Winner. Business Leader of the Year 2022

Sherilyn Kamga

Position: Senior Strategic Finance Analyst
Company: Talend
City: Los Angeles, California
Country: USA
Economic/Business Sector: Technology/Software & IT Services

Sherilyn Kamga was born in Paris and grew up in France. In high school, she developed an interest in Asia by learning Mandarin Chinese. She pursued a degree in Finance and Management at EM LYON Business School, one of the top business schools in France, where Sherilyn graduated in 2017.

After graduation, Sherilyn Kamga started her career as a Logistic Project Manager for a French garment company in Shanghai. This experience allowed her to gain a deeper understanding of the Asian market and its business environment.

Ms. Kamga has advanced experience in Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A). In her current role, she provides finance partnership and support to the R&D and Cloud Departments, connecting financial data, analysis, and forecasts to support expense and headcount planning and budgeting. Sherilyn zooms in and zooms out on the business to define short- and long-term objectives, partnering with c-level executives and their teams to develop their strategic plans with a focus on profitability.

In addition to Sherilyn's background in finance and management, she is also skilled in FinOps, a combination of financial management and operations management which allows to optimize of the usage and costs of cloud services. With critical skills in FinOps, Ms. Kamga can help control hosting costs and build stricter control over cloud service usage. This allows her company to make data-driven decisions and optimize its cloud services usage and costs, ensuring it gets the best value for its investment.

Sherilyn has also developed her technical skills on Anaplan and is a Certified Model Builder and Workspace Administrator at her current company. Through Ms. Kamga’s expertise in Anaplan, she has successfully revamped financial planning models to improve efficiency and accuracy in forecasting and budgeting processes. By revamping the financial planning models, she was able to streamline the data input process and automate the consolidation of financial data from various departments. This improved the accuracy and timeliness of the company's financial forecasts, allowing to make more informed decisions.

In addition to her background in finance and management and technical skills in SOL and Anaplan, Sherilyn has also developed a deep understanding of the SaaS (Software as a Service) industry through experience working in tech for the past 4 years. She has gained a thorough understanding of the SaaS business model and the unique financial challenges it poses. Sherilyn is familiar with the recurring revenue streams, the subscription-based pricing models, and the metrics used to measure the performance of SaaS companies.

Ms. Kamga has also experience working with SaaS financial planning and analysis tools. She understands the importance of accurate forecasting and budgeting in this industry. She consistently uses data to track key performance indicators (KPIs), such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), and chum rate, which are crucial to measure the performance and growth of a SaaS company.

Sherilyn plays a critical role in financial planning and analysis for her company. Her recent achievements include coordination and a complete revamp of the financial planning models, including headcount plan, income statement, and cash forecast, namely:

• Automated headcount planning and reporting processes,

• Adoption of FinOps practices across the company.

Recently, she has completed an SQL certification, which allows Sherilyn to contribute to data integration projects in her company, working with teams from IT and HR. The knowledge of SQL enables Sherilyn to effectively extract and manipulate large amounts of data and use it to support the financial planning and analysis process. This certification has also further advanced her ability to analyze data and make informed decisions, allowing her to collaborate effectively across different teams and departments in her company.

Ms. Kamga also increased the collaboration and alignment between finance and other departments by creating an easy-to-use platform for budgeting and forecasting that can be accessed by all relevant parties. This ensures that everyone is working towards the same goals and have a common understanding of the company's financial performance.

By upgrading her current company's financial models in Anaplan, Sherilyn was able to increase the granularity of the budgeting process, allowing them to better track expenses at a more detailed level. This provides greater visibility into the financial performance of different departments and projects, allowing to identify areas for cost savings and improvements.

Her recent achievements include collaborating on an internal strategic project to automate ARR reporting, which helps get visibility on financial results.

Overall, Sherilyn's efforts in revamping the financial planning models have brought significant benefits to the company. By improving the accuracy and timeliness of financial forecasts, increasing the granularity of budgeting, and fostering greater collaboration and alignment between finance and other departments, Ms. Kamga's company is better equipped to make strategic decisions and optimize its financial performance.