A quick look at what else we can do for your business this quarter, from the latest thinking on business performance to how our clients are putting it into practice.
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Verostone provides a strategic business-wide optimisation engine,
offering much more than solutions design and implementation
If you know Verostone for designing, implementing and evolving financial planning, management and reporting architecture, that’s just one part of what our team offers. We’ve now broadened our remit – expanding our strategic offering, as well as our portfolio of solutions.
The problem we keep seeing
Leadership teams set ambitious goals, then watch them undermined by:
Clear objectives matter, but the key success is successfully aligning strategy with execution. Performance is created – or constrained – by how leadership, people, processes, finance, and technology work together.
Our strategic vision: Five connected pillars
Verostone delivers end-to-end business optimisation consultancy. We work with boards, executive teams and finance leaders to redesign how organisations operate – ensuring strategy, execution and insight work as one. Our services focus on five interconnected areas:
Two things worth knowing
We don’t simply deliver software solutions. We build an optimisation model that connects strategy to execution.
Want to book a complimentary consultation with a Verostone consultant? Click here for a quick initial meeting
A day of insight, innovation & high-performance thinking
A huge thank you to everyone who joined us at Mercedes-Benz World on 14 May for a day of learning, networking and genuinely good conversations. Together with our partners Xledger, Prophix, Yooz, Trintech and Agicap, we brought senior finance and business leaders to the historic Brooklands circuit to explore the challenges and opportunities shaping modern finance, and one question in particular: what separates organisations that consistently perform from those that merely plan to?
On the agenda:
What kept coming up:
The afternoon brought those themes to life rather more literally: the AMG track experience, the F1 Pitstop Challenge, a genuine lesson in precision under pressure, and a simulator leaderboard that revealed a surprisingly competitive streak in a room of finance professionals. Some came for the networking, some for the fastest lap. Everyone left with ideas worth accelerating.
A heartfelt thank you to our speakers, panellists and partners for helping make the day such a success.
If you couldn’t attend or simply want to relive some of the highlights look at our short event recap.
Watch our recap here.
Your board is asking what you’re doing about AI. The better question is how it’s connected to your data.
The pattern we’d steer you away from.
Someone pastes a management pack into a general-purpose chatbot. The answers are impressive. The habit spreads.
This is shadow AI, and IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 put a number on it:
The instinct isn’t wrong: people want to work faster. Ban it and it moves to personal devices. Better to channel it somewhere safer.
Start with what you already own
Your finance platform almost certainly has AI built in, forecasting, anomaly detection, narrative reporting. It runs inside an environment you’ve already contracted and secured, on validated data rather than a pasted extract.
Exhaust what your platform does natively before looking anywhere else.
When you do connect, use MCP
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI to your systems -structured and permissioned, rather than pasted. Now vendor-neutral under the Linux Foundation, backed by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and AWS.
Data stays put. Access is scoped. Everything is traceable.
The constraint is rarely the AI
Fragmentation is. The 2025 FP&A Trends Survey found just 11% of organisations have fully aligned planning, and only 17% rate their data quality as good. Point an intelligent tool at that and you get confident-sounding answers built on inconsistent inputs.
When the answer isn’t a platform
Some problems cannot be solved with software. When growth stalls for reasons nobody can quite name, when a restructure needs to happen without losing the people who make the business work, when strategy is clear in the boardroom but evaporates somewhere on its way to delivery, those need judgement, not a system.
That is what our consulting and advisory practice exists for, and it is led by two people who have done the work at the highest level.
Chris Gaines, Performance Strategy Director, joined Verostone from a career in commercial leadership and high-stakes private equity, having advised the likes of Bain, the Carlyle Group and the NHS. He specialises in spotting the operational gaps others miss, and in moving businesses from potential to performance:
• Decisions that land: strategy translated into clear, ground-level action
• Hidden value unlocked: operational friction identified and removed before it costs you further
• Change that sticks: complex transformations delivered without losing the trust of the people who matter
Jon Daniel, Business Improvement Consultant, brings over 40 years with global brands including IBM, BT and Telefónica, and sits on our senior leadership team. He specialises in closing the gap between where a business is and where it needs to be:
• Business improvement: diagnosing performance blockers and delivering measurable, lasting results
• Operational restructuring: rethinking processes and managing growth with structural efficiency
• Boardroom advisory: a results-focused partner to senior leadership, balancing client needs with sound financial management
Why this matters for you
Between them, Chris and Jon have sat in the rooms where the hardest decisions get made — in private equity, in global corporates, in public sector organisations under real scrutiny. That experience makes the advice more direct, more commercially grounded, and considerably less interested in the theoretically ideal answer than in the one that will survive contact with your organisation.
It also pairs unusually well with the rest of what we do. Most consultancies hand you a recommendation and leave. Because Chris and Jon’s advisory work sits alongside our delivery, integration and managed services teams, the roadmap they design is one we can also build, implement and support, which removes the gap where good strategy usually goes to die.
Ready to explore what’s possible? Book a complimentary session with one of our Verostone consultants here.
From fragmented financial data to a seamless, scalable integration for one of the world’s largest independent fragrance houses
Rapid international growth creates a familiar problem for finance teams. As entities, regions and systems multiply, financial data ends up living in more places than is comfortable, and the effort of moving it between them grows with every addition. For CPL Aromas, a global, family-owned fragrance house crafting scents for leading brands across fine fragrance, personal care and home care, connecting core financial systems became a priority to strengthen reporting and support faster decision-making.
The constraints CPL Aromas faced:
The brief for the new solution was clear: seamless, scalable, and built to last as the business grows. Working closely with CPL Aromas’ team, Verostone designed and delivered an end-to-end integration between Microsoft D365 and Planful.
Key features of the solution include:
Critically, the integration was built to scale. As CPL Aromas grows, new data can be brought into the same structure rather than requiring a new solution each time – supporting the business’s wider digital transformation and future-focused data strategy.
Results and benefits:
CPL Aromas now has a scalable foundation for reporting and insight, built to grow with the business.
Tackling your own integration challenges? Book a complimentary session with one of our Verostone consultants here.
You can buy the dashboard. You cannot buy the culture
Most organisations have made the investment. The platform is in, the data is flowing, the dashboards look good. And yet decisions still get made the way they always were- on instinct, on seniority, on whoever argues most persuasively in the room.
The evidence on why is unusually clear, and it is not what most people expect.
It isn’t a technology problem
Wavestone’s 2024 Data & AI Executive Leadership Survey, covering more than 100 Fortune 1000 data and analytics leaders, found:
Three things that actually build it
Readiness matters more than ambition
A data-driven culture cannot be built on data nobody trusts – and trust is thin. The 2025 FP&A Trends Survey found only 17% of organisations rate their data quality as good, and 46% of FP&A time still goes on collecting and validating data rather than analysing it.
Ask people to decide on numbers they privately doubt, and they will revert to instinct. That is not a cultural failing; it is a rational response to an unreliable input.
Click here to take the poll.
Transform finance into a strategic engine for smarter decisions
Is your finance team ready to move beyond manual processes and unlock real-time insight? At Verostone, we help organisations transform finance into a strategic engine that connects data, strategy, and operations. Our approach goes beyond software, combining AI-enabled tools, best practice frameworks, and hands-on expertise to deliver measurable results.
How we support you:
Take your finance function further
Book a complimentary discovery call with a Verostone expert to:
Start building your roadmap to strengthen collaboration, accuracy and agility across finance and operations – get in touch with our support team by mailing support@verostone.com.