The last of our interviews with the finalists for the Finance Director of the Year title at the Accounting Excellence Awards is a conversation with Aikta Varma
She has driven changes in culture and technology at a succession of businesses and co-authored a new book on digital transformation.
Considering the challenge she was up against during the pandemic, it’s not surprising that Aikta Varma went on to co-author a book about digital transformation in finance.
As the newly-hired Head of Finance at The West Brom Building Society, she was tasked with meeting the annual accounts deadline when the workforce was in lockdown and didn’t have the tech for remote working.
“It’s probably one of the biggest achievements of my life and showed me that I can do a lot more than even I thought was possible,” she says.
Aikta was born and raised in Kenya and moved to the UK to study economics at the University of Nottingham.
“One thing that growing up in Kenya has given me is a very strong work ethic and I think that’s played into every role I’ve been in – a huge amount of resilience, a huge work ethic and an ability to be flexible and dynamic and just get on with anything I’m doing,” she says.
After graduating, she moved to Manchester to join KPMG’s graduate scheme. She mainly dealt with financial services clients, working in the company’s audit practice. A move to Birmingham saw her reach “quite a senior level”, doing a lot to build up the financial services practice.
“I didn’t have an ambition to be a partner at KPMG and after about 10 years I thought I’d done my stint, I’d done a lot of international travel, a lot of very full-on client work and I was ready for something different – more commercial rather than purely accounting,” she says.
After a year-long “semi-career break” in Kenya, during which she held a contractor role with the UN Women, she became Financial Reporting Manager at Paragon Banking Group.
“They had a big project on IFRS9, which was a new accounting standard at the time, and I joined the team that was leading that. It was a very prominent role in rolling that out across Paragon and all its divisions. We were a small team responsible for the the annual report and accounts as well as our IFRS9 project,” she recalls.
“Paragon was a really good place to work. It’s a FTSE 250 business and gave me a lot of experience, not just of number crunching but considering how the numbers look to the analysts, how to present financial metrics and how to discuss them.”
Aikta seized the opportunity to head finance at The West Brom. “Those kinds of opportunities at that level in financial services don’t come around that often in Birmingham,” she says.
“I started in January 2020 and March 2020 was our year-end – and that was effectively when we had to start working remotely.
“At The West Brom, no one except a very few senior people had laptops. They were all just used to working at the office, desktop-based.
“I had to lead a year-end in a company I was new to, when the team was not used to working remotely. I had to galvanise them but the organisation wasn’t initially set up to work remotely. We didn’t even have Zoom to begin with.
“It was a big cultural change and that’s when I realised I had a great opportunity to capitalise on what the pandemic was forcing us to do – to switch our ways of working to be more agile, more responsive, more flexible.”
Core members of the team got laptops first, while others were authorised to put software on their personal machines. She arranged daily conference calls by phone and was clear about what each person was expected to do that day. Managers were expected to be innovative and solve problems.
She says: “People were used to pushing the problem up the chain if they were stuck. I said, ‘You can’t push every problem up to me. You need consider potential solutions and then come to me and we’ll discuss it’. Pushing accountability down was a huge cultural change within my department.
“The West Brom said it wasn’t going to change the deadline for publishing the accounts, which was a huge ask considering I was newly enrolled, but we still did it. Team intact, still alive, we did it.”
The West Brom is the eighth largest building society in the UK, mainly serving Birmingham and the Black Country. It seeks to support home ownership, helping first time buyers get on the property ladder including through initiatives such as shared ownership.
“In the past 15 years, it’s come through a period where it’s had to stabilise itself. When I joined, it was still on the route to stability, very risk-averse, and it’s evolving to being more risk-aware rather than risk-averse,” says Aikta.
“Now that it’s a stable organisation, it’s looking to bring in more senior management to think about how we grow the business. What do we need to do to differentiate from our competitors? Strategy is becoming really important now, so is branding, and The West Brom will continue to consider how to reshape its strategy to meet the evolving needs of its members.
“The likes of Monzo will never reach every single person. Some customers want a bank or building society with a branch network they can go into – but equally, you need to think about how we get a new customer base. How are we going to do that in a way that’s ethical, giving them the product that’s right for them and helping them make it a sustainable way of life, not giving them a product they can’t afford?”
Aikta sees her FD of the Year shortlisting as recognition for the impact she’s had on that organisational culture.
She has sought to empower people to identify solutions for themselves rather than pass the problem up the hierarchy. “For the whole team, not just the senior managers, it’s about everybody mucking in and sharing knowledge”, she says.
“What I’ve managed to do is really build up a team of strong managers leading each team, so they’re better able to support their team members and answer their questions. As The West Brom grows, we as senior managers and heads of department are being empowered a lot more to make decisions,” she said.
She also sees the shortlisting as recognising her work on digital transformation. The book she has written on that subject, with husband Tarnveer Singh, will be published at the end of October.
“Since the pandemic, everyone's used to being very agile, used to being very much more tech-savvy. It’s about saying, ‘OK, you've been doing all these reconciliations, paper based or Excel-based, for months and months. The system can do them, why aren’t you doing them in the system or why are we even doing them in the first place?’
“Some of it comes from people complaining ‘It takes me too long every month to do this’ or ‘It takes me too long every morning to wade through all this data, we’re short staffed’. When you sit with them and understand the problem, you tease out the fact that a process that is overly complicated manually can be simplified digitally.”
Even more important to digital transformation, she says, is to ask what state the data should be in.
“It’s about saying ‘Where do we want the data to be?’ Where we’ve had incorrect data on a month by month basis, or we've reported something incorrectly because the data has come to us too late or too incorrect, how can we get that data better?
“It’s saying, how can we produce this data in a more efficient, accurate and systemic way every month?”
“I think some heads of finance are purely focused on the accounting side, whereas I have a very broad role,” says Aikta.
“It's slightly unusual and it allows me to see a lot more of the business than I guess the normal finance person would.
“I think my personality allows me to be successful at that. But that in turn allows me to really connect with the business on a level that's beyond just numbers.”
During her time at The West Brom, she has also gained an Executive MBA from the University of Warwick’s business school.
“My MBA was focused on strategy and leadership and that really comes into play here because I'm working across the business,” she says.
Being effective in finance is partly about being able to communicate the stories behind the figures, she believes.
“In financial services, we have considerably complex accounting and we need to be able to make sure the numbers stack up. But when explaining to the audit committee or to an executive committee, we have to be able to say why the numbers have moved in this way, what’s going on in the business and in the external market to drive those numbers.
“You have to get to the nitty-gritty of what’s going on in order to explain it in a way that someone who doesn’t have a lot of time or technical knowledge can understand and appreciate.
“Our job is to spot those patterns –and that’s why it’s so important not just to work well within finance but with the rest of the business and understand what they’re doing.”
Finance Transformation: Leadership on Digital Transformation and Disruptive Innovation by Aikta Varma and Tarnveer Singh will be published on October 31 and can be ordered here. The Accounting Excellence Awards are held on October 8.