Menno Van Zanden is the Director of FP&A – Software Business Operations at Diebold Nixdorf in the Netherlands. He started his career as an Accountant at Oracle, where he spent more than 14 years of his career. He became FP&A Manager Benelux at General Electric, before moving to NetApp, and Diebold Nixdorf.

How do you see digital Finance, business intelligence (BI) and data transformation in the next ten years?

I think automation, artificial intelligence is going to make a huge change to how Finance operates and what our role within the company is, because a lot of the standard processes which we’re now outsourcing are going to be automated and using AI and robotics to get them done.

Which sounds like a threat, but I think it’s an opportunity, because it will allow us to focus on adding value to the business and doing the things we should be doing, and that is helping drive the business forward and helping drive the right business decisions.

I think as we move towards automation of all the standard activities - especially transactions - Finance is going to have to move towards a real time model. I think the traditional monthly cycle is going to be too slow at certain points. Not necessarily always, but we have seen it in the beginning of the pandemic; things changed so rapidly that a monthly cycle is too slow to react and make decisions.

As we move towards automation having a real time financial overview, companies will become a lot more flexible in reacting in changing environments. I think that’s where we need to step in to help drive those discussions and not be the number crunchers, so we move from: What has happened? Why did it happen? What is going to happen? To: How do we make it happen? That is where we add value.

Looking at that flexibility and the real time numbers, a lot of the financial planning and modelling is going to be automated. As we have all these automated numbers in the systems, the planning can become automatic to an extent, and will make it much quicker to run different scenarios and modelling. It will fundamentally change the world of Finance.

When we look at BI, the amount of data that we have now, we are probably not able to do anything manually, so we need the automation to be able to analyse it and use that data to drive the decisions.

One of the things we are working on now in my current role is how we expose the data to the leadership, because we traditionally send around reports in various forms. We need to move to a self-service model, where we have BI dashboards where people can go to anytime that they want in the real time Finance model and they can look at the data. In Finance, we would need to make sure that the way the data is presented is understandable to non-Finance people to drive decisions.

How do you feel that the workplace will have changed now we’re emerging from a global pandemic?

Obviously, it’s changed significantly. In March 2020, we were suddenly forced to work from home and, despite that being a big change, it hasn’t impacted the businesses and how we work together as much as maybe we would have thought; it turned out we have the digital technology to continue to work.

We had some hiccups, but the IT department worked very hard, and it turned out that we could work that way quite easily. We changed meetings and we used Teams and Zoom. Without anyone necessarily introducing it or saying we need to do that, people started turning on their video. That meant that, because of the pandemic, I saw people for the first time that I worked with for a couple of years already. Before that, we would have just a phone call, so I think it brought people closer together who were remote previously.

Now, as we hopefully emerge from the pandemic, we need to learn from the things that we’ve learnt, and think about how we organise our offices and our workspaces in a way that we use it for what they should be used for.

For a long time, the office was a place where you go and work because it’s quiet, and you can be efficient there. We’ve now learnt that you can be very efficient at home, because there’s less distraction. I do think that offices and workplaces are a place where you go to collaborate and be creative together.

So, how do we organise things to make it more appealing for people to come to the workplace, as that is one of the challenges we are seeing now. People are so used to working from home, we are not able to get them to come into the offices, so offices are quite empty. We need to figure out how to create the atmosphere to make people want to come back to the office. The new office environment will be more the campus style environment, where people come to collaborate and get inspiration.

What advice would you give to someone that wants to start a career in Finance?

My answer is probably not the traditional one, because I think a lot of people plan their career - I’ve never done that. The way I’ve gone through my career is by doing the things that I enjoy. The advice I would give is: look for what it is you enjoy, because - for a lot of Finance people - Finance is all the same.

I think, once you are in Finance, you realise it is actually a very broad spectrum of things. With different skillsets, there are different things that you do. I don’t have an Accounting degree, so it wasn’t the logical step to go in the Accounting direction, but I think the reason I managed to be reasonably successful in my career is because I did the things that I enjoy. If you enjoy something, it shows to people you have this energy and you can get across. You tend to be better at the things that you enjoy, and people see that, and I think it interacts.

One of the other things is, I’ve had quite a stable career from a company perspective; I didn’t change companies every two years. I understand why people do that, because it can kickstart your career, especially in the beginning, both from an experience and a financial perspective.

I think the benefit I see is, if you stay longer within a company because you know the company, you can focus your development more. If you change companies, you need to get to know other people, the environment, the processes, the systems. But, if you stay within the same company, you can say, “Okay, what is the development goal that I’ve set for myself?”, and you can focus much more on it, because you don’t have the distraction of learning all the other things.

I understand it can be maybe a bit frustrating at times if you’re stuck in the same role, but I do believe that loyalty does get rewarded within companies, and, as opportunities arise, you can make those steps up within the same company. I worked for 12 years in one company, and I did five or six different roles. They were all within different departments, and kind of a natural progression and extending my responsibilities.

The last thing that is probably a more traditional one as you come into Finance, you need to understand the basics, because, at the beginning, as you do analysis, it may feel a bit boring, but it will help you understand to do an analysis as you get there. One of the most important things at the beginning of my career are the skills to understand the business, processes and hierarchies, and how they can help you analyse things, and this allows you to use the system to better enhance your job.

How did you fall into the industry and get your current role?

Both the fact that I ended up in Finance and in the industry were a bit by chance. My father used to be in Finance, so, when I was young, I was like, whatever I do, it will not be that. I started studying Physics, because what I enjoyed in Physics in high school was understanding how things interact, how things work, and how processes work.

First year Physics at university was pretty much the same as Mathematics and that just threw me off a little bit, so I switched to Business Economics, as that was a bit more practical. I ended up in an internship at my first employer, Oracle, where I was asked to stay, and I decided to do that.

I think the reason why I stayed in the industry is because I’m quite technical; I call myself a bit of a nerd, I like gadgets, I like figuring things out from a technical side. When I interact with people from a more technical side of the company, I understand quite well what they’re talking about.

What I like about the industry is the pace is extremely fast, the developments are extremely fast, because what I don’t like is, if I go into the office tomorrow, that it’s the same day as it is today. In IT, the pace of change is so high that you know that tomorrow is going to be different.

What would you say is the most rewarding part of your role?

The most rewarding thing for me is I like solving puzzles, and that’s what originally drove me to the Physics side of things, as well; you have these puzzles and understanding how things fit together. I don’t think non-Finance people understand those puzzles, and how they fit together and how it helps them; that is what I enjoy the most. What I enjoy the most is those things that make a real impact. That’s on the technical business side of things.

On the people side of things, how we’ve progressed as a Finance organisation within the company I work with right now, I actually don’t have a team; we’ve outsourced a lot of our activities where we have a virtual team. What I find that I really enjoy is helping them grow, develop and learn.

I can say now, having worked for more than 25 years, I realise I have a lot of experience, and I like to share that with them, and explain to them and show them how I do certain things, and helping them understand why I do the things that I do, and that way try to get them to the next level.

I think there are going to be huge changes in the next couple of years or in the future in the financial world. I believe it will be very interesting and challenging, and I think every Finance organisation needs to embrace those changes.

Thank you to Menno for speaking to our Finance & Accountancy recruitment team in the Netherlands, led by Hannah Mallia and David Harper.

Views and opinions contained within our Executive Interviews are those of the interviewee and not views shared by EMEA Recruitment.