In this special episode Glenn is joined by Nate Saperia to answer the 10 most burning questions in FP&A. Nate brings nearly 20 years of finance experience including at Accordion, Spruce Finance, Hess Corporation and GE. At Saperia Consulting Nate specializes in real-time dashboards, financial planning, and interim CFO/FP&A leadership.

The questions:

Q1: How can I use AI in FP&A?

Q2: What do you think of FP&A solutions?

Q3: How can you get to driver based decision making

Q4: Fastest levers FP&A teams can pull with margin pressures rising?

Q5: How can an FP&A function trust the financial data it’s using when it doesn’t control the data?

Q6: Should the CTO or CFO own the data?

Q7. Skills to get from M&A Financial due diligence to FP&A?

Q8. FP&A Internship, what advice?

Q9. Things I wish I had known earlier in FP&A?

Q10. What’s the future of Excel in FP&A?

Australian-born Luke Mulcahy started in FP&A at larger businesses including Coates Group (internet leader in Sydney) and manufacturing company Sherwin-Williams. But for nearly 4 years he has loved having “wow” moments of finance insights with smaller companies. closer to the $5-10million range, where powerful insights are taken straight from finance to the CFO. In his words: “You can have those moments a lot more frequently with small business owners and just tell them what they’re, what they’re missing, what they haven’t got eyes on.” In this episode:

• Forecasting energy consumption for a utility company in Australia
• The fear and strategy of becoming a fractional CFO
• The ideal set up for FP&A in small businesses
• Why big companies often have big data problems (and cleaning that data)
• Big FP&A wins in small business
• Solving the date problem in Excel

This special episode formed part of FP&A Con 2025 which saw a record-breaking 1500 registrants.

The guests: Nathan Bell, Managing Partner, VAi Consulting, is among the most in-demand experts. Bell has unique experience– having started in computer science, before leading finance teams at Native American Bank, Digital Media Trends and Gartner– where he advised hundreds of FP&A teams facing chaotic data situations).

Anna Tioma former CFO of Sandoz and Softeq. Most recently she has pivoted to become a fractional CFO at Blend2Balance.

Anna Yamashita, Solutions Consulting at Data Rails who has worked across SAS finance throughout her career where she helps FP&A teams implement modern performance management solutions.

In this session:

• How AI is being applied in real FP&A workflows today
• Predictive analytics as the gold standard
• Getting to a single version of truth with AI
• ROI in AI
• Mastering Data Management
• Misconceptions about AI in finance and security
• Co-pilot, prompts
• Bonus: Security and AI