A Day In The Life Of A Director Of Strategic Finance At Tala
A Director of Strategic Finance at Tala spends 70% of their time working with business partners, ensuring decisions "make financial sense," such as analyzing a new product's financial viability through testing and analysis. The remaining 30% involves high-level strategic planning with senior leadership, setting "the overarching objective and goal" for the company, and translating this into financial models for investors and the board.
Strategic Planning, Financial Analysis, Business Partnering, Financial Modeling, Leadership
Advizer Information
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Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
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Zu Daya
Director of Strategic Finance
Tala
University of Toronto
MBA, University of Toronto
Biology & Related Sciences, Economics
Finance (Banking, Fintech, Investing)
Finance
International Student, Honors Student, Immigrant, Worked 20+ Hours in School, Student Athlete
Video Highlights
1. Working with cross-functional teams (product, risk, technology) to analyze the financial implications of business decisions and product launches.
2. Developing and utilizing financial models to project the financial health of the company and communicate this information to senior leadership, investors, and the board.
3. Participating in strategic planning processes to set company-wide objectives and goals for the coming years, ensuring alignment between strategic vision and financial performance.
Transcript
What does a day in the life of a director of strategic finance look like?
That's a good question. I would say where I would start on the day of life is what time of the year we are in. A lot of the time in Strat Fin, what we do is, as the name says, strategic planning.
I'll give you two examples. The first example is, let's say for the 70% of the time where we're not in financial planning, the day in the life of someone like myself or my team is working with a business partner on understanding if a decision that we are about to execute on, or a decision we have already executed on, is making financial sense.
For example, in the next few weeks, I'll be working very closely with our product team to check and see if this new product that we're releasing will make sense. Are we doing the right tests? And once we do the right tests, the analysis on the tests to make sure that it's kind of what we want. So in the next set of few weeks, that's what my days looked like.
It's a lot of meetings with the product team. It's a lot of brainstorming, understanding why we are testing certain features, how it helps the customer, how it helps the business. And then ensuring that those hypotheses are tested correctly so we can build the product and test correctly. And then doing the actual financial analysis. So that's one example of what it looks like.
During our planning season, it's a little bit more high-level. Someone like myself would sit with our senior leadership across the company, talking to our Chief Risk Officer, our Chief Technology Officer, and all those senior leaders, and our Chief Park Officer. We're setting the strategy of the company.
What does the company look like in a year from today? What does the company look like in three years from today? We're setting that overarching objective and goal and then figuring out the steps and the milestones that we want to hit. At the end of the day, because we're still a finance function, we're funneling all that into a financial model so that our senior leadership, our investors, and our board can understand the high-level strategy of the business and how it translates into our financial model and our financial metrics. So those are the two types of planning, which is like 30% of the year.