5 Minutes with...

Going beyond the business to get to know

Olivier Homps, President & Chairman of the board at FIIT Consulting.

With over 15 years’ experience in consulting for banks and insurance companies, Olivier leads FIIT Consulting with a commitment to delivering impactful financial transformation and digitalization services. Below, Olivier shares his vision for his company, perspectives on the finance function and changing technology landscape and the future he sees as an Aptitude Partner.

Name: Olivier Homps

Title: President & Chairman of the Board

Organization: FIIT Consulting

Location: Poland

Olivier Homps, President of FIIT Consulting, transitioned from a client-facing consulting role to executive leadership, steering the organisation through growth and strategic partnerships. With over 15 years of experience in consulting for banks and insurance companies, Olivier leads FIIT Consulting with a commitment to delivering impactful financial transformation and digitalisation services.

Leveraging his extensive experience, Olivier fosters relationships across the industry, including strategic partnerships, long-term engagements with clients, and synergies with other firms and industry players. To learn more about FIIT Consulting, please visit https://fiit-consulting.com

On his vision for FIIT Consulting

We started as a group of contractors – all Aptitude alumni – working on the same big transformation program. In addition to working well together, we thought there was value in our shared expertise that could benefit the wider market. There was a need on the Aptitude side as well, driven by company growth, to build out a larger pool of trained delivery partners. It was a perfect fit. So, we started FIIT Consulting to provide comprehensive support for Aptitude projects – be it around implementation, or taking over testing phases, all the way down to operational support.

Our mission and vision revolve around the conviction that Aptitude products hold the power to simplify finance transformation and finance digitalization and we are committed to leveraging our expertise in these products to make life easier for finance teams. That’s what we strive for. And I think we’ve found this vision resonates deeply with our clients – who appreciate the value we bring and recognize how our services seamlessly complement Aptitude’s offerings.

On the changing nature of finance transformation programs

Olivier: When I started, finance transformation projects were predominantly triggered by regulatory change. Finance digitalization was seen as a big undertaking and almost always driven from the top down. So, either the regulator said, ‘you have to do this,’ and the CFO complied, or the CFO had a vision for their company and the way they wanted to take finance into the digital age and out of Excel.

But it has changed dramatically. For starters, the business and the finance function are a lot more tech savvy than they were ten years ago. There’s a lot more understanding of what products are out there and what these products can do for their day-to-day jobs. And as a result, there’s now a significant bottomup push for finance transformation, which means we’re seeing a higher volume of smaller-scale initiatives where a business unit is saying, ‘you know what, we’re going to change the way we do things compared to the group.’ Then they talk across business units and communicate the value coming from these smaller projects that can be executed in 9-12 months and make a real difference. That’s how they get buy-in across the business. This bottom-up feed into transformation is something that didn’t exist before. There is a much bigger appetite for change.

On common finance challenges

Olivier: One of the most prevalent challenges in Banks and Insurers is the integration of systems and processes following mergers and acquisitions. Organizations that have expanded through M&A often find themselves dealing with disparate systems and disjointed processes, making it a significant hurdle to overcome, thus driving finance transformation initiatives.

On exciting tech trends

Olivier: When I started my career, most of the focus was file based. Transferring files, loading files, extracting files, producing more files. So, the whole microservice approach where you can consume data from pretty much anywhere and from pretty much any system is something that makes our lives so much easier.

And in terms of infrastructure, the whole Cloud push is something that has been so refreshing. To be able to be onsite with a client and just jump up an environment in an hour. Now you’ve got a brand new environment that you can ramp up, assign the capacity you need to perform any kind of testing and then you can get rid of this environment. The flexibility that it offers on implementation is great.

If I’m looking into the future, how can we not talk about the increasing role of artificial intelligence in our daily operations? It’s hard to fathom at the moment how much of an impact it will have on the finance office but there are very clever people who are looking at this. I think the use of data combined with artificial intelligence in order to build predictive models and things like that is just something that I’m really excited about.

On the Aptitude/FIIT Partnership

Olivier: We were so excited to officially become an Aptitude Certified Partner! What that means for us – in addition to being a lot busier – is that we’ve got regular alignment with sales, with professional services and with the partner teams at Aptitude so that we can refine our offers and bring additional value to the client.

We’re also really excited about the prospect of Fynapse, Aptitude’s new finance management platform, because it means not only we will be able to be a service provider, but we can also start channeling our expertise into creating modules specifically for Fynapse that encapsulate our Banking and Insurance knowledge for our joint clients. We’re excited to ramp up our internal development capabilities to take advantage of this opportunity to add to the Fynapse marketplace.