Introducing: William (Bill) Stong
April 9, 2009, 12:13 pm
With more than 25 years in wholesale, international banking, Bill focuses on understanding, reporting, analyzing and improving the profitability of companies. Bill’s experience comes from a career at one of the world’s largest international banks where he held a succession of functional positions: divisional administration & strategic planning, Relationship Management, Sales, Product Management, Pricing & Costing, Financial Planning & Reporting, Management Information Systems (MIS) and Project Management.
Bill’s portfolio career has been with a broad range of product lines: Treasury/Cash Management, Trade Finance, Credit & Lending, Foreign Currency Banknotes & Coins, Foreign Currency & Securities Trading operations, Institutional Trust & Securities services and Payroll processing services.
Over the past 15 years, Bill has increasingly focused on profitability issues facing different business lines. In particular, he has concentrated on the factual reasons driving profitability, irrespective of the underlying trend: profit may be growing, remaining flat, or shrinking.
Bill melds disciplines to help companies understand and improve profitability:
● Analytical techniques (e.g., financial analysis & modeling; fact basis)
● Business function reporting (e.g., each business area receiving reports, in their format, from a common source of data). Confirm how all reports have the same data, even if top-line results are different (more on this phenomena later).
● Project Management (e.g., from issue identification through to resolution)
● Performance tracking (e.g., enhancing reporting to follow resolution and to monitor/anticipate the future)
A key to success is having the relevant factual basis understood (a function of knowledge) and accepted (a function of human nature).
Looking ahead
Bill is a firm believer that technology constraints affecting the ability to cover all aspects of profitability will continue to be eliminated. An ultimate goal is to provide accurate information to all stakeholders involved with generating profit for a company (even non-profits); to allow each functional area to best fulfill its role in growing that profit.
That is: all reporting created from an irrefutable data source. Internal arguments are then about “Why” something happened, and not about whether something happened.
Views may be divided into “Major” (are critical to the profit dynamics of the company) and “Useful” (add worthwhile insight). The major ones include:
➊ Accounting/Financial view
➋ Customer view
➌ Product & Service view
➍ Organizational view
In other words, every dollar of profit (including the revenue and expense components) needs to be reported by:
✓ the General Ledger
✓ Customer
✓ Product or service
✓ Company organization
More on everything coming up!
Insight knowledge for profit maximization. Blog 2
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