The Challenge:
A global investment bank with several hundred completed transactions and more than 100 professionals focused on M&A and corporate finance advisory had a problem hiding in plain sight: its most valuable people were spending too much time on work that didn’t need their expertise.
Senior bankers and analysts were maintaining pipeline trackers by hand, rebuilding the same analysis over and over, and assembling reports manually — hours that should have gone to clients and live deals instead. Underneath that, the firm’s internal finance function needed the same discipline the front office brought to its deals: dependable accounting leadership, a forecast and reporting process leadership could rely on, and the ability to scale analytical support up or down as deal volume changed, without hiring a full team to sit idle in slower periods.
This is a pattern that shows up often at fast-growing, deal-driven firms: the business scales faster than the finance function supporting it, and the cost of that gap is senior time that should be spent elsewhere.
How Liv Data Helped:
Liv Data stepped directly into the firm’s finance function, rather than handing over a set of recommendations and walking away.
Finance Operations
- Supplied internal accounting leadership, a controller, FP&A capacity, and analyst support — hired, managed, and paid directly by Liv Data
- Worked side by side with the firm’s own staff, so leadership never had to manage a hire or run a payroll cycle
- Built in the flexibility to scale capacity up or down with deal volume, without adding permanent headcount
Technology & Automation
- Deployed AI tools built on Claude directly into banker workflows, targeting the research, drafting, and analysis tasks eating up the most time
- Built a live pipeline intelligence dashboard, replacing spreadsheets that had to be updated and reconciled by hand
- Built and now run the firm’s monthly FP&A process — forecasts, variance analysis, cash flow, and reporting — on a platform configured, maintained, and taught to the internal team
Strategic Leadership
- Sits on the firm’s AI committee, helping decide where automation should go next
- Keeps technology choices and financial strategy moving together instead of on separate tracks
One detail that shapes how this team works: a Liv Data partner previously served as CFO at a firm operating at this same scale — guidance grounded in having actually run finance inside a business like this one, not just advised on it from outside.
The Outcome:
- Bankers spend far less time on manual reporting
- Leadership works from a live, current view of the pipeline instead of numbers pulled together after the fact
- A monthly FP&A process leadership can trust, replacing ad hoc reporting
- The firm’s finance function — from accounting leadership through FP&A — now runs on Liv Data’s team, giving senior-level financial infrastructure without the cost of building it in-house
Why It Worked:
When day-to-day finance operations, technology, and strategic leadership all come from one team instead of three separate vendors, less gets lost in translation — and problems get solved faster because the people fixing them already understand the whole picture.
