The last time I provided an update, we were in a shutdown; now we are in a war. The impacts of this current geopolitical event are impossible to gauge but the risks of economic decline and inflationary pressure are increasing as a result. It is unclear how it will impact our clients but, as you will read below, we continue to add clients and consultants while extending existing team members. I’ll also dedicate a portion of this update to our growing emphasis on recruiting support (for clients who are focused on permanent hiring) and an emerging technology that will change every one of your jobs by the end of the year.
Augment at a Glance
In the past 3 months, we have signed 2 new clients, adding 5 consultants to support them. Three team members were extended (or in the process) across 3 clients! We had two consultant engagements end this quarter; one of them after two years of support. On a bittersweet note, one of our consultants was extended this quarter and has very recently accepted a full-time job with the client. While I will be sad to see him go, I look at these outcomes as a positive because hopefully our client and former consultant will both continue to view Augment Analytics favorably the next time they need support! Finally, we have added 4 net new consultants to the platform; and, today the platform of available consultants stands at 122.
New, Existing, and Prospective Clients
As I mentioned last time, our new privately-held consumer finance client is leveraging several resources. One of them was recently extended while another’s project came to an end. As a promising sign, we were recommended to another department of the company and have placed an analyst with them supporting their direct mail marketing strategy.
We signed a digital-first mortgage lender that is rapidly growing. The initial support is through recruiting as they ramp up their mortgage operations, an area where we have not traditionally had staff augmentation resources. In just three months, we have already successfully hired for the initial list of open positions and may temporarily work ourselves out of a job if they don’t post more job openings.
We were also engaged by a start-up fintech that raised significant equity last summer. We will be supporting their growth both through recruiting activities (which we are already beginning candidate interviews for) and through our staff augmentation analysts, the first one being related to fraud strategy. We have another consultant interviewing for a role supporting their direct mail marketing strategy right now.
As I alluded to above, we have several additional opportunities to support clients with recruiting support. We are in conversations with a large US auto retailer, a credit card financial tech company, and a mortgage insurance company to provide recruiting support. In fact, both the auto retailer and the mortgage insurance company are also interested in bringing in staff augmentation analytics support.
In-Demand Job Families
Regarding our highest priority resource needs, the primary areas of interest from clients over the past several months are noted below. I continue to appreciate your referrals:
- Data scientists
- Direct mail marketing strategy analytics
- Credit risk analytics
Note: We are going to be putting some additional business development emphasis in other job families including compliance and technical program manager in coming months.
Trends in the Industry: Direct Mail Is Making a Comeback
Direct mail is making a comeback. As Gemini, ChatGPT, and Anthropic eat into SEO/SEM market share, a number of clients are returning to the forgotten medium of direct mail. With more data about every consumer now available to be mined, targeting and messaging can be performed like never before. A lot of companies had direct mail on autopilot (or turned it off completely) and are now looking for areas to invest their excess marketing budgets. If you have direct mail experience, make sure it is prominent on your resume and LinkedIn profile.
Today’s Highlight: Claude’s Excel Plug-In
If you haven’t used it yet, the plug-in is a pop-up in your Excel file. You can instruct it to interact with your spreadsheet. It is quite powerful. The plug-in can largely execute any task you give it which can include refreshing the spreadsheet for a new client, adding an additional quarter’s worth of columns/rows, etc. Still, I think the power will come when the effort to train it is stored in memory so that it can repeat the task flawlessly for the next client. I highly recommend that everyone start getting familiar with Claude (or similar tools) because I am certain that everyone in a professional capacity in financial services will be using these tools by the end of the year or will be on their way to obsolescence. That is not a threat; it is a heads-up.
A special thanks to Craig for getting this on my radar. I have spent over 10 hours with Claude since I attended Anthropic’s webinar last week.
Testing Claude for Excel: Can It Build a Real Financial Model?
Video: Josh Aharonoff (Your CFO Guy) on YouTube.
- 1:30 — The plug-in creates a financial model from scratch
- 3:00 — It begins creating projections formulas
- 6:00 — It builds a more comprehensive statement of cash flows
- 12:30 — It builds a revenue model specific to the client
- 16:30 — It incorporates headcount
