Wassia Kamon: The power behind Powerball on doing “FP&A on the Go”

Wassia Kamon built FP&A from the ground up at Intralot, a state lottery vendor behind the US Powerball lottery (as an insider she couldn’t play the lottery for nine years).

And Wassia knows something about winning against the odds.

She arrived in the US aged 17. As she points out “only 3% of people getting a CPA are black”.

Wassia says: “Growing up in the Ivory Coast I was not a minority. Coming to the US I had to learn what it was to be a minority.”

She started posting regularly on LinkedIn after “seeing that there’s nobody that looks like me that’s talking about finance. “I never had a black boss, I never reported to somebody that was black. So the fact that I’m in this role means that other people saw me for what I could bring to the table and hired me.”

Her rapid rise has seen her become a finance executive with roles as VP of Finance at Boehringer Ingelheim From there, she moved on to more FP&A-focused roles at Boehringer Ingelheim, a global pharmaceutical company, as finance business partner for different business units, to VP of Finance at Low Income Investment Fund (the company manages $2billion of investments). She was recently recognized as an up the 40 under 40 honoree by CPA Practive Advisor.

In this episode learn:

• Her approach to learning *on the go* in switching from accounting to FP&A 
• The value of “starting where you are” 
• How to make sure finance speaks the same language as the rest of the business
• Putting ongoing meetings ahead of an annual meeting when it comes to budget and other big ticket items
• Secrets to managing a team and getting the most out of colleagues
• Book recommendations to boost your FP&A career
• How being “overly confident” led to her biggest FP&A career blunder 
• Her favorite Excel function that changed her life forever 
• What’s better, chocolate or Cheetos?

YouTube video of this episode 

Full episode transcript

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