Apr 23, 2018

Philip Woodburn joins us and starts off by providing an overview of the structure of the team: "Four or five years ago we started moving the basic transactional finance, payment of vendors, cash application for customers, down to Monterey but we kept what called the competency centerpiece all around financial reporting and  financial closing. We've kept that team. It's not a big team, about 30 people. So it's a small portion of what we do globally, but very close to our business leaders up in North America so that we can keep the engagement with the business. We are a French group, but US actually is our biggest country globally. The Philippines was a base for us actually, both for manufacturing as well as services over the last eight years. Actually it's a very large call center particularly for our US market because Filipinos speak a lot of English. We built on that and we expanded that as a finance hub for the Eastern part of Asia and for the Pacific to give a little bit of proximity to the customers in that region. We're now starting to see a little bit more synergy between what we do in the Philippines and India on an Asia-Pacific basis, and we're clubbing together more of those operations in that particular geography today. But that's also, as you imagine, a long way away from Europe on the East side of the world. Malaysia is more of a hub for HR for Southeast Asia. But China definitely is an important base for us. China is our second largest country globally. We have a very large operation both in terms of industry, in terms of what we produce, as well as what we sell to the Chinese market and it's probably our fastest growing global market today, and we have a big team in China for Chinese speaking part of the world."