FinSquare Consulting Group: Driving Growth And Innovation In Luxembourg

Pictured Finsquare Consulting Group’s, Luxembourg country manager Celse Maregarege (Photo © Silicon Luxembourg/Stephanie Jabardo)

FinSquare Consulting Group celebrates its first year of activity in the Grand Duchy. Julien Frenot, CEO, and Celse Maregarege, Luxembourg country manager, talk about the company and the particularities of the Luxembourg market for its business.

FinSquare Consulting Group, a Belgian company specialized in financial interim management, review and optimization of financial processes and related services, opened a branch in Luxembourg in 2022.

Based in the Silversquare Liberté, a coworking space in Luxembourg City, FinSquare Luxembourg intend to grow its activities in providing its clients with in-depth finance and banking consulting expertise.

Celse Maregarege (its country manager) and Julien Frenot (the CEO of the Belgian group), discuss the origins of this expansion in the Grand Duchy, and the particularities of the Luxembourg market for its activities.

When did the idea of FinSquare come about?

FinSquare was launched in Brussels in 2016 by four partners who wanted to capitalize on their knowledge and experience and offer their services to the finance departments of organizations.

Indeed, after several years spent with the Big Four, in large multinationals or teaching, they realized that finance departments had great needs for human resources and expertise in the operational financial field. The group currently employs 42 consultants in Belgium and two in Luxembourg.

What are its main core businesses?

Our activities include four main business pillars, which are all related. The first is Interim Management, which provides corporate finance departments with a flexible workforce – Chief Financial Officers, Finance Directors & Managers, Financial Analysts & Controllers, Reporting or consolidation Specialists – to tackle their critical business and finance issues. These missions may last a few weeks up to a few months.

The second pillar is Process Review and Optimization: we review and optimize the documents and the internal financial processes (closing, budgeting, reporting, controlling) of our clients’ financial departments. The objective is to improve their performance. When possible, we use the technology to be more efficient.

The request for review and optimization usually comes from the company’s CFO, who for instance realizes after an employee has left the company that no documentation exists on the processes that he/she used to operate. And no one in his team is able to apply these.

Furthermore, the whole mission – from the documentation up to the process improvement – often serves as a necessary phase, prior to the implementation of a digital transformation.

Our third activity is Program and Project Management: we assist our clients in their projects, which apply the Prince2 management method or the customers’ own methodologies.

Finally, FinSquare offers other services including M&A strategy, HR consulting and financial communication: we provide our clients with resources to carry out their merger & acquisition from A to Z on the financial side.

In terms of financial communication, for example, we provide a specialist who will directly and temporarily take over the communication tasks of the finance department. These missions are somehow exceptional and more of a niche.

All our consulting missions consist in filling an urgent operational needs. We provide a temporary additional resource, whose experience and added value can be very quickly and directly implemented. However, we do not come to tell our clients how they should do their job.

Who are your customers? In which sectors do they operate?

Our Belgian clients operate in sectors including the industry, energy, finance, retail, healthcare, public sector, real estate, telecom, transport and logistics. This allows us to bring new perspectives to our clients, with what is done in other sectors. It also allows the problem to be posed from another angle, to challenge the customers’ processes and to provide them with another approach that they would not have naturally thought of.

Why did you choose to come to Luxembourg?

The country is close to Belgium in terms of location and mindset. Moreover, many of our clients are also present in Luxembourg. Indeed, there are often similarities in terms of process needs and synergies between the parent company and its subsidiaries, and vice versa.

However, the needs for expertise differ: Belgian clients are usually looking for finance generalists, whereas Luxembourg clients need consultants with in-depth finance and banking expertise, such as KYC/AML analysts, accountants, risk managers, management controllers, reporting officers…

Furthermore, we are also helping clients on more general missions, such as the control of overheads, for major banks in the financial center.

Do you support your customers in the digitalization of their processes? If so, how?

A large majority of our customers continue to operate their processes manually, especially for invoice processing. Most have not yet considered digitizing their processes.

Moreover, our consultants are rather generalists, and we are not IT experts to advise them on one tool rather than another. We can therefore only support them with our business expertise on improving their manual processes.

However, we also serve customers when they implement digital solutions to operate their processes. Often their business teams “do not speak ITC” and developers in charge of the migration or of the implementation “do not speak finance or business”. We, therefore, act as an interface between the two teams, as business analysts do.

We also intervene after the implementation of the solutions, to reconcile the financial data, which might have been lost during the migration.

What are FinSquare’s next steps in Luxembourg?

In Luxembourg, we are still in the startup phase. We will continue to offer quality operational missions, which have proven their worth in Belgium.

In addition to its expertise, FinSquare stands out for its very pragmatic approach to bringing value to customers very quickly, but also for its founding values of transparency and proximity to the customer.

The use of various technologies and simpler and more efficient working methods makes it possible to offer the most competitive prices. We will continue to grow. We are therefore looking for consultants, who would be interested in taking part in the project and in the company’s growth in Luxembourg. Our goal is to hire two consultants per month and to reach 10 employees by the end of 2023.

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