Nse Ekanem Email & Phone Number

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Ontario, Canada

Remote

• Managed a loan portfolio of up to $15 million; increased compliance with on-schedule interest payment and principal repayment by 98% over the last 2 quarters with proper documentation.• Created monthly, quarterly, and annual management reports with schedules for the department to track previous metrics not tracked.• Decreased workflow time for the end-of-day processing by 18% by introducing a new data organizational system used by 10 direct reports in the Finance Team.• Managed the financial cycles of the organization’s annual budget, quarterly rolling forecasts, and monthly operating reviews.• Improved systems and procedures to shorten month-end closings from 12 to 8 days by facilitating training sessions.• Coordinated process improvement efforts for day-to-day accounting operations on an ongoing basis via constant testing of new processes, ideas, and strategies for better firm performance.• Reconciled Loan and Grant portfolios with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) with no noted shortcomings.• Accountable for the overall company’s accounts and cash flow, which resulted in cost savings of millions of naira annually and increased business performance and profitability.• Executed complex financial analysis, trend analysis and forecasts, and planned and executed budgets, month-end, year-end, quarterly variances and forecast reports.• Improved stakeholder engagements by responding to investor inquiries while ensuring consistency of responses.• Maintained and managed the client relationship management database.• Deployed ERP systems (Xero, Odoo, Sage & QuickBooks) to facilitate processes and maintain records, improving the quality and accuracy of reported results.

• Strengthened overall efficiency by developing new processes for finance-related activities, internal control procedures, and risk management systems, eliminating bottlenecks.• Enhanced payment processing speed by 500% by driving the e-payments project to 53,000 smallholder farmers across Nigeria in 2021.• Worked with the expansion project team that recruited, trained, and deployed agro-products to 25,000 farmers across Northern Nigeria.• Established and grew relationships with clients through asset management activities.• Managed the effective GL reconciliation and liaison between Operations systems and Accounting systems.• Captured all income statistics by tracking interest income for USD and Naira deposits.• Increased customer success ratings to 90% by commissioning and coordinating a 10-man customer service operations team that also cleared all backlogs of issues in weeks.• Established strong relationships with regulatory bodies, which led to quick tax-related resolutions with Tax Authorities.

Lagos, Nigeria

• Reviewed the daily account postings & reconciled the general ledger.• Optimized the tax returns filing process that improved compliance ratings by 40%, significantly reducing the fines paid to regulatory bodies.• Wrote and implemented the finance standard operating procedures (SOP) manual, which increased efficiency by over 50%.• Improved investment transaction data quality and accuracy of millions of dollars of cash investment portfolio while maintaining fixed deposit/Interest Income schedules.• Built multiple Excel models to provide financial forecasts for liquidity & cash-flow activities.• Lowered the timeline for report submissions significantly by creating new procedures for documentation and preparation of monthly/yearly account closings.

Lagos State, Nigeria

• Improved management-level decision-making outcomes by evaluating financial data and generating simple findings.• Implemented enhanced verification methods that validated accurate recording of transactions in the appropriate account allocations, minimizing revenue losses by at least 7%.• Redesigned the accounting workflow by optimizing accounting software and Excel for automation and calculation.• Accurately processed weekly payroll for over 20 employees; kept accounting papers and tax filings with up-to-date monitoring.• Reviewed the daily postings, reconciliation & filing of the general ledger and assisted in preparing monthly management accounts & budget forecast activities.• Reduced business losses due to operational deficiencies by preparing and reviewing detailed logistics and contingency plans for current operations.