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ON Feedback - 2026-04-29

TL;DR

Lucia (newly appointed Group Treasurer) validated the v0 bridging direction and offered ON as a pilot customer to test the tool's boundaries (direct cash flow → indirect with same categories → raw P&L). Bigger-picture asks: variance feedback loop, historical commentary view, explainability surface, and Palm taking over Anaplan's rule-based bridge logic for the long-term plan.

Overall Sentiment
Direction validated Yes
Stage shown Skateboard
Ready for next stage Needs ingestion path for ON's long-term plan + boundary testing
Blocker for them? No (directional, but high strategic interest — they want to replace Anaplan's bridge rules)

Source

  • Transcript: 2026-04-29-bridging.md
  • Date: 2026-04-29
  • Participants: Lucia Galan-Cáceres (Group Treasurer, ON), Emma Sjöström, Gurjit Pannu, Graciela Hernández Rodriguez (new Palm design lead, first customer call)
  • Context: Discovery + prototype demo. Discussion focused first on ON's current Anaplan-based bridge logic and Lucia's "low-touch treasury" vision; Emma demoed the v0 prototype towards the end. Recording: https://tldv.io/app/meetings/69f1b3c5f4ca130013471e4f

This Iteration: Validation

What Lucia validated about the v0 direction:

  • Overall direction — "I'm feeling quite happy. I feel like we've high-level validated the direction this is going to take."
  • Indirect (budget) plotted next to actuals + Palm forecast — Lucia confirmed this matches what they need to compare against the FP&A long-term plan.
  • Category alignment as the foundation — "I think we might be a good pilot customer because we already follow the same categories across platforms. So this would be a very easy case for the tool to do the comparison."
  • Variance explanation as part of the bridge — "If Palm is not giving us the reason, we would have to investigate it. Otherwise."
  • Treasury + controlling as joint personas — Lucia sees the bridge as a shared surface between treasury and controlling, not a treasury-only tool. Could open up to CFO usage too.

Important Nuances

  • Time horizon split is critical. For ≤13 weeks, Lucia explicitly does not want the long-term plan to bias the operational forecast — Palm's bottom-up should win. For >13 weeks (especially beyond 6–7 months), the FP&A long-term plan should dominate. Don't blend the two indiscriminately.
  • Plausibility-checking is the v0 win. Today, treasury manually compares Palm's forecast to the long-term plan in Excel/Anaplan as a "plausibility check." Replacing this manual step with a side-by-side bridge view is the first concrete value Palm delivers — even before the more ambitious "replace the bridge logic" outcome.
  • Ambition: replace ON's Anaplan bridge rules entirely. Lucia wants Palm to ingest the P&L + balance sheet plan and produce the direct cash flow forecast itself, replacing the rule-based Anaplan logic. She'd "pitch this back to FP&A" if Palm's logic is good enough. This is a bigger bet than the current v0 scope but matters for product positioning.
  • "Low touch" vs "no touch" distinction. "On a regular day, I would love forecast to be more science than art." But Lucia always wants the override option ("let me type in five instead of two") when she has specific knowledge. The override path must remain — pure no-touch will lose her trust.

Future Iterations: Suggestions

High Value

  • Variance feedback loop with persistence. When Palm surfaces possible variance drivers, let the user tick the right one and add a comment. Feed that confirmation back so future similar variances are pre-explained. "Would it help?" — Lucia.
  • Historical bridge view with commentary. Filter to a past period, see the variance + the comment Lucia (or her team) made at the time. Avoids re-investigating the same gap two months later.
  • Explainability surface ("Gemini-style reasoning"). Show the steps Palm took to produce the bridge — assumptions, references, calculation path. "I need visibility... the variance tool needs to have much more information for me to be able to fully trust your approach." Without this, controlling will not adopt Palm's numbers.
  • Long-term FP&A plan ingestion from BigQuery. ON's long-term plan refreshes ~quarterly and is available in BigQuery. Bidirectional Palm ↔ data lake connection requested. Manual upload is acceptable as a v0.

Medium Value

  • Boundary-testing modes. Support uploads at three granularities — direct cash flow, indirect with same categories, raw P&L — to find where the model breaks. ON volunteered to be the test bed.
  • Persona breadth. Surface the bridge to controlling and CFO, not just treasury. Lucia sees this as a cross-functional collaboration tool — useful for challenging APEC's perpetually-off forecast, for example.

Longer Term

  • FX cash flow monitoring & hedging alerts. Palm flags short cash positions by currency/region (e.g., "you're short USD because cash is sitting in China") so treasury can trigger repatriation. Lucia sees this as a separate workstream but high value. Out of scope for current bridging work.
  • Categorization prompts — same UX pattern as variance feedback, applied to category refinement.

Questions Asked

  • Who's the user? → Treasury primarily, but also controlling (challenging regional forecasts) and potentially CFO (understanding how P&L transforms into cash). Lucia sees it as cross-functional.
  • Would you use Palm's forecast in your official long-term plan? → Yes, ideally. "I would love that." But it requires explainability so FP&A and controlling trust it.
  • Is the variance explanation feature valuable even if Palm only surfaces candidates rather than the answer? → Yes. "If Palm is not giving us the reason, we would have to investigate it otherwise."
  • How often does the long-term plan refresh? → Every ~3 months. Available in BigQuery.

Raw Feedback Quotes

"I really want to create this high-value low-touch treasury. Wherever we are not needed to touch anything and we can rely on a product." — Lucia

"What's interesting here is to test the boundaries of the tool. What if instead of giving you the direct, I give you the indirect? What if I go one step further and I give you just the P&L? How good is it? We can test where the tool finds its limits." — Lucia

"On a regular day, I would love forecast to be more science than art... But I always want to have the option to go in and say, nah, let me type in five instead of two just because something I heard or something I want to simulate." — Lucia

"It just creates friction in the conversation with controlling when they say, yeah, but you're not taking our numbers. We want to speak the same language for the long term." — Lucia

"Would we be able to give feedback here and say, yep, that's the one we checked and this is the reason — and then give feedback to the tool? Would it help?" — Lucia (proposing the variance feedback loop)

"I want exactly that — and I need visibility. So even in the no-touch version, I also need to see how you come to that number. The variance tool needs to have much more information for me to be able to fully trust your approach." — Lucia

"I'm feeling quite happy. I feel like we've high-level validated the direction this is going to take." — Lucia (summing up the prototype review)

Action Items

  • [ ] Scope BigQuery integration for long-term plan ingestion
  • [ ] Manual upload path for ON's long-term plan as a v0 starting point
  • [ ] Boundary-testing plan: direct → indirect → raw P&L
  • [ ] Lucia to share Anaplan liquidity planning essentials deck (was Amanda's, to confirm reuse)
  • [ ] Graciela to dig into PostHog + sync with Giannis for product context
  • [ ] Track FX / short-cash alerting as a separate downstream workstream