Gartner Expert

Michelle Carlsen

Director Analyst

Michelle is a Director, Analyst in the Finance practice, focused on Growth Investment & Cost Structure key initiatives. She supports CFO's and Finance leaders with issues ranging from daily expense questions to transformational investments.

Previous experience

Michelle helped Thrivent launch a Transformation Management Office to guide strategic spending of $750M over a 3 year period. Her contributions included the finance aspects of the TMO including the development of templates for investment evaluation, process mapping, implementation of a governance framework as well as ongoing management of the transformation project spend.

At Ameriprise, Michelle supported a Technology Transformation, which reduced IT spend by $75M and completely overhauled Technology allocations back to the business to drive transparency and accountability.

Michelle spent 2 years at a PE-owned BPO/call-center company, and managed an FP&A team responsible for pricing, budgeting, and forecasting 25 clients with annual revenue of $400M. She also participated in M&A in the form of valuing/purchasing existing client call centers that were re-badged to Stream Global Services.

Michelle also spent 3 years at Deutsche Bank in the Private Wealth Management division as an internal consultant. She provided modeling expertise to support advisor acquisitions and support key initiative investments as well as supported internal audits to identify and implement process improvements

Professional background

Thrivent Financial

Finance Lead

Ameriprise Financial

Sr. Finance Manager, Technology

Stream Global Services

Sr. Finance Manager, Pricing & Revenue Finance

Areas of coverage

Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting

Profitable Growth Strategies

Education

B.S. in Finance & International Business - Georgetown University

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Top Issues That I Help Clients Address

1Investment management & governance

2Investment approval processes & business cases

3Capital allocation

4Cost structure

5Technology investments & ROI

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