives and process as much of that as I can in Workday and use Workday our central platform. But to do that, it has to we have to be really tactical. So we have to define streamline processes so that we can make sure that we're continuing to produce timely, high quality, decision ready data that we can make accessible to our business leaders whenever they need it.

Carillo: That's so interesting because it sounds like you guys are really leaning into technology to help you do that, but I really like that this centralized data strategy. Here is our guiding. Here's our guiding principle. We're going to use the technology around it. But we've got to have that.

Vanderpool: A lot of automation in order for you to really be able to drive that and have efficient processes, you have to have good, clean, structured data.

Vanderpool: If you don't, you're just taking data from one system, doing a bunch of manual reconciliations and normalizing the data and then loading it back up. It's far less efficient than a master centralized data repository with good, clean, golden source data that you can feed into all your different issues. Yeah, I feel like that's an ultimate goal for so many people.

Carillo: Yeah, I feel like that's an ultimate goal for so many people.And it's when you feel like you have that strategy, it's got to just be such a game changer for the firm. 

Vanderpool: It's tough. It's a huge initiative that we've already made really good progress and I'm optimistic we'll get there. 

Carillo: Yeah, and I think that leads really well into kind of the next topic about the consequences of this rapid scaling in that unmanageable city of data.

Carillo: You guys have really thought about that strategy, because we see so many businesses that scale fast, can get mired in that data swamp. And I rarely hear people say, I love my data. My data is so great, it makes it almost the amount of it makes it just almost unmanageable for them. How do you, as in your role, ensure that the accounting data remains organized, accessible, actionable?

Vanderpool: Like you said, trying to help make sure the business can make those informed decisions today and then even that may be to come. Yeah, it's a great question. One of the biggest risks of growing fast the way that we have is data fragmentation. And so if you've got information that's sitting on disparate systems and spreadsheets, it makes it incredibly difficult to really get it all in and one centralized repository and have it all be consistent so you can drive that automation that we described.

Vanderpool: So we're taking a proactive approach by getting everything, all of our financial data into Workday, so that we have one single source of truth for our corporate-level accounting data. I think over time, as we move towards a centralized data lake that's governed by master data management with really robust data governance principles, we'll be able to really structure and standardize all data across the firm at the point of entry, so that we can make sure that the inconsistencies of the data that you're describing don't exist and become unmanageable.

Vanderpool: The other thing that I would add is for us, scaling manually just isn't really an option. We've been really focused on is automating our financial workflows as much as we can, using tools like workday, Prism, and Alteryx, and then doing that. I'd mentioned earlier, we're just removing hundreds of hours of time that's spent doing data extraction, reconciliations, and reporting manually.

Vanderpool: So not only is that helping us drive better data accuracy and compliance, but also we're ensuring that we're getting insights out of that data that are timely and reliable from a decision-making standpoint. And then just lastly, one other point I'd add is where I think a data swamp typically exists is when you have just mounds and mounds of data without the appropriate context.

Vanderpool: And so, we focus on really defining the right KPIs and financial metrics and delivering that data to our CFO in a structured and digestible format. And we, me and my team, we're really focused on making sure that the teams across GA are getting right the right data at the right time without having to jump through a ton of unnecessary hoops.

Carillo: I think that is such an interesting take and really leads so well into what I wanted to talk about next, which is really financial forecasting in such a fast-growing environment that you guys are in. Given that dynamic nature of the financial landscape, what are the transformative changes in those financial metrics and indicators that empower you to identify trends and guide different strategic decision making in the company?

Carillo: I think you were just talking about how you guys really try to provide that information in a timely way to your executive team, and so would really love to hear a little bit more about that. 

Vanderpool: Yeah, sure. So we have a really good planning and analysis team, and they work really closely with myself and my team to align on our management reporting deadlines.

Vanderpool: We're now in a spot where we're presenting flash results for the quarter to our CFO two weeks before quarter end, which is a really big improvement for us. And I would attribute that a lot of that anyways to the improvements that we've or the advancements that we've made in Workday. So, you know, that combined with process streamlining have just been really instrumental in achieving that level of efficiency.

Vanderpool: From an industry perspective, we focus on C related earnings, which is really just our management fees, less our operating expenses and distributable earnings, which is our fee related earnings plus realized income on our carried interest and balance sheet investments. And so having timely, granular visibility into that information allows the firm to remain agile and proactively respond where we need to.

Vanderpool: So if, for example, we're at risk of missing budget in any given quarter, having that information available in a timely manner is critical and allows us to, to move. Looking ahead, we've licensed Adaptive. I'm hopeful that the firm moves forward with that implementation next year, because I think that will really help us just take the function to a whole new level.

Carillo: Yeah, that's two weeks of flash results. Two weeks before a quarter end, that is impressive and especially impressive considering you're saying you're even looking to go on to Adaptive, on to a new system to make that even better? That's that's really impressive. 

Vanderpool: Thank you. 

Carillo: Yeah, I talked to companies a lot who they would be very happy with two weeks after the quarter.

Vanderpool: Yeah. So we tried two weeks after the quarter. And the numbers have to be completely locked up. 

Carillo: That really is a cross-departmental function as well with and accounting working together on a lot of that stuff. And as your role as CAO evolves from traditional accounting, how do you ensure that accounting data is effectively shared and utilized for those data driven decisions?

Carillo: Has more insight into the data? Enable those two teams to be more collaborative, and been part of this highly effective function that you have?

Vanderpool: I think so. We've invested quite a bit in streamlining our data architecture by consolidating financial data across systems into Workday. You know, we're currently doing that three IB uploads, but over time it'll be a little bit more direct.

Vanderpool: And so that ensures that whatever accounting data that we're providing, it's accurately, it's timely, and we make it accessible for decision making. And we tag things using the work tags in workday down to cost center, spend category, and even vendor for our professional service expenses. So having the ability to track data at that level of granularity allows our planning and analysis team to really understand variances.

Vanderpool: If we're missing budget and really drill down and have good, thoughtful explanations available for our CFO when he inevitably will ask. We worked really closely cross-functionally with our human resources team, our team, fund ops, marketing, and all the other business critical functions in GA so that we can make sure that the financial insights that we're providing are aligned with the broader business objectives.

Vanderpool: And through our FP&A team, we're able to provide reporting so that those individual function heads can benchmark how they're spending relative to budget. We've actually gotten really good at managing our expenses, and I attribute a lot of that just to the progress that we've made, really using Workday more effectively. 

Carillo: Yeah, I imagine they're not spending the time having to ask accounting and HR, what is this?

Carillo: What hit this account when they're actually going to ask the question that why did this happen? What happened? As opposed to having to try to figure out what's even in that account that that probably makes it more collaborative. 

Vanderpool: Yeah. It allows them to ask more targeted questions. So they want to go back and understand why a very specific sub account balance moved or is off relative to budget.

Vanderpool: They're able to obtain that. A lot of you have to go back to the business and ask those questions in many cases, but it allows them to just really be laser-focused. And it makes the process of explaining variances more efficient. 

Carillo: Yeah. And probably just easier for the collaboration of the teams. They know when they're getting a question.

Carillo: It's an informed question. It's not just trying to dig in to, as we said, that Data swamp. So I'm going to flip a little bit onto the topic. That is something that everybody talks about today. You can't get through a podcast, a presentation, a conference without talking about AI. And it really is becoming increasingly integral in financial processes.

Carillo: And we're seeing finance and accounting teams starting to figure out how they can incorporate that into some of the daily routine tasks in order to level up their teams. How do you foresee AI reshaping your. What steps are you taking to explore those benefits? 

Vanderpool: Yeah, I think it's going to fundamentally reshape the finance function and at GA we're actively exploring ways that we can leverage generative AI to enhance efficiency, make better decisions, and drive more automation through GA.

Vanderpool: Traditional AI has helped us streamline things like reconciliations, transaction processing, and anomaly detection, but I think generative AI has the potential to really introduce new possibilities, things like generating predictive insights, automating workflows today that aren't automated, and then allowing us to really go that extra step with advanced financial analysis. And so there's a couple things that, or couple areas where I think it's in particular going to refocus our finance function.

Vanderpool: So one, I've talked a little bit about how we're using Alteryx today and that we leverage basic AI tools to automate simple yet time consuming tasks. We're now leveraging generative AI so that we can do things like note-taking during team calls. And we're actively exploring ways where we can take that technology and streamline other repetitive processes that rely on structured data, like responding to operational due diligence requests that we get from current and prospective investors, low risk, high impact use cases that provide a lot of time-savings and allows our team more broadly to really focus on strategic and value added activities.

Vanderpool: Like a lot of private market firms, our policy allows us to use ChatGPT-like solutions as long as it's done within clearly defined boundaries. We do that. None of our data is exfiltrated into the solutions. We have data loss prevention tools that we use to make sure that's not happening, and any alerts get surfaced. We react very quickly.

Vanderpool: I think AI-powered chat bots and virtual assistants is another area where I think it's going to revolutionize parts of finance, accounts payable, vendor inquiries in the auto process in particular. This spring, we're planning to implement Auditoria to, automate our invoicing, processing and vendor inquiries. But I think generative AI could actually take a step further by really ingesting data, learning from past transactions, pinpointing inefficiencies, and identifying process improvements in real time.

Vanderpool: I think it also has the ability to bolster any organization's fraud detection program, which, you know, is something we take pretty seriously here. I think that's another area. And then lastly, there's a lot of buzz around leveraging AI to simplify the execution and testing of internal controls. That's another area where GA invests a lot of time and resources.

Vanderpool: And so while we haven't been able to identify a solution that's fully fit for purpose for GA, we're closely monitoring the space and we're optimistic that as AI continues to evolve, It'll eventually get us to the point where we can streamline those processes quite a bit and enhance our efficiency, but also make sure that we're complying with applicable standards.

Carillo: It really is such a fast-changing landscape right now, is was, especially when I'm talking about how I can be used in finance and accounting. I know it's largely fast moving, generally larger than that, but I really liked hearing some of those ideas. I think a lot of where we are right now in this space is many of us just talking about the ideas, throwing them out there, learning from each other because it's almost like, what can we imagine?

Vanderpool: Yeah

Carillo: what can we envision and who's going to figure out how to get there first to help level us? 

Vanderpool: All right. 

Carillo: Really, where I see it, I know you talked about you have the controls over data loss and things like that. That's obviously one of the areas that gets brought up as people are concerned about it. My data being shared, how do I know that what's being done is accurate?

Carillo: Are you experiencing any resistance within GA and how do you how is GA looking to help people maybe move beyond those comfort zones and start to embrace the AI and AI-driven insights? 

Vanderpool: Experiencing resistance? No, but we are approaching the adoption thoughtfully and carefully. We think it has immense potential to enhance efficiency and automate some of the routine tasks that our teams are undertaking daily and lead us to better decision making.

Vanderpool: But we understand that in order to do this and do it successfully, it really has to be a strategic and human-centric approach. And so rather than rushing to integrate AI into GA for the sake of innovation, we're evaluating the impact that it could have through a controlled and really governance driven framework. As you mentioned earlier, our primary concern is maintaining the security of our data, our investors data.

Vanderpool: And so we approach open source models with very specific right care. But I would say largely there's a lot of excitement in the firm around how AI could transform our jobs day to day. We're just we're being very thoughtful about how we move. 

Carillo: And that's, I think, something that some companies in financial services that we've seen who maybe jumped are realizing that maybe they need to hit pause or take a step back to find that proper governance model, make sure that they have those kind of guardrails and controls in place to make sure that what they're putting in is has that great structure around it.

Carillo: So moving from AI back to kind of efficiency and automation, maybe let's talk about how it feels to be the CAO in a company that really is skyrocketing and growth. Like you said, they've added almost 50 billion in assets under management just since you've been there. The pace of your day is probably hectic, and you're juggling all kinds of balls in the air, and you might feel like you're taking your eye off.

Carillo: Some of them sometimes. Can and should finance teams rely on automation for some of that, for example, to stay on top of reporting accuracy, to take care of compliance to reduce manual workloads. What is your thought process on that and how automation plays a role there? 

Vanderpool: Yeah, I think automation is no longer a luxury. I think it's necessary for finance teams that are operating in a high growth environment, like the one in GA.

Vanderpool: Without strategic automation, there's a real risk of getting mired in manual processes, which that can lead to errors and inefficiencies and in our case, risks of complying with SEC and various accounting standards. For us to keep up with the growth of the firm while maintaining accuracy and compliance and really trying to stay agile, we focus on three key areas of automation.

Vanderpool: The first is we focus on automating aspects of our financial close process so that we can assure, ensure that we're reporting in a timely fashion at a very precise level. And so we're leveraging tools like Workday Prism that will allow us to bring data in from multiple systems, perform the real time validations, and generate reports with built in reconciliation checks that reduces the need for manual intervention.

Vanderpool: The less people that are touching data, I think the less risk of error. We're also continuing to deal with evolving, regulatory requirements. They're only becoming more complicated and demanding. And so by leveraging automation audit trails, using automation for us to enforce various policies across the business, and using automation so that we can actually execute approval workflows, it's allowed us to make sure that our compliance is proactive rather than being managed last minute.

Vanderpool: I think this is really important for a firm like ours, especially considering that we're operating at a PCOB level standard, even though we're private. And then the last thing I would just say is I don't view automation as being purely a means to an end. It's not just to getting to being more efficient. I think it's also about taking our team and freeing up their time so that they can really focused on higher value analysis rather than transactional work.

Vanderpool: And so by taking direct seeds from other systems and integrating with Workday using data governance tools and having AI-powered reconciliation, it reduces the time that we spend wrangling and structuring data and allows our team to be more proactive in supporting decision-making, which I think they all appreciate. 

Carillo: Yeah, I think on some of the the talk tracks and things that I listen to and hear, traditionally people spend about 70% of their time cleansing and putting together data and 30% of their time analyzing it.

Carillo: And the goal with automation and such really is to flip that, so it's 30%, making sure the data is correct, cleansing it. If you need to, in 70%, really doing that analysis and evaluation. I think automation really is how you get there with that is reducing the need to check that things uploaded correctly and putting it together in Excel, all of those fun things.

Vanderpool: Yeah, I really try to hopefully lead by example and challenge the team. If there's things that we're doing manually, I push them to identify solutions where we can automate it. And a lot of times, where we have manual process, it's because, as you mentioned, the way the data is entering the organization is in a highly unstructured format. It may be coming through emails,

Vanderpool: We may have to get on and download it off of other portals. And what I always really try and press on the team is you really have to trace that data back to the point of origination. If we can figure out a way to structure the data, that's going to allow us to drive more automation, we've got a couple examples of where we've done that have really saved a significant amount of time and have, in my opinion, have actually positioned us to just have a far more controlled process around what you describe as manually wrangling data, structuring it, and then feeding it into your systems.

Carillo: Yeah. And I think overall if I, if I put my former auditor hat on, it just so greatly reduces the risk within your organization. So much risk exists. Like you said, with these manual processes that the automation really great. It's efficiency. Hopefully it's saving you time, but also just risk that unquantifiable thing that we all have to deal with every day.

Vanderpool: I totally agree. 

Carillo: And so I like how you said freeing up your people's time as well, because I think one thing we don't talk about a lot is the impact that technology has on people, but not from changing their work. It's more about developing talent with technology. That coming, the talent coming into organizations needs to have these higher level skills now around technology because of the way that we're looking at the future of work for finance and accounting, and sometimes we're competing with other tech companies and other places for this talent.

Carillo: How are you using these types of emerging technologies to develop skills within your finance team that already sits there, and how is that had an impact on attracting and retaining some of that top talent for you? 

Vanderpool: Yeah, you're you're spot on. So we look to actively integrate tools like Alteryx into our workflows so that again, we can allow our team to focus on higher value analysis rather than repetitive tasks.

Vanderpool: And so by automating things like data extraction, performing reconciliations, and even doing some of the reporting, we're able to take our finance professionals and really position them to focus more on insights and strategies, which from their perspective, it makes the roles a lot more engaging and impactful. When we hire, instead of hiring purely for technical skills, we're looking to develop them internally, and so we encourage our teams to experiment with technology.

Vanderpool: We encourage them to work alongside our technology teams so that they can really shape that next generation of financial reporting. I think that's another area that keeps the team engaged and gives them a path for career growth. And then lastly, I think emerging technologies allow us to offer finance professionals an experience that goes beyond traditional accounting. It gives them the ability to really drive automation projects and get exposure to data-driven decision making, which I think makes us an attractive place for talent.

Vanderpool: And also by removing a lot of the manual inefficiencies. Know your 7030 example you gave earlier. I think we're also creating more rewarding work environment. If we can get people to the point where there's more balance in their day to day, we're able to normalize work hours. It improves overall job satisfaction and helps us ultimately retain people for longer.

Carillo: Yeah, and that's not something you traditionally hear as a priority within finance and accounting function. Is work life balance normalizing workload. I think traditionally our functions have been so head down so many hours a week, busy season type of you have being at a company and hearing you talk about it in that way really makes it seem like this is a great place for your teams to to thrive and grow.

Vanderpool: Yeah, for sure. And I think a lot of that stems from tone at the top. I think GA's a place where we work hard and we've got to do what we do to get the job done, but there is there is a focus on making sure that we're giving people balance. There's times during the year where myself, the team, we have to work more, but for the most part, we want people to have work life balance.

Vanderpool: We want them to really be focused on engaging and rewarding work when they come to work every day. I think overall that just contributes to a better culture, and it helps just broadly with employee retention. And that's what we've seen the last couple of years. 

Carillo: That's great. And U want to wrap with that and maybe a couple of last thoughts from you as you look ahead.

Carillo: And what are the key areas you and your team are going to be focusing on to support growth and efficiency and ensure that the business remains on a path of this continuous improvement and success that it seems like you guys really have built into your DNA there at GA. 

Vanderpool: Yeah, my, my, you know, primary focus is really to supporting or contributing to the profit profitable growth of the firm while ensuring that we're scaling the finance team responsibly.

Vanderpool: I have a pretty large team that's supporting me, and I think my role as the CAO is to strategically manage headcount growth and not I'm not referring to replacing people with technology because I don't think that's feasible. But I think if we put the right tools in the hands of our people, and allow them to focus on higher value work, rather than doing things like manual reconciliations and data processing, I can accomplish that.

Vanderpool: Objective. When I joined the firm a couple of years ago, the Corporate Accounting team looked quite different than it does today. We built a really high performing team here that is focused on continuous improvement and we're enhancing our capabilities with each and every quarter that passes. But to sustain that momentum, we have to really embrace emerging technologies and continue driving automation where we can.

Vanderpool: I don't think it's realistic to fully automate our function, but if I could get somewhere around 90%, I would be thrilled with that. I think that would really put us down a path of really ensuring that the firm's operating as efficiently as possible, and really has the scale to support the growth of the firm in a way where we're not growing headcount, proportionally with growth in AUM.

Carillo: I look forward to watching you guys down that journey. And luckily, as a partner with Workday and General Atlantic, I'm going to be rooting for you guys to get to that 90% automation and watching that headcount with you guys as you guys continue on the journey.

Vanderpool: That's great. And I mean, you guys have been an incredible partner to us.

Vanderpool: We were big fans of Workday, and we're really excited about seeing Workday is very ambitious with Agentic AI coming to life. I know we didn't talk about that earlier, but I'm highly optimistic that Workday is going to help bring us further down the path of more efficiency and the ability to produce higher quality data.

Carillo: And we're excited about it for you guys, too.

Carillo: We've been talking about data Equation with Lee Vanderpool, Chief Accounting Officer at General Atlantic. If you enjoyed what you heard today, be sure to follow us wherever you're listening today. And remember, you can find our entire catalog at workday.com/podcast. I'm your host, Nicole Carillo, and I hope you have a great workday.