OneStream Splash EMEA 2024 Recap

That's a wrap! OneStream Splash EMEA 2024 wrapped up in fabulous Copenhagen — bringing together industry experts, customers, and partners to experience the future of enterprise finance. At Splash, we shared announcements of major innovations, customer success stories, and so much more. Attendees experienced what's possible when organizations have the access, insights, and capabilities needed to Take Finance Further™.

In this blog post, we share a daily recap of Splash. The recap highlights key opportunities customers had to elevate their finance teams with strategies to enhance financial operations and build valuable connections.

Day 1: Setting the Stage for the Future of Finance

Day 1 brought finance professionals together and provided a foundation of practical knowledge to help Take Finance Further™.

Hands-On Workshops & Product Spotlights

In a series of interactive workshops, attendees had the opportunity to dive deep into specific topics and gain practical skills. These interactive sessions covered everything from advanced modeling techniques to optimizing dashboards, ensuring participants left with actionable insights and new expertise.

Partner Summit

Splash Copenhagen also gave us the opportunity to host our sixth annual EMEA Partner Summit. The partner summit is designed as an exclusive half-day event for our incredible partner community. In the summit, those attending got partner-specific content, a preview of the conference's upcoming content, and an opportunity to network with peers and OneStream staff before the main conference started.

Over 230 people from over 60 partner organizations were joined by a wealth of OneStream speakers, including the global and EMEA executive leadership (see Figure 1) whereOneStream CMO Tim Minahan took to the stage to give an update on our new branding and share the marketing strategy.

A notable new addition to the 2024 agenda was role-based sessions for our consulting and sales and marketing partner teams. In the sessions, the teams took a deeper dive with OneStream experts and even got some hints and tips.

Overall, partners gained new insights and got previews of new innovations and best practices. The partners thus gained insights into supporting not only customers through collaboration and training but also the long-term success of OneStream's alliance partnerships.

Day 2: Igniting Innovation

Day 2 focused on innovation and driving the finance function forward — with a vision keynote, Executive Summit, customer breakouts, and spotlight sessions on new innovations.

Vision Keynote

Tom Shea kicked off the second day of Splash with a much-anticipated keynote (see Figure 2). Bringing energy and excitement to the stage, Tom highlighted a series of highly targeted AI-powered innovations. These all focused on making every aspect of planning, financial close, and reporting processes faster, easier to use, and more personalized.

During his keynote, Tom noted how customers such as Nutreco uniquely unify management reporting and bring 17 — YES, 17 — critical processes together. Nutreco’s management reporting now includes reporting for financials, capital, supply chain, ESG, tax, and other areas.

That feat offers a great example of “doing more in the core.” It shows what’s possible with OneStream, too, highlighting how customers are generating massive increases in efficiency, effectiveness, and business value.

Tom also unveiled two new core finance innovations and showcased several previously announced innovations to streamline the navigation and delivery of financial and operating reporting.

Here are four of the new OneStream solutions Tom discussed:

1. Excel 

New Excel enhancements seamlessly integrate the robustness and control of OneStream with the familiarity and flexibility of Excel. Through the integration, planning and analysis have significantly improved efficiency and accuracy. These enhancements empower users to perform comprehensive workflows and financial tasks directly in Excel. As a result, productivity and user satisfaction are enhanced across the broad spectrum of planning, financial analysis, and reporting scenarios.

2. Navigation Center 

OneStream Navigation Center easily organizes all standard and user-defined reports. For easier report access, the center enables tagging and bookmarking for frequently used reports. Reports can also be secured, and due dates can be set to centralize, streamline, and enhance reporting for all users.

Another key topic, especially here in Copenhagen, focuses on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requirements. At the heart of the topic is how finance teams are preparing for evolving ESG requirements and using ESG targets as a catalyst to drive corporate-wide business plans. Focusing on those aspects, OneStream President Craig Colby came to the stage to share insights on OneStream’s product vision for ESG. That vision is to deliver a uniquely unified ESG reporting and planning solution that’s always aligned to your trusted financial data.

To close out the vision keynote, Craig welcomed CEO Tom Shea back to the stage to discuss our vision for what we call Enterprise Finance AI.

Tom previewed the following AI capabilities coming to the OneStream Sensible AI portfolio:

3. OneStream AI-Powered Anomaly Detection

In OneStream’s Sensible AI Library, AI-powered Anomaly Detection is a pre-packaged AI capability that helps finance leaders detect anomalies for data cleansing and reporting. By scanning thousands of transactions to detect unusual patterns or outliers, AI Anomaly Detection can uncover unexpected or duplicate entries. Those discoveries enable finance teams to quickly investigate and correct issues before the final close. Currently, this capability has limited availability.

4. OneStream Sensible Machine Learning (ML) Scenario Modeling

This capability builds on OneStream’s initial Sensible ML solution and creates real-time, AI-driven "what-if" forecasting scenarios using a company's own enterprise information across operational and financial workstreams. With this capability, finance teams gain two key capabilities. First, finance can isolate key business drivers (e.g., changes in interest rates, inflation, gas prices, new product introductions, and plant shutdowns), Second, finance can validate the scenarios and test their impact across forecasting, operational planning, workforce planning, sales planning, and other areas.

Executive Summit

The second day of OneStream Splash EMEA also featured an insightful Executive Summit where senior finance leaders continued discussing what Tom and Craig shared in the keynote.

Designed specifically for finance executives to get “beyond technology,” the group discussed how they’re preparing for the key topics reshaping the future of finance teams (see Figure 4).

Highlights included the following:

• Customer success stories from Maersk
• BARC analyst Dr. Christian Fuchs, OneStream head of EMEA FP&A Aisling Harney and Henrik Jensen, Vice President, Group Accounting, Governance, Risk & Controls, MaerskdiscussingOneStream’s 2035 research
• Several roundtables on AI, finance transformation, and ESG in partnership with PWC

Product Spotlights

Throughout the conference, many sessions showcased what's new and what's coming across OneStream's solutions. Attendees watched live demos and got a comprehensive look at how the new enhancements could be applied to attendees' own organizations. For example, attendees learned about extending planning across organizations, Transaction Matching, what’s new with Excel, Narrative Reporting, AI services, and other enhancements.

OneStream Innovation Village & Partner Showcase

Throughout Splash, attendees explored the expo hall, which included the OneStream Innovation Village and Partner Showcase (see Figure 5). Participants spent time at dedicated booths digging deeper into our unified modern finance platform, with product demos highlighting new innovations. In addition, attendees connected with experts who provided personalized insights and solutions guidance on how features and solutions can be applied to attendees' own operations.

Women in Finance

Day 2 included an inspiring tea break discussion with our Women in Finance panel on Leading Through Change — How Women Can Lead as the CFO Role Evolves. The panelists (see Figure 6) shared their experiences and views after examining a series of quotes from inspiring women. For example, the group talked about assertiveness and the difficulty in trying to balance it with empathy. The women also talked about often struggling to be their authentic selves in a male-dominated environment. Finally, they talked about how everyone can contribute and the need for more women supporting women.

Breakout Sessions

We had a ton of breakout sessions with many customers and partners presenting. While there are too many to mention individually, here are two notable ones:

1. OneStream’s ESG Solution — What's New and What's Coming

During this session, we highlighted the OneStream ESG solution. With ESG being such a big topic for the Office of the CFO, the session was one of the most popular. The audience heard about the global regulatory landscape and how OneStream connects ESG compliance with risk-based decision-making. Through that connection, OneStream provides a combined view on the financial and ESG impact of business decisions.

2. What’s New and What’s Coming in OneStream Close & Consolidations

OneStream’s very own financial close experts Anna Jones and Stacey Byeled this session. In it, they took the packed audience through exciting new enhancements that help streamline the close process in Journals, Account Reconciliations, Transaction Matching, and other areas.

Splash Night Out

The OneStream Splash Night Out is always the premier social event of the conference. This year, the venue was the Royal Danish Opera House (see Figure 7) for an evening of glamour, networking, and fun. The audience was treated to an opera singer who not only performed traditional opera but also sang along to some dance music!

Day 3

Breakout Sessions

The breakout sessions continued at full speed, with many customers and partners presenting. However, this task was slightly more difficult for some following the successful Splash Night Out party. Here is one session worth highlighting from Day 3:

Aleph Holdings — Amplifying S/4HANA and MS Dynamics with OneStream

We often hear that finance needs to wait until ERP changes are made. Why, exactly, should finance be “required” to wait on CPM processes that are critical to managing corporate performance?

In the presentation, our partner Avvale and customer Aleph Group joined forces. Together, they shared how they defined a framework in OneStream for consolidation, close, planning, and reporting amid Microsoft Dynamics and SAP S/4HANA ERP changes. The framework ultimately gave IT the flexibility to continue making the required changes to Aleph Group’s transactional systems while enabling finance to keep driving corporate performance improvements. As a result, the close was shortened from ten to four days, a 60% improvement in data access was delivered, and faster audits were achieved.

Partner Awards

We concluded the Day 3 sessions by celebrating our fantastic partners with our Partner Awards. During our highly anticipated awards session, we recognized partners and customers who have demonstrated exceptional execution of our OneStream technology and have been instrumental in their financial journey. The awards, including the prestigious Power of the Platform and Partner Innovation Award, are a testament to the transformative power of our technology and the strategic partnerships we have forged. And the winners are...

Power of the Platform Award: This award went to AMCO and Nutreco, who benefit significantly from combining 17 critical processes in the unified OneStream platform.

Partner Innovation Award: This award was granted to Black Diamond and its customer, a quantitative finance research and technology firm. Through a true partnership, they co-developed an innovative solution that now delivers their attribution model insights in a matter of minutes.

Spotlight Keynote

Following the partner awards, we heard from a truly inspirational speaker, Marga Hoek (see Figure 8). Marga is a global thought leader on sustainable business, an international speaker, and the author of "The Trillion Dollar Shift." This new book reveals the business opportunities provided by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Over the years, she has gained recognition as a successful and innovative business leader in various CEO and executive roles.

Conclusion

As the finance landscape continues to evolve, the connections and knowledge finance leaders gained at OneStream Splash EMEA will be invaluable in navigating future challenges and opportunities.

Thank you to all our amazing sponsors, speakers, and customers who made this event possible. Fueled by our commitment to customer success, finance, and technology, the Splash experience is truly unmatched.

Learn More

To learn more about how to Take Finance Further in your organization, check out our upcoming events and webinars.