The Role Of A Finance Manager In An FMCG Company, Ft. Ayush S & Priyanka B, HUL #Finance

as long as you are clear do you want just a job or do you want like a career right first question to ask is pretty much that I am a chartered accountant by profession qualified in 2010 I was doing my article ship with constant young I soon realized that I would be happier working for an

industry I made a shift moved to Mondelez which used to be Cadbury India limited then worked there for a few years around four years or so I had an international stint also when I moved back to India that’s when hul happened in 2018 so I’ve been here around five years now so I come from

an army background pretty much I’ve you know spent my life across different cities went to an undergrad College in Bombay then went for my MBA to ISB and then have been in hul so I actually got into text-decoration: none;">Finance even before going to Iceberg in an investment bank so I was not new to the world of Finance but yes I got introduced to the world of fmcg in ISB where you

know I got introduced to hul through lime that’s what kind of got me to thinking about her career in fmcg or the industry per se as a part of the ca curriculum three years of internship or articleship as we call it is compulsory this articleship usually has to be done at a CA firm which

includes one of these big fours like onston young KPMG Etc so that’s where we all start off once they become Chartered Accountants I’ve seen a lot of people have found their comfort zones in those firms which do Accounting auditing taxation all of these with highly

specialized fields and they tend to stick there a few people like me decides to move to corporates be it fmcg or any other sector it could be as long as you are clear do you want just a job or do you want like a career right first question to ask is pretty much that if when you come to an fmcg in

Finance whether you are working in the supply chain Finance side

of things or you’re working in the customer development Finance side of things or you’re partnering a category or you’re working on M A in fact Unilever also has a ventures

fund that invests in startups so I think so there is no limitation in terms of what you can do and there have been people who from Finance have gone and really you know run P L’s run

business being general managers that just equips you with a different sort of skill set and also macro understanding of how industry Works thankfully hul happens then I again got a chance to work with Treasury here it’s a big Treasury team managing a team of

10 people with so many opportunities not just to do the core Treasury functions but there was a lot of challenge thrown at me in terms of building certain capabilities that the organization was wanting to build for its Treasury teams like hedging capabilities

Dynamic discounting capabilities all of this for a lot of corporates within the fmcg place we were one of the first ones to develop things like this I then moved to category Finance here

partnered with the hair care and oral care business which is around a 5000 crore business combined worked with some very senior stakeholders within Finance as well as marketing it raises your

functional expertise to another level altogether now I’m a part of the performance management team so if you’ve noticed there is always a step up in the journey foreign get into meeting rooms and when you are part of conversations where senior people are you know discussing things the

depth they go in the point of views that they form just looking at a piece of data kind of you know nudges you also to think in those directions so I think just being part of conversations where you’re not even expected to contribute if you do that’s great at least in the early part of

your career but the takeaway and the mental muscle building that you can do just being present in a room where 10 in super intelligent people are having a conversation negotiating or trying to influence one another with either data or you know logic is quite interesting I would say India itself is

way ahead of the financial inclusion or digital Finance when it comes to most other countries also given the kind of Technology India is developing like UPI has become big it makes all the

more sense for us to be more engaged with them UPI is something which doesn’t exist in most other countries right when we talk about hul you know from a Finance angle

because we are in the country which is really innovating and pioneering fintech it’s and when you have leaders who really you know are crafting agendas like reimagin actual which are really you know how do I drive digital transformation within the organization nobody is shutting those to hear

new ideas so as young people or as people let’s say were closely following that industry or The Innovation that is happening in fintech you’re more than free and in fact encouraged to come and say that oh you know what this let’s say blockchain has come up and this is one of the

ways I think think we as an organization can incorporate this new technology similarly even with banks we worked on Technologies like blockchain did pilot even if these are pilots that don’t work we are encouraged to learn from them and probably it’s a moon shot which five years later

10 years later will become something that everyone in the industry is adopting we would have already done a pilot learned our lessons we know what needs to be probably changed internally in our ecosystem to adopt that five years down the line so a lot of these experiments and Pilots that we do will

be Moon shots of 2023 which will become business as usual in 2030 and this is the kind of atmosphere this place or this organization facilitates for people like me as somebody new joining the business don’t worry everybody here is to help you succeed nobody is going to set you up for failure

in any which ways you will be given a mentor a buddy there will be anybody that you wish to reach out to there is a catch-up session that you can set up anytime that you need the leadership team is super approachable you’re definitely going to succeed it will be overwhelming given the size of

the business which you can’t help but you’re here to succeed and the system will make sure that happens the objective should be to you know learn as much as you can and build your network connections and as you proceed in that Journey you kind of start realizing yourself that okay this

is what I am good at and this is what I want to do right don’t take too much stress also and be bogged down by that oh I need to have Clarity it’s okay to be clear that you don’t have Clarity it is a journey you will figure things out on the way I think that’s the only

parting advice that one could give to you know people considering to be school