LT CFO Events-Miami, USA, August 28, 2009

Latin Trade hosted its second LT CFO event on August 28, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami. More than 30 top financial officers from Latin American multinational corporations attended the forum, which was sponsored by Brazilian software maker TOTVS and the accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young. The special guest for the event was Matthew Wyatt, director of finance transformation in Latin America for the beverage giant SABMiller. Wyatt is based in Bogota, Colombia, but flew in for the event from the company’s headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. Below is an excerpt from an interview with Latin Trade Managing Editor William Plasencia. A video of the full interview is available at www.latintrade.com.

Tell us about yourself and your role at SABMiller:
I’m based out of Bogota, but I look after the six operations we have in Latin America. In the Andean region, Colombia is our largest operation, followed by Peru and Ecuador. In Central America, we have Panama, El Salvador and Honduras.

My specific focus is the finance transformation area, which includes the creation of shared service centers, standardized processes, and leveraging some of the technology investments of the larger operation into our smaller operations.

What potential does SABMiller see in the Andean Region?
Oftentimes shared service centers are seen as an initiative to drive out cost in the operation. The cost piece is important, but what we’re trying to do is uplift process, uplift our technology, capabilities and more importantly our human capital so that they can actually drive value and provide much more of the business decision support across the regions and into the commercial areas and distribution.

Is SABMiller looking to expand in the region?
You’ll have to talk to our mergers and acquisitions guys. We obviously came from being a local South African brewery under 20 years ago to now being No. 2 in the world. You don’t do that without expanding. I’m sure over the next few years we will expand quite significantly, both in Latin America and other parts of the world as it makes sense.

You were a consultant before. What made you jump into operations?
You come to a decision where you continue consulting, or jump in and see whether everything you’ve been talking about actually works. When the opportunity came up with McGraw-Hill, one of the oldest international booksellers in the region, it was very interesting to take learnings from years in consulting and actually put them into reality.

How did you join SABMiller?
I joined SABMiller just over two years ago – many for personal reasons. My wife is Colombian. The operations of SABMiller are 10 to 12 times larger than McGraw Hill just in the Latin American environment. So it was really an opportunity to now start putting things to scale.

Are there best practices from Latin America being adopted in other parts of the world?
There certainly are. That’s the art of globalization nowadays. I think there’s something to be learned from each country and each region. If you look at the history of SABMiller that’s part of its success. They came from what was essentially an emerging market – South Africa – and expanded into Africa, Eastern Europe and now into Latin America. They found that a lot of the best practices from South Africa were very applicable to Latin America. Now we’ve been in region three or four years, and we’re starting to export talent, so those people obviously learned the techniques both in-country and merged them with what SABMiller brought to the table.