Emily Williams

I am a positive, driven, and personable individual. I have a passion for finding pragmatic, simple solutions to solve complex business problems and a keen interest in insight driven decision making. I have recently relocated to London from New Zealand (ex-EY) and I have a Youth Mobility visa which gives me the legal right to work in the UK. 

June 2022 – July 2023 | NZTE | Customer Solutions Group
Business Advisor to GM, Customer Solutions Group
NZTE is New Zealand’s economic development and trade promotion agency. My role was the Business Advisor to the General Manager of the Customer Solutions Group (CSG). CSG is a team of 80 people and $25m budget with the purpose of developing products and services offered to NZ businesses wanting to export or raise capital.
Key contributions:
➢ Designed an intuitive PowerBI dashboard integrating data from our CRM and D4ME systems. This
dashboard enables all 80 members of CSG, to track ongoing progress to 4/6 organisational KPI’s.
These KPI’s were exceeded for FY23.
➢ Lifted the quality of planning and execution of the CSG work programme, through facilitation of
planning days, and developing rhythms and rituals to track progress of the plan, including organising a regular all hands call to recognise contributions of different team members. Team engagement lifted 7%, exceeding company average.
➢ Developed a cost analysis model and provided customer insights used to inform strategic decisions by the executive leadership team about which CSG services to keep, evolve or stop as part of a strategy refresh process, to achieve 10% budget savings.
➢ Drove continuous improvement by identifying opportunities for cross-team collaboration, measuring performance, and simplifying processes. My discovery work led to the kick-off of a workstream in the organisation wide digital transformation for optimising workflows within CSG. This work has involved me working with the relevant teams on mapping the current processes, gathering business requirements, and mapping an ideal state process for the digital products team to develop a solution.
➢ Developed a process using Microsoft Excel to analyse verbatim responses from our internal employee survey responses to identify key themes across teams. These themes have been fed into proposed actions to improve the culture of CSG for FY24.
➢ Project managed a storytelling piece of work on how CSG is understood by the wider organisation. This has led to the development of tools for educating on who we are and an onboarding process for relationship managers who provide our products and services to NZ businesses.
➢ Co-ordinated the CSG strategy paper for FY22 which was provided to share performance and priorities for the NZTE Board meeting. This paper set the scene for the direction of CSG and enabled the Board to contribute opinions about the future of our strategy.
March 2020 – June 2022 | EY | Business Consulting
Consultant
Key contributions:
➢ Fieldwork lead on a programme of five operational risk internal audits for a major APAC Insurance
group. This involved conducting process walkthroughs and testing for compliance with internal processes, frameworks, NZ legislation, regulations, and IFRS. I drafted reports in line with client requirements that shared our findings, recommendations, and level of risk within the business area. We agreed action plans with the clients off the back of these audits for how they would improve their overall control environment.
➢ Conducted pre-implementation risk review for an ERP transformation. This involved reviewing business process documents, how workflows will operate in the new system and any manual workarounds. This led to the successful kick-off of their ERP transformation programme.
  
➢ Undertook process reviews for financial markets clients and identified how processes could be improved to mitigate risk or be more efficient. Led a follow-up review with one client to evaluate whether the solutions to our recommendations were fit for purpose and adequately implemented.
➢ Internal audits for 4 clients; accounts payable, revenue recognition, finance reconciliations, contract management, corporate actions handling and procurement. These engagements involved process walkthroughs, testing controls and reporting findings and recommendations.
➢ Designed a formal onboarding process and risk reporting process for the ERP transformation programme at a major NZ retailer. This is used to successfully onboard new team members and manage risk within the programme.
➢ Performed a model validation for a financial advice tool for a major NZ bank that was successfully implemented to support lending advisors.
➢ Seconded for 7 months to a major FMCG co-operative company in their IT PMO. Responsibilities included project finance, risk reporting, being the interface between the technical delivery team and internal stakeholders, providing status updates to senior leaders, executing organisational change management strategies, and managing the scope and timeframes of projects. Projects included an organisation wide SharePoint Migration, development of two iPhone applications that improved user experience in the office and an application rationalisation programme.
➢ General IT controls testing, infrastructure testing and documenting automated IT processes for financial services clients.

Other Qualifications
• Enrolled Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand
• New Zealand Certificate in Financial Services (Level 5) in financial planning and investments
• PROSCI Certified Change Manager (January 2023)
• EY Bronze Badge Digital (2020)
2015 – 2019 | The University of Otago
Double degree – Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Commerce majoring in Economics.
2012 - 2014 | The McDonald College
In January 2012 I attended the annual Classical Ballet International Summer School at the McDonald College in Sydney. I was offered a fulltime place at the College on a scholarship which I accepted thus I completed my final three years of schooling in Sydney whilst simultaneously undertaking semi-fulltime ballet training.