Inside Grab’s finance evolution

As Grab rapidly scaled across Southeast Asia, the company needed a transformation partner — not just a systems integrator. Together, Grab and Huron reimagined how people, finance, and sales work across borders, functions, and tools.

The goal: empower teams to make smarter decisions, free up capacity for high-impact work, and accelerate sustainable growth.

The outcome: a measurable, multi-phase transformation anchored in automation and AI withend-to-end platform support — to give leaders and their teams the peace of mind they needed to focus on what matters most.

We’re not just talking about automation — we’re building a finance organization that runs differently, where people do less manual work and more strategic thinking.” — Vivek Ramdev, Managing Director, Huron

As Grab’s business grew across new markets and platforms, so did the complexity of its operations. Like many fast-scaling organizations, Grab saw a critical need to improve how its finance and sales teams connected, collaborated, and delivered value.

Working closely with Grab, Huron supported initiatives to:

Connect systems and data to strengthen reporting, collaboration, and decision making across regions and business lines.
Automate manual processes to free up team capacity for higher-value, strategic work.
Streamline workflows to help teams innovate and scale more easily across diverse markets.

Together, we laid the groundwork for smarter, faster, and more scalable operations — empowering Grab’s teams to focus on driving growth.

This isn’t just a system transformation. It’s a mindset shift — from reactive to predictive, from manual to intelligent, from fragmented to unified.” — Rich Schmitt, Managing Director, Huron

Huron partnered closely with Grab’s teams across Southeast Asia to design and execute a transformation rooted in scalable systems, process reengineering, and organizational alignment.

Finance transformation: Standardized the record-to-report (R2R) process across markets and restructured the close calendar to support continuous, touchless closing capabilities. We introduced a tiered shared services model and embedded forecasting best practices.
Sales transformation: Designed and implemented a unified lead-to-cash workflow within Salesforce, streamlining sales planning, opportunity management, and contract generation across all business units and countries.
AI and automation strategy: Conducted process mining to identify high-effort, high-frequency tasks and built a centralized automation roadmap. Embedded AI-driven workflows in audit, reconciliation, and transaction processing to reduce manual dependencies.
Platform integration and support: Aligned business processes with Oracle ERP, Workday, and Salesforce systems, creating triage-to-resolution playbooks and launching an integrated service model for ongoing platform support.
Operating model and role redesign: Developed future-state organization design across finance and sales, aligned to Grab’s growth strategy and tech stack. Defined capability models and change enablement plans to support new responsibilities and digital adoption.

Grab really meant it when they said they wanted a different organization — they weren’t just changing systems, they were redefining roles, too.” — Fanny Ip, Managing Director, Huron

Together, The Huron and Grab teams developed and executed a scalable, unified model built to grow with Grab’s vision.

Huron didn’t just deliver a roadmap — we embedded alongside Grab’s teams to design, implement, and sustain real change. By aligning across strategy, process, platforms, and people, we helped Grab lay the foundation for smarter growth. Our partnership continues today, with Huron providing ongoing platform support and co-developing future enhancements.

Let’s talk about what we can build together.