Based between Belgium and France · Open to relocation

Strategy,structured.

I'm Simran. I walk into messy, fast-moving companies — usually startups — and give them structure: priorities people can name, numbers people trust, and a plan that actually ships.

  • Strategy & Business Operations
  • Finance / FP&A
  • Transformation & PMO
  • Risk, Controls & Process Excellence
  • Chief of Staff
  • Corporate Development & Fundraising
Simran Dubey, strategy, finance and operations professional based in Brussels

Strategy · Finance · Operations

Wonka AIVLGEWillis Towers WatsonCognizantAix-Marseille UniversitySolvay Brussels SchoolProject Management InstituteWonka AIVLGEWillis Towers WatsonCognizantAix-Marseille UniversitySolvay Brussels SchoolProject Management Institute

01About me

I bring order to chaos

Here is the honest version: most of the companies I have worked with were not short on ideas. They were short on structure. Twenty priorities, no owner, a forecast nobody believed, and a leadership team spending its week firefighting. That is the room I walk into, and that is the room I like.

As Chief of Staff at Wonka AI in Brussels I sat next to the CEO and turned all of that into something you can run a company on — OKRs, an operating rhythm, a budget and forecast that hold up, a ~€3M subsidy file, investor conversations, hiring, and the boring plumbing that quietly makes a startup faster.

Before that I worked with founders and senior leadership at VLGE in Paris across finance, strategy and business development. And before the startup years, financial services — Willis Towers Watson and Cognizant — taught me the discipline: reconcile it, control it, evidence it, then say it out loud in one page.

Chief of Staff is one label for what I do, not the whole of it. Strategy, FP&A and finance, business operations, transformation and PMO, risk and process excellence — same job underneath. Frame the problem, do the actual analysis, and stay until it lands.

I'm PMP® certified and a Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt. I enjoy working where strategy meets execution: bringing structure to complex problems, aligning stakeholders and turning decisions into action.

0M

Subsidy application structured and coordinated

0%

Reduction in processing cycle time (Lean Six Sigma)

0%

Less reconciliation time across reporting workflows

0+

Years across strategy, finance and operations

Ecosystem initiatives I've driven

OpenAI Select logoOpenAI Select
NVIDIA Inception logoNVIDIA Inception
Claude Partner Network logoClaude Partner Network
Deloitte Rising Star logoDeloitte Rising Star

02How I actually work

Culture. Operations. Strategy.

This is my operating model — whether the title on the door says Chief of Staff, strategy, business operations, FP&A or transformation. Chaos goes in on the left. Something a leadership team can run on comes out on the right.

Twenty prioritiesNo clear ownerA forecast nobody trustsCulturehow people work togetherOperationsrhythm, owners, follow-throughStrategydirection and trade-offsFive priorities, five ownersA cadence that holdsNumbers people trustTHE MESSHOW I WORK — C · O · SWHAT YOU GET
01

CEO priorities

What leadership needs to be true in 6, 12, 24 months.

02

Company realities

Capacity, cash, systems and what the team can actually absorb.

03

People & blockers

The follow-ups and frictions that quietly decide whether strategy moves.

Simran Dubey at an industry conference

From my LinkedIn

Yesterday, over tea, a neighbour asked me: “So, what do you actually do as a Chief of Staff?”

Before I could respond, he added with a smile: “Doesn’t sound like that big of a deal.” I smiled too — not because he was wrong, but because I knew the answer wouldn’t fit into one casual conversation over tea.

Being a Chief of Staff is like standing at a very unusual intersection. One road leads to the CEO’s priorities. Another leads to the company’s realities. And another leads to people, culture, decisions, blockers, meetings, follow-ups — the million tiny things that determine whether strategy actually moves.

Some days you’re close to the CEO’s calendar. Some days you’re close to the team’s confusion. Some days you’re quietly making sure a blocker never becomes a business problem.

A Chief of Staff is not just “leadership”. And it’s definitely not just “staff”. It’s the role that moves between both.

By the end of the conversation my neighbour said: “Okay… now that sounds difficult.” And honestly, I laughed. Because yes — it is. But that’s also what makes it meaningful. Impact often comes from the work no one notices.

#ChiefOfStaff#Leadership#Strategy#Operations#Culture#Execution
Read it on LinkedIn

03Experience

Where I've worked

I partnered with the CEO on company-wide priorities spanning strategy, finance, operations, legal, HR and organizational execution.

  • Translated strategic priorities into structured roadmaps, ownership, deadlines, operating rhythms and measurable follow-through across functions.
  • Supported investor outreach and fundraising: investor research, outreach coordination, follow-ups, executive materials and investor communications.
  • Worked on an approximately €3M subsidy application, coordinating cross-functional inputs and structuring strategic, financial and operational information.
  • Drove ecosystem initiatives involving OpenAI Select, NVIDIA Inception, Claude Partner Network and Deloitte Rising Star.
  • Supported financial planning through budgeting, forecasting, KPI tracking, management reporting and resource-allocation analysis.
  • Ran leadership operating rhythms: OKRs, weekly and monthly business reviews, executive meetings, workshops, offsites, prioritization and action tracking.
  • Led process-optimization and AI-enabled automation initiatives, mapping workflows, clarifying ownership and controls, and reducing repetitive manual work.
  • Coordinated people and organizational priorities: onboarding, hiring support, ownership clarification and cross-functional alignment.
Chief of StaffFundraisingOKRsAI AutomationFP&A

04Featured work

Four problems, and what I actually did

Tap any card to open the full story: the mess I walked into, the framework I used, and the numbers that moved.

04 — Frameworks

The toolkit behind the work

I don't collect frameworks — I use a small number of them properly. Hover or tap a card to open the shape of the method and where I've actually applied it.

06AI in my workflow

I build agents, not shortcuts

How the agents connect

inputs → agents → governance → outputs

HUMAN REVIEW · GOVERNANCEERP & ledgerInbox & SlackMeeting transcriptsMissing-invoice agentmatch PO · GRN · invoiceProcess agentroute, approve, escalateReporting agentpull KPIs, flag varianceClean closeOwned actionsBoard-ready numbers

Nothing reaches a board pack or a supplier without passing me first — that dashed lane is the point of the whole system.

Download the one-page workflow (PDF)The whole loop on a single page — save it, or send it to someone who needs the structure.QR code linking to this portfolioScan to open
this portfolio

In my current role I stopped waiting for tools to exist and built them. An agent that hunts down missing invoices before close. Automations that take the manual steps out of approvals and reporting. A governance layer so none of it runs unwatched. AI gave me back the hours — I keep the judgement, the relationships and the final word.

01

Missing-invoice agent

Reconciles what was ordered, delivered and billed, then chases the gaps. It finds the invoices nobody noticed were missing before month-end close does.

Close prep from days to hours

02

Process automation

I map the process by hand first, cut the steps that exist only out of habit, then automate what's left — approvals, handovers, status updates, recurring reports.

Manual steps removed, not hidden

03

Governance layer

Every agent has an owner, a documented prompt, a data boundary and a review point. Governance is what makes automation safe enough to keep.

Documented, auditable, rerunnable

04

Research agent

Investor lists, market maps and competitor briefs — sourced, deduplicated and returned as a structured table I can act on the same morning.

~70% of prep time back

05

Drafting agent

First drafts of investor updates, executive memos and subsidy narratives, working from my own tone-of-voice and past documents.

Version one in minutes

06

Meeting-to-action agent

Turns transcripts into decisions, owners and dated actions that land straight in the tracker — no post-meeting archaeology.

Zero lost actions

07

Reporting agent

Pulls KPI data, flags variances against budget and writes the commentary I then challenge and correct.

Variance flagged before the meeting

The loop I actually run

Step 1 / 6

20 minOne-page problem brief

Everything on the table before anything gets solved

I collect the raw material — Slack threads, board asks, half-finished decks, transcripts, the spreadsheet nobody trusts. No filtering yet. An agent strips it into one clean brief so I'm reading signal, not scrolling.

The agent does

Intake agent: transcripts, docs and threads in, one structured brief out.

I do

I decide what's actually in scope and what's noise pretending to be urgent.

Time reclaimed, by task

Research & investor prep~70%
First-draft documents~60%
Meeting notes to actions~85%
Recurring reporting~50%

Indicative share of manual effort removed on recurring tasks — the saved hours go back into strategy and people work.

My guardrails

  • Human in the loop on anything that leaves the company.
  • Every claim traceable to a source or a number.
  • Automate the repetition, never the judgement.
  • Document the prompt like a process — so anyone can rerun it.
Simran Dubey running a workshop session

06Master thesis & defense

Adoption of AI in Sustainable Finance

Perceptions, Challenges and Opportunities Among International Financial Institutions

Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management — IAE · MSc International Finance · 2024 — 2025 · Under the guidance of Dr. Robert J. Martinez, PhD

The question

Financial institutions are under growing pressure to integrate ESG factors, and AI offers scalable tools for ESG data processing, risk modelling and reporting. My research asked practitioners what is actually happening: how AI is used in sustainable finance today, what limits adoption, whether global scaling is feasible — especially in emerging markets — and whether current ethical and regulatory frameworks are sufficient.

How I researched it — Qualitative + quantitative mix

5 expert interviews

Anonymised senior practitioners across EU and global financial and infrastructure institutions — use cases, benefits, barriers, scalability and outlook.

Survey of 11 practitioners

Banking, asset management and fintech; closed-ended plus open text on adoption, challenges and feasibility.

Analysis

Thematic coding of interviews, keyword and frequency analysis of survey responses.

What I found

  1. 01

    AI is being piloted — not yet embedded — to support ESG goals, risk visibility and reporting across ESG scoring, document intelligence, climate risk and responsible lending.

  2. 02

    Data quality is the number one barrier, cited by 8 of 11 practitioners; non-standard ESG data means better models cannot fix inconsistent inputs.

  3. 03

    Human-in-the-loop remains essential, and adoption succeeds where it is co-designed with the workforce, unions and regulators — trust is part of deployment.

  4. 04

    Global scaling is feasible but conditional on data infrastructure, local adaptation and workforce training, particularly in emerging markets.

  5. 05

    Explainability is a commercial requirement, not an ethical extra — unexplainable ESG decisions do not survive investor or regulator scrutiny.

DistinctionRecognised as best student in Corporate Finance by the Head of the Master of International Finance.

Barriers to adoption — practitioner survey

Data quality & availability73%

8 of 11 respondents — the binding constraint.

Lack of standardisation55%

ESG data and scoring diverge across providers.

Transparency & explainability36%

Model opacity blocks regulated decisions.

Skills & expertise gap27%

Workforce readiness lags the tooling.

Cost & resource constraints18%

Acute in emerging-market institutions.

Research pillars

ESG analytics
Climate risk
Data governance
Responsible AI
  • ESG analyticsScoring quality, data gaps and comparability across providers.
  • Climate riskPhysical and transition risk modelling in portfolio decisions.
  • Data governanceLineage, auditability and disclosure-grade data quality.
  • Responsible AIExplainability, bias controls and human accountability.
Simran Dubey presenting her master thesis research at a podium

Recommendations — for institutions

  • Strengthen ESG data infrastructure.
  • Build explainable, auditable models.
  • Human-in-the-loop for critical decisions.
  • Co-design adoption with the workforce.
  • Localise AI tools to context.

Recommendations — for regulators

  • Set explainability standards.
  • Enforce anti-greenwashing controls.
  • Enable supervised sandboxes.
  • Support emerging-market infrastructure and training.

AI in finance isn't a replacement — it's a recalibration of how we see value, risk and responsibility.

ESG scoring and screeningDocument intelligence and complianceClimate and operational risk predictionResponsible lending and underwriting

07How I work

What I bring to the table

I bring structure to complex problems: priorities, OKRs, operating rhythms, decision logs and follow-through that actually lands.

OKRs & operating cadenceExecutive memosRoadmaps & governanceBoard / leadership prep

Languages I speak

EnglishNative / Bilingual
HindiNative / Bilingual
MarathiFull Professional
FrenchElementary

08 — Education & credentials

What I studied, and what I'm certified in

Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management — IAE logo

Double Masters, International Finance

Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management — IAE · 2024 — 2025

Research on AI in Sustainable Finance: ESG analytics, climate risk, data governance and responsible AI. Recognized as best student in Corporate Finance by the Head of the Master of International Finance.

Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management logo

Exchange — Masters, International Finance

Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management · 2025

Exchange program in Brussels.

Somaiya Vidyavihar University logo

Postgraduate Degree, Accountancy · BCom, Accounting & Finance

Somaiya Vidyavihar University · 2016 — 2021

Foundation in accounting, finance and commerce.

Certifications — what each one actually gave me

PMP® — Project Management Professional

Project Management Institute

The global standard for managing scope, schedule, cost, risk and stakeholders across predictive and agile delivery.

Lean Six Sigma — Yellow Belt

Process excellence

DMAIC, root-cause analysis and process mapping — the toolkit behind my 25% cycle-time reduction.

Become a Chief of Staff

Professional programme

Operating models for the CoS role: executive partnership, cadence design and decision support.

Financial Management

Finance

Budgeting, forecasting, working capital and performance analysis for leadership decision-making.

Introduction to Credit Risk

Risk

Credit assessment, exposure and default risk fundamentals applied to lending and counterparty decisions.

SQL

Data

Querying and joining operational data directly, so reporting doesn't wait on someone else's queue.

Residential Mortgage Lender

Financial services

FHA, VA, USDA and Jumbo products, documentation review and regulatory compliance.

09Moments

Where I've shown up

On stage at VLGE

01 / 05

On stage at VLGE

Making the case that tech adoption in fashion is survival, not choice. I like the version of strategy you have to defend out loud.

Speaking and moderating

02 / 05

Speaking and moderating

Rooms full of founders, operators and investors. Half of this job is saying the complicated thing simply enough that people move.

M&A and due diligence, taught out loud

03 / 05

M&A and due diligence, taught out loud

Walking through the P&G–Gillette deal. Teaching a framework is the fastest way to find the holes in your own thinking.

At Euronext Brussels

04 / 05

At Euronext Brussels

Standing in front of the BEL 20 board. Markets are where strategy stops being a slide and starts being a number someone is accountable for.

Between Belgium and France

05 / 05

Between Belgium and France

Brussels and Paris are home base right now — and I am open to relocating for the right team.

Swipe or drag →

10 — Contact

If things feel chaotic right now, that's usually where I'm most useful.

I'm based between Belgium and France, and I'm open to relocating for the right team. Strategy and business operations, finance and FP&A, transformation and PMO, risk and process excellence — and yes, Chief of Staff too. If the job is to bring order to something growing faster than its structure, we should talk. Either inbox reaches me; email is fastest.

  • Strategy & Business Operations
  • Finance / FP&A
  • Transformation & PMO
  • Risk, Controls & Process Excellence
  • Chief of Staff
  • Corporate Development & Fundraising
© 2026 Simran DubeyStrategy · Finance & FP&A · Operations · Risk · PMP®