Liberty Bank team established their first formal FP&A function
Cut down time spent on budgeting and planning processes by at least 25%
Providing business partners with more detailed, insightful financial analysis
The Challenge: Building Out Business-Wide FP&A and the Processes To Support It
In 2020, there was no formal FP&A function at Liberty Bank, the oldest and largest mutual bank in the United States. Even with 50+ locations, nearly $7 billion in assets and 700 employees, the bank was still relying largely on time-consuming manual processes to fuel financial analysis and had no end-to-end business performance management solution in place.
When Jeff Culp—Liberty’s SVP and CFO of Business Transformation—joined Liberty Bank, his goal was to change that. “The first order of business was not only starting to develop and build an FP&A organization, but at the same time find an appropriate business performance management system that could take us out of the 1990’s and get us into a more automated solution for business-line reporting, budgeting, forecasting and strategic planning,” he said.
As Jeff began consulting business leaders throughout the company, he found that many of them didn’t have a full understanding of their financial information and had minimal visibility into business unit results. Providing that visibility would require a solution that everybody could use. “It had to be Excel-based and it really had to be intuitive and user friendly,” he said. After a thorough RFP and demo process, Vena was the clear choice for Liberty Bank. Jeff remarked, “There was a 100% consensus for Vena.”
Starting the Journey Towards FP&A Excellence With Vena
Jeff wanted Liberty’s FP&A Team to become a “trusted advisor” to their business unit partners. “That’s a journey,” he added. “It doesn't happen overnight, but you have to earn your way to the table and then embed yourself into the business—become part of the team.”
To avoid “scope creep,” Jeff focused on building a foundation for FP&A by implementing Vena first for budgeting and forecasting. He followed up a year later with reporting and strategic planning capabilities.
Since implementing Vena, Jeff and his team have been able to deliver significantly greater visibility into business unit results, enhance HR-related planning, provide executive leadership with more detailed financial insights and save themselves hours of work. “We cut down the time by at least 25% by having automated functionality for things like capital expenditure planning, which was completely manual prior to utilizing Vena,” he said.
Next, Liberty Bank plans to build upon that foundation by scaling their FP&A program even further, using Vena to implement dashboards and more complex reporting—including profitability reporting.
“Prior to Vena, it would take us 7–10 days to aggregate the information during the annual budget process—and that was without any analysis. […] Those seven days have been slashed down to one. Once we have our deadline, we settle the balance sheet, roll it up and we have our results. Now, we have extra time to do the analysis, so I don’t have to sit in front of the CFO and not be able to answer questions.”
Jeff Culp
SVP and CFO of Business Transformation, Liberty Bank