Andrea Beirne

Partner, Deal Advisory, KPMG

Biography:

Andrea’s extensive financial due diligence experience includes analyzing and modeling structured finance transactions, evaluating asset-based and cash-flow debt structures, and assisting acquirers in financial, cost saving and synergy analysis. Andrea has diverse cross-border experience in manufacturing, distribution, chemicals, agriculture and retail segments. In addition, Andrea has five years of experience providing financial statement audit services to publicly traded companies while at Arthur Andersen.

Andrea provides due diligence assistance and structured finance consulting services to clients in the financial services industry. Andrea has over 20 years of experience, including more than 14 years with KPMG, and nine years with Arthur Andersen LLP’s Transaction Advisory and Assurance Practices.  Andrea has 18 years of financial due diligence experience, which includes analyzing and modeling structured finance transactions, evaluating asset-based, asset-backed, and cash-flow debt structures, and assisting acquirers in financial, cost saving and synergy analysis.  Andrea has diverse, practical experience in manufacturing, distribution, retail and service segments.  From a cross-border perspective, Andrea has extensive experience with structuring deals with international components. In addition to providing due diligence consulting services, Andrea has extensive experience with Regulation AB attest engagements, and other asset-backed securities, transaction-related agreed-upon procedures. Andrea has worked with clients across the financial services sector, including commercial banks and finance companies, hedge funds, asset-backed securities issuers, primary and master servicers, and trustee organizations.

What advice would you offer to women just starting out in the industry?

My advice would be threefold relationships, goals and passion.  Develop relationships with professionals from different types of financial institutions, advisory, appraisal and law firms. The relationships you build early in your career will be relationships that you will have forever.  They share your passion for this business and the transaction nature of our industry.   Set one-year, five-year and ten-year goals, both from a personal and professional perspective.  Reflect on those goals on a yearly basis.  Share those goals with your mentor and sponsor and discuss ways each year you can attain those goals.  Share those goals with your support network from a personal perspective as you will need them to support you to attain your goals. And, last but not least…passion.  Reflect on what you want to do with your career and make sure you are passionate about it.  Balancing your personal and professional life gets harder as time goes on and different priorities come to the forefront. You have to make sure you are passionate enough about what you are building and, if you are, then it is all worth it.     

What do you know now that you wish you knew in the beginning of your career?

How important it is to have a support network both within your organization and in your personal life.  There is not one way to navigate through challenges in your professional and personal life – everyone has to look at what has worked for others and develop what works for their own personal situation.  Learning how to use your resources and finding your support network will help guide you through the challenges you will face during your career.  Also, your career is a marathon, not a sprint.  Enjoy the different challenges and experiences through the process.  Don’t rush and learn from the people around you as much as you can.  

What kind of role has mentoring and/or sponsorship played in your career?

Sponsorship has played an important role in my career assisting me with reaching the different milestones in my career.  Mentoring has been very important with keeping me on track with my goals, helping me balance the demands of both my personal and professional life and making me get out of my comfort zone and take on responsibilities I may not take on if not coaxed by my mentor. 

What do you think the industry could do to attract and retain the best and the brightest today?

Financial institutions need to continue to recruit from schools with great finance and accounting programs and develop training programs that  show students all aspects of a deal from developing the relationship with the company, to underwriting, to managing the deal in the portfolio. Finding ways to establish a relationship early on, and expose these students to the many opportunities they have in a career of finance, will lead to connecting these talented, bright students to financial institutions. We need to use the conventions to bring these professionals together to develop relationships with each other and seasoned bankers.