About Daniel Sim, FCA — Founder of Nitro Advisory Singapore

The flywheel

A CFO without AI is a bottleneck. AI without a CFO is a demo.

Every AI engagement that fails is missing one of two halves. Most firms can only sell one.

Failure mode 01

The AI consultant without a seat

Builds a genuinely impressive pilot. Then discovers adoption needs authority — a view of the real numbers, a chair in the decision meetings, licence to change how a department works. Without the seat, the pilot stays a pilot.

a deck

Failure mode 02

The CFO without AI

Trusted, rigorous, and rate-limited to one person's hours. Every model, every report, every answer queues behind the same chair. The advice is sound. The capacity never compounds.

a queue

The intersection

“The CFO seat is the only chair in an SME that sees every department's numbers — and has licence to ask every department questions.”

The seat supplies authority and visibility. AI supplies reach and capacity. Each compounds the other: the seat finds what's worth automating, and the automation returns the hours the seat needs to find more. Nitro is built at that intersection — and the intersection defends itself.
An AI shop can't rent the authority. A traditional CFO can't bolt on the capability.

The seat → Visibility → Automation → Capacity

The pillars

Three commitments, zero asterisks.

Plenty of firms publish values. These three are structural — remove any one and the flywheel stops turning.

Pillar 01

Practitioner, not theorist

Every skill is tested in our own operations first. If it doesn't survive contact with our own work, it never reaches yours.

frameworks without fingerprints

Pillar 02

Finance at the core

Deep financial acumen in every function we touch. Every AI skill is designed with ROI in mind, not just productivity — measured in dollars, not demos.

productivity theatre

Pillar 03

Permanent capability transfer

We are not building a dependency. The library, the methodology and the upskilling are yours — and they stay yours when we leave.

a retainer dressed as a roadmap

Client zero

We run Nitro on the same system we sell.

The firm's delivery infrastructure — document production, market intelligence, financial modelling — runs on the same AI-augmented methodology we build for clients. Nitro was the first engagement. It never closed.

“Adoption is a power problem, not a software problem.”

Tools don't change how a business works; the person with standing to insist on them does. The fastest proof a system gets adopted is a firm that already runs on it — so we show you ours.

Runs on the methodology In production

Document production

Client deliverables, memos, model packs

Market intelligence

The research pipeline behind Perspectives

Financial modelling

The models inside live engagements

This website

Written, built and shipped on the same system

The path here

Fourteen years before Nitro.

2010 — '14

KPMG — the view from outside

Four years auditing banks, private equity funds, REITs and business trusts across SGX. Led several SGX-listed engagements, worked on IPO board memos and MD&A, and caught material restatements in client project accounting. Qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 2014.

The lesson: a clean audit opinion is not a definitive indicator of whether the business is actually healthy. Corporate governance is only as good as the information reaching the board — and the boards I served were making real decisions on numbers their own finance teams didn't fully trust.

2014 — '17

Isuzu Motors Asia — building FP&A from scratch

Built regional FP&A from scratch for Isuzu's ASEAN holding — ten subsidiaries from Thailand to Laos, with topline of ¥40 billion. Designed the P&L/BS/CF models, built the budgeting model, wrote the risk and pricing policies, partnered SAP consultants on the reporting design, and coached the first finance hires on the ground in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.

What it produced: a US$1M product-pricing error caught and corrected; travel spend trimmed 30% (≈US$0.3M); an FP&A function from scratch.

The lesson: building from scratch teaches you faster than any playbook — learn the business quickly, design for what it actually needs, and work beside the operators. Finance partners the business; it doesn't just keep score.

2018 — '24

Astellas Pharma — local, regional, then international

Seven years inside a Tokyo-listed pharmaceutical, wearing every hat in turn: finance business partner on the Singapore Leadership Team while double-hatting as APAC Regional FP&A — seven affiliates, US$200M topline — then Medical Affairs International finance business partner, followed by International finance business operations covering 25 affiliates and US$60M of operating spend across Latin America, Eurasia, Africa and Greater China.

What it produced: consistent forecast accuracy within 3% OP variance; an Anaplan implementation project-managed end-to-end (≈US$0.4M); SAP S/4HANA roll-outs supported across three regions; global dashboards visualising US$1B of revenue and US$0.4B of opex — preparation hours cut by >80%. Awarded the Astellas Finance Excellent Partner Award.

The lesson: the systems and rituals MNCs use to run themselves aren't magic — they're transferable. Most Singapore SMEs are leaving most of that value on the table.

2024 — now

Nitro Advisory — from success to significance

Given an opportunity to bring MNC discipline to Singapore SMEs, without the trappings of corporate life. The firm runs on a four-phase Target Operating Model and deliberately caps engagements per partner so attention never thins out. In 2026 the firm built its own AI-augmented operating model — document production, market intelligence, financial modelling, all of it — and now builds the same capability for clients, measured the way a CFO would measure it.

The commitment: every engagement is led by a partner, never handed down to an associate. Today that partner is me. As Nitro grows it will be a small bench of senior operators chosen for the same standard of excellence, so what you're buying is quality, assured.

The founder's desk

Character × Competence
you can't see from a CV.

The old ideal was 文武双全 — the scholar-general, equally at home with the pen and the sword. Three artefacts from my desk carry that story better than bullet points ever could.