September 28, 2022

Gabriela Gutierrez: Using AI to Predict Revenues within FP&A

45 minutes

Gabriela Gutierrez is Financial Planning & Analysis Specialist at eBay Classifieds in Germany.

Gabriela is one of our most international guests. Growing up in Ecuador, she did an MBA in Barcelona and studied in the US. She now works in Germany leading revenue forecasts for the core divisions of the online juggernaut eBay Kleinanzeigen.

At eBay Kleinanzeigen (Kleinanzeigen is the German word for classifieds) she is responsible for revenue forecasting for 70% for the largest classified online ads portal in the country. She splits her days providing forecasts for the main business, advertising, subscriptions and classifieds. (After the sale of the eBay classifieds division it belongs to the Norwegian Adventina , in which eBay in turn holds 33 percent).

In this episode, Gabriela discusses the pivotal moment in her career: how she learnt to love coding and embraced data analytics and ML to deal with the vast amount of data at the company.

She discusses spending hours and days and months learning Python (“I would spend hours trying to understand where I had made an error”) and eventually experimented with Meta’s Prophet - a forecasting procedure implemented in R and Python and her strong working collaboration with the data analytics team at the company.

Originally choosing finance over a fashion career, she fell in love with FP&A as perfect for someone of her mindset, a natural introvert, who nevertheless comes alive when talking with others about numbers: “I love how you can see how any initiative in the business will influence the revenues or cost” and “tell the story using numbers.”

In this episode Gabriela talks to Paul about

Her path to FP&A

Her secrets to balancing the metrics across the company’s advertising, subscription and classified forecasts

Her deep relationship with the analytics team

Whether analytics should be within the finance team?

Her journey from FP&A to data science

Using AI to predict revenues in FP&A

Her passion for Germany and interests outside of finance

Her biggest advice to succeed in FP&A

Her favorite Excel function

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By Glenn Hopper