When Pramod Iyengar returned to school after working for several years as a manufacturing engineer with United Technologies, he was ready to change careers.
The young engineer headed back to the University of Michigan, where as an undergraduate he had earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering. However, this time he had a business degree in mind.
Read MorePost graduation with an MBA in hand, Iyengar landed at Intel Corp., where he had the opportunity to join a “very efficient and very well-structured finance team,” he explains.
For his part, Iyengar says Intel gave him the opportunity to learn not only the discipline of finance, but also how to use financial data and analysis to influence and improve operations across the company.
Intel also offered the opportunity to move into a variety of other areas. “Employees just had to take the initiative and take advantage of them,” comments Iyengar. At Intel, Iyengar began as a finance manager with the distribution channel and soon became a senior financial analyst with the microprocessor products group.
Looking back, he credits the chipmaker with regularly bringing together finance professionals from across the company.
Says Iyengar: “They would share best practices and strategies for using finance to improve decision-making in other areas, like accounting and sales.”
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CFOTL: Tell us about Veem. What does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
lyengar: The simple way to think about Veem is to understand that we automate payments for small and medium-size businesses globally. We provide ePAR services and a global network for businesses to basically handle all of their needs to pay and be paid. Along the way, we also offer additional services to help you to manage your working capital and other financial needs. In short, we want to simplify what small and medium-size businesses go through in terms of all of their back-office processes around payments, invoicing, approvals, cross-border remittances or payments, and so on. We want to make it easy and take the stress out of the business owners’ hands. This is what we’ve built our growth on, and, in a nutshell, it’s what Veem does.
Read MoreLooking at the next 12 months for Veem, as a finance leader, I think that it will be all about building the engine to upscale. As with a lot of start-ups that get to that first level, maybe when they get to the high single digits or the double digits of revenue, it still takes one more level of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done. To get to that $100 million or $200 million number requires not just having figured out the solution and product that you’re going after, but also how to do it at scale so that you’re able to grow at the larger level. For me in the next 12 months, it will be all about building the tools, the measurement metrics, and scaling our abilities to enable the company to deliver our services to 5 times, 10 times, 20 times the number of customers that we currently serve. This is important.
I think that this will also allow us to continue to be efficient in terms of being able to track the business, to provide more and more insight into what goes on, and then to scale the company accordingly. We’ll need more emphasis on business planning and financial analysis and insight, along with what’s required to build up the management of the compliance of the company. I think that these are key for finance. We need to be able to continue to provide this level of insight and support to the organization as it grows.
jb
Veem | www.veem.com | San Francisco, CA