In celebration of CGMA Week, the FM podcast welcomed two CGMA designation holders who recently spoke at UK & Ireland ENGAGE to discuss the lessons they’ve learned throughout their careers, how their mindset has shifted over the years, and the advice they would give to finance professionals navigating opportunities in a challenging era defined by potential and uncertainty.
Simon Ritchie, ACMA, CGMA, founder and CEO of Blox Software, and Olcay Yilmaz, FCMA, CGMA, finance director–Rail Infrastructure at Siemens, explain the importance of continuous learning in a time when knowledge has a faster expiration date for finance professionals.
Ritchie and Yilmaz highlight the ways finance professionals can position emerging technologies as innovation drivers in the finance function and how to fully embrace those tools in their roles.
CGMA Week is a global celebration designed to showcase the value, pride, and achievements associated with the CGMA designation.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- How an early start in technology can prevent finance professionals from working “backwards”.
- The importance of learning to love learning — and why it pays off.
- Key areas Yilmaz and Ritchie expect AI to optimise within the finance function.
- Strategies for harnessing structure and embracing change through uncertainty.
- Their advice for professionals preoccupied with career ladders and titles.
- Tips for professionals struggling to map their learning and growth journeys.
Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: Hi, listeners, welcome back to the FM podcast. I’m Steph Brown.
This episode is a special one we’re publishing during CGMA Week, a global celebration designed to showcase the value, pride, and achievements associated with the CGMA designation.
The conversation features two CGMA designation holders who spoke at UK & Ireland ENGAGE in October.
The guests will be leading us down memory lane in some ways, reflecting on lessons learned throughout their careers and advice they would give to other finance professionals following along this journey.
A big welcome to Simon Richie, ACMA, CGMA, financial planning and analysis expert, founder and CEO of Blox Software, a software development company specialising in streamlined FP&A solutions. I’m also thrilled to welcome Olcay Yilmaz, FCMA, CGMA, finance director of rail infrastructure for leading technology company Siemens.
I asked the guests, who had just completed their ENGAGE session in London focused on advice they’d give their younger selves, what lessons learned early on have been most valuable in their careers. Here’s Olcay Yilmaz with the first answer:
Olcay Yilmaz: The most valuable lesson, I think was my start in consulting, where I had this chance to learn about strategy in more detail. Got a strategic tool set, too, which I still benefit from. Equally, what was very beneficial is the fact that I had international assignments, which opened my mind for new perspectives. Overall, it’s all about changing perspectives and being able to change your perspective.
Simon Ritchie: For me, I started on the more traditional finance track. I did a degree in finance.
What I discovered quite early on is that actually my core passion was in technology and systems. I loved geeking out on some [Visual Basic for Applications], some Excel formulas, working in the systems side much more than I did the typical accounting side. So, I, basically through that, discovered my passion, and that discovery has led me down a different career trajectory, but one that makes me extremely happy and I’ve loved.
Brown: Both of you had a background or an interest in tech quite early on in your career. How has that helped as we’re getting into this AI, data-driven era with transformation? How do you think that those skills learned early on have impacted your attitude and your aptitude to those changes?
Ritchie: I think we’re in a tremendous age the way that AI is now able to do so many tasks for us. These systems are getting smarter and smarter. Especially with the agentic AI revolution, we’ve got something that can plan and do multiple steps, access to tools, access to data. It’s fantastic.
I’ve always looked at technology as a tool that I should harness to be better at delivering my goal, delivering impact, delivering insight. I think I just look at it as something that’s going to help us to be better, and there’s just huge impacts right across the board to be had.
Yilmaz: When I was a student, I had to implement, believe it or not, Excel in the company which I worked in. When you have that exposure early on, you’re associated with a new technology which then helps you really to create a certain value add which others can’t do. That is really great, and that sticked with me for a long time. Every time a new technology comes up now, I’m always jumping on it and trying to shape it and use that technology to shape it.
What is also great to know is with all those years we had tried to automate, digitalise, and it was a huge effort with the existing systems. However, now with AI in particular kicking in, you can see that it will be all getting a little bit easier. In order to support the business with decision-making, we will have instant information available rather than going backwards, retrospectively, to understand, and that makes really a difference.
Brown: The world of work and the demands of your roles are constantly evolving, and we talk about the value of continuous learning. From your experience, what does continuous learning involve for finance professionals now? What do they really need to start learning to future-proof their careers?
Ritchie: I would say that learning is something that I’ve embraced right through my career. It’s the thing that I think helped me to progress and make progress. I would do the day job. Then, in the evenings, I would learn about these concepts that I needed. Normally, those [were] things that you couldn’t really learn in the day. You couldn’t afford to take time out of the day to learn. But I felt like it was valuable to do that. I used to spend a lot of time and effort learning extra skills that I think I would need in a month or two, or that I think would put me into the right position to get onto that project or to get that assignment or to get that promotion.
It’s been something that I have learned to love. Now I just find myself sitting around on evenings, watching YouTube, learning about both work things and personal things, like I love learning how to do woodworking and all sorts. I think if you can embrace and enjoy learning, then it’s the sort of thing that can just help you all the way.
Yilmaz: Knowledge expires much quicker than in the past. That’s a fact. In order to be able to keep up, you have to learn and constantly learn. Growth comes with learning, too. Whenever you change a job or do something different, you learn, you add value, you learn again, and that’s a cycle at the end of the day.
Not learning is not really an option. This phrase about continuous learning is really true, and those who don’t embrace it have an issue from an employability point of view. Adding value. You’re very quickly out of the game as a matter of fact — be it in a corporate company, or if you have a start-up, yourself — you can’t afford not to learn. You have to learn constantly in order to be the partner of choice.
Brown: As we’ve touched on, CFO roles are becoming more technology-driven. In many cases, emerging technologies and how they’ll be used is still in the early stages of development. From your experience working with those technologies, where do you see the most potential in those tools?
Yilmaz: I think the key around the new technologies emerging around AI, is all about supporting the decision-making instantly and not with a huge delay. In the past, we always had to go back into our offices, do a further piece of analysis, go back into our boardroom and present those. Now we have a situation that with new information coming up, and we can see it already with the Power BIs and Tableaus of this world. That you are able to support decision-making of key stakeholders imminently.
This transition will be accelerating even faster, I think, in the next few years. It’s important that we as a finance function continue to engage around data architecture; how to make sure that the right data is available at the right time for decision-making.
Ritchie: I am currently the founder of a start-up software business. I just felt that the systems available up until now were just not good enough. I left the corporate world. Went and raised some venture funding and we’re building a brand new company. I spent all my time thinking about how we can bring technology to bear, to help businesses to get insights so they can make better decisions. I’m really excited. We’re in the age where we can help with that even more.
The things that excite me? The ability to be able to understand what a business leader is asking and then go and find all the relevant data and then project and forecast. That’s something that’s always been very difficult. For a long time, the systems have been able to go and analyse data and just give you some backwards-looking-data. What I’m really excited about now is the ability for us to project and forecast and run many different scenarios.
Then, come back and be a real partner for the leader. Thinking through, “These are the different options, this is the impact. The second and third order impact of a decision that you could make. ”I was spending all my time thinking about how we can power that and how we can help power decisions.
Brown: There’s so much ambition and so much idealism with how this technology can be used. But obviously, there’ll be professionals that are quite wary because of the amount of uncertainty that comes along with these developments. How can you prepare for that level of uncertainty?
Yilmaz: I think outlining what you want to achieve and what the purpose is, is very critical as a leader in such a situation, to your teams and the individuals. Your teams need to understand that this is a journey which can’t be stopped, to start with.
But also, the value they are creating is actually not mundane tasks — downloading from [Systems Applications and Products] and then processing data further — The real value is to join the dots, to create a storyline across the data and make it alive so that the decision-making support is optimised. That’s the reason why I think outlining that vision for the teams is very important in times of uncertainty.
Ritchie: I think helping people to embrace — there’s a fear of change, there’s a fear of the learning — being a good learner, understanding how you can learn.
We heard at the conference here, the great thing about AI is that it can help you with the learning. Which is just fantastic. I think if you encourage people to think about their role right now, the impact that they’re driving, and embracing this technology. It’s just going to help them drive even more impact. Instead of just spending all their time keeping a spreadsheet maintained and up-to-date.
That’s not really what their job is. Their job is not to have a tidy spreadsheet: Their job is to have clean data; a good set of data that you can rely on, and then insights to help drive decision-making.
This technology is just fantastic at helping improve their impact, or increase their impact.
Brown: What beliefs have you had to challenge or embrace over the years to move forward in your career?
Ritchie: As I got further in, I became very ambitious. Quite driven. Excited to get the next promotion. Get further responsibility. Get a bigger team. I suppose what I felt like is that it was like climbing a corporate ladder. If you fell off, at the bottom of the ladder is these spikes of death. If you fall, you’ll die. I had this mental model of always [having] to climb up: You could never go down.
I was trying to jump across into a different career, essentially. Move out of finance. Move into product and building technology solutions. But I couldn’t ever go down the ladder. I found that quite crippling. What’s been really freeing for me was to look at it, instead of that, It’s like climbing mountains. You’re going up and down and it’s all part of your training. Your training is the knowledge that you acquire. The repetition builds a better physique to be able to go up and down further.
It’s not always about going up, it’s about coming up and down. I found that quite freeing because then you know you can learn, you can go up, you can come back down. I was worried: “What are people going to think, if you come down?” This fear of failure or imposter syndrome can creep in. Having that as a different mental model has really helped me.
Yilmaz: Just building on what Simon said, I think it’s very important to acknowledge that titles are not that important, and progress is not a straight line, too. And that’s what you exactly said.
I think it’s more like you have to think about, in terms of a balance sheet, almost of your [capabilities]. What kind of assets do you add constantly to your balance sheet? This is the discussion rather than having a discussion around the next title — being a [finance director], a CFO, etc. — and aiming towards that. This usually comes automatically the moment you’d rather focus on your capabilities and what kind of further angle you add to your capabilities.
Brown: What are two or three tips you’d give finance professionals who are ambitious, but feel they’re struggling to keep up with the pace of change?
Ritchie: I would say, you can only do so much. As long as you feel like you’re improving yourself and you’re making an effort, that’s good. You can give yourself a break now. You don’t have to know everything the day after a company talks about it. It’s important that you help to bring that in to your business; to your world, when it’s relevant.
I would just say, embracing these new technologies, these new techniques, it’s just going to make you better. It’s going to help you grow in your career. Help you deliver more impact. And that’s really what’s going to help you grow.
Yilmaz: Trust in the compounding impact of small, incremental steps.
Back to the topic of learning. Learning doesn’t come as a straight line; learning doesn’t come in one big go. It comes usually in small pockets. It’s like a puzzle. And once, all of a sudden, the puzzle completes.
That’s how I visualise it for myself, and I think there’s some truth in that perhaps. Rather, focus on pushing yourself to your limits, as a matter of fact, because that is very rewarding and gives you that extra edge.
You should never think that you’re not doing enough because there’s only so much time you can devote into learning and progressing. It’s all about making sure that you’re coming out of your comfort zone and giving your best, and you take it from there. Then you have to trust [in] the compounding impact of all the efforts.
Brown: Thanks again to Simon Ritchie and Olcay Yilmaz for sharing their journeys, reflections, and expertise with FM. I’m Steph Brown. Thanks for listening to the FM podcast.
