Intro

- [Narrator] This is an audio course. Thank you for listening. - [Christian] So the main idea is to give time back to the business. So basically like if there are like certain processes that are taking six hours long or two days long, then I try to develop tools in order to improve their performance. And it will take now like one minute, 15 minutes or one hour - [Instructor] That was Christian Martinez, who is currently working as a finance automation manager at Kraft Heinz in Australia. But as you'll hear, there's a lot of big changes coming up for him. And a lot of lessons that he's learned throughout his years, his travels, his work in the EU and just so much good tidbits for you if you are in the realm of finance or consider going into that from wherever you're at today. So without further ado here is Christian Martinez. (upbeat music) Christian, welcome to the Free the Data Podcast. I'm very excited to have you on here. Now you are in Australia, but you travel quite a bit. (speaking Spanish) So tell me a little bit about your background. What are you, where, when did you get into working with data? What are you doing now? How did you end up in Australia? Is that where you were born and raised? Like, like just, I want to hear the journey of where you started and where you're at now 'cause I think it's one that maybe a lot of other people can learn from. - [Christian] Yeah, no, thanks so much for having me here. First of all, and sure. So I'm originally from Mexico. I was born and raised there and then I studied a bachelor of business actually back in 2013 and during my bachelor's and a bit after I had the opportunity to travel to Europe to have like an exchange program in Paris and Slovakia. And then I stayed working for a bit in Switzerland, in the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. And after that I thought that I really wanted to have like an international career. So that propelled me to start leading up and finding masters of finance and analytics. And I found that in Monash University here in Melbourne, Australia. So I started that in 2016 and basically, at first it was a program for mainly finance, but I started to learning a little bit more about like tools like Excel, Python, R, SQL, stuff like that. And I was really interested on that part of data analytics and basically how to use data in order to help finance professionals. So that led me to start startup called the Financial Thoughts that was basically helping finance professionals to get into data analytics and also helping students to get their first industry related job in Australia, in the analytics and finance. I have been doing that for the last four years now. And at the same time, like after finish my master's. I got myself a job in Kraft Heinz, the food company. So I started in there as a finance analyst and then moved to be like an accountant, then finance controller, senior finance controller. And then finally, now I'm leading the finance automation team for Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. I'm currently based in Brisbane in Australia, but I'm moving to the Netherlands to Amsterdam in (indistinct). I would like to lead that finance observation efforts for Kraft Heinz, the international level.