BCN #1 - Why this matters now?

There are fewer large corporates to build a career inside.

More finance professionals find themselves working within SMEs.

And SMEs are different.

Corporations are professionally led.

SMEs are entrepreneurially driven.

In a corporate environment, forming a reliable view of the future can lean on history as predictability is supported by culture, capital, structure, and scale.

In an SME, those anchors are weaker with the critical question changing from:

To:

That shift is not subtle – in trying to answer the question, gaps with visibility inevitably appear.

AI is reducing friction involved with building visibility, recognising patterns, and accelerating understanding.

Which means these gains are becoming too significant for SMEs to ignore.

Working alongside SMEs amidst rapid technological advancement requires the finance profession to reassess its relevance.

BCN is a way of seeing — a lens that shifts finance from keeping score to making it happen.

And given entrepreneurs create and continually build, typically “it” means growth.

This weekly newsletter is for finance professionals:

• who are sufficiently open-minded to question their current lens
• who work within, or alongside, SMEs
• who want to remain relevant as technology reshapes expectations

Each week we will draw from how BCN works in practice — how it has been applied across businesses in different sectors and at different stages of development to unlock, release, and realise scalable growth.

Currently, together with two friends who share a belief that SMEs deserve access to capabilities traditionally associated with larger organisations, we are building a suite of AI capabilities designed to improve visibility, accelerate understanding, and help SMEs better navigate growth.

Over time, this newsletter will explore both the observations that led to BCN and why recent advances in AI make those observations increasingly relevant.