Visyond wins the Out of Excel award at the Financial Modelling Innovation Awards 2020!
About the Nomination
When looking for innovation that sits outside of financial modelling’s very comfy home of Excel, the Out of Excel category of the Financial Modelling Innovation Awards 2020 is looking for ideas that genuinely expand the profession of financial modelling and have made the very best of not being restrained by Excel’s many and lovingly endured limitations.
Showing just how financial modelling is evolving, there were a number of worthy entries to consider within this category, which included some great examples that are truly enhancing financial modelling.
The winner of this category has sought to move the spreadsheet experience to the cloud and make scenario modelling a genuinely collaborative experience; the cloud-based single-source-of-the-truth model with the advanced functionality of Excel.
And the winner of the Out of Excel Category is Visyond!
Problem
Decision making requires modelling, scenario planning, forecasting, analytics, knowledge management, data visualization and reporting tools. Analysts, experts, clients, CxOs must collaborate with strict requirements on data security and governance.
Without Visyond, the process requires multiple platforms and causes the following problems:
- Data leaks & security threats
- Version chaos and lack of a single source of truth
- Difficulty to track changes and compare scenarios
- Time- consuming and error-prone manual setups, with high probability of accidental errors
- Lack of interactivity and self-service options for what-if analysis/stress testing
Solution
Visyond runs in the browser, it’s a single source of truth, and its cells allow for multiple assumptions to be combined into scenarios in real time. They can contain attachments and conversations to improve the quality of the data and the communication process.
Comparing scenarios, running Monte Carlo simulations or knowing what are the most impactful cells on a certain formula cell, becomes fast and automated.
Anyone can carry out, in minutes, what takes experts hours or days to do. Stakeholders can self-serve through interactive online slides, and run their what-ifs from the cells that the project owner decides to expose on these dashboards.
Finally, Visyond uses human-readable names and detects the root cause of errors.
Judging Panel
Natalie Bayfield - Senior Departmental Fellow, University of Cambridge
Inventor of ‘Real Estate Financial Modelling’ as a subject in its own right. Natalie has dedicated the last two decades to advancing the skill within the sector, via Bayfield Training and Cambridge University.
Ian Bennett - Partner, Deals Modelling, PwC Australia
With over 18 years as a professional financial modeller, Ian leads PwC Australia’s Deals Modelling team and is a globally recognised financial modelling expert. He has developed and reviewed the models that have supported major transactions around the world and has recently developed a technology agnostic approach to financial modelling and a range of analytical modelling review services.
Danielle Stein Fairhurst - Financial Modeller, Author, Corporate Trainer
Danielle Stein Fairhurst is regularly engaged as a speaker, course facilitator, financial modelling consultant and analyst. She founded the Financial Modellers’ Meetup groups which now have over 5,000 members in seven countries as well as a LinkedIn forum with more than 40,000 members.
Fiona Foster - Investment Manager, Kiwi Group Holding
Fiona Foster has provided financial modelling consulting and corporate finance advisory to clients in New Zealand, the USA and the UK. Most recently she spent 3 years in New York, helping to build out PwC’s financial modelling and data analysis capabilities in the USA. She has developed and led financial modelling training with clients and internal teams and is a member of ModelOff’s Diversity Council, aimed at improving diversity within the financial modeling industry.
Iain Morrow - Partner & CTO, Gridlines
Iain started developing financial models in the mid-1990s. He has developed deep expertise in the energy sector and in economic regulation, in both private and public sectors.
Iain has degrees in mathematics from Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He has published on machine learning, data analysis and modelling.
Lance Rubin - Founder & CEO, Model Citizn
Lance is a highly innovative, commercially savvy and lateral thinking financial modeller. His ability to distill complex financial problems into meaningful insight led him to founding Model Citizn.
He is an ex-Investment Banker and KPMG modeller, CFO of fintech lender Banjo and Group CFO for Sequel CFO and is touring the world on the Future of Financial Modelling.
