I recently moved into a Financial Modeling Team Lead role in an insurtech company.

The previous FP&A function is currently being split into two separate teams:

1. Budgeting & reporting
2. Financial modeling (my team)

The structure is still flexible, and business is scaling like crazy so I’m trying to define what this team should realistically own in long-term.

What I’m considering:

Right now I see the role evolving in three directions:

1. Finance-owned data layer (core idea)

• Building a financial data layer independent from operational databases

• Owning core data marts (sales, payments, transactions)

• Building finance dashboards on top of a single source of truth

• Eventually extending into accounting data + reconciliation logic

• Automating parts of reporting that are currently done manually by accountants

• modeling work

  2. Financial modeling

• Company valuation models

• Product pricing (e.g. insurance products like life insurance)

• Partner / supplier profitability and joint business cases

• FP&A input into planning

• Owning or heavily shaping assumption frameworks for budgeting

• Feeding analytical drivers into forecasting (cohorts, marketing efficiency, etc.)

3. Ad hoc analytics

• Cohort / retention analysis
• Profitability breakdowns
• Risk-style or scenario models for strategic decisions

Where I’m unsure:

I’m trying to understand if this is actually a coherent “single team scope” or if I’m mixing multiple functions that normally belong in different org units (FP&A, BI, data engineering, etc.).

Also trying to understand:

• What typically breaks when finance teams try to own data infrastructure?
• What does “good” look like in the first 6–12 months for a setup like this? should i provide a demo or initial success story to keep the team, what projects should i focus on?
• If you were in this position, what would you aggressively prioritize early vs explicitly avoid?

edit: the reason behind the data layer ownership is the incompetence or lack of resource in the data department. In the last two years, the data team was not able to provide enough or accurate dashboards or even ETL processes and datamarts for the fp&a team and I did most of the queries and etl pipeplines myself. My main idea is adding a data engineer to my team to just handle these pipeplines and also having some control over accounting confidential data that i want to add to data marts.