Sanjeev Panwar got into finance to keep his family afloat. After eighteen years at WPP Scangroup, he has arrived at a philosophy of finance that is as straightforward as the man himself.
When Sanjeev Panwar walked into his first audit job in India, his family was going through financial difficulty and he needed to earn. Finance was practical and close enough to start immediately. He joined a small audit firm, learnt the basics and hoped it would lead to a steady accounting role somewhere.
During one of his early audit projects, he watched his boss, a qualified chartered accountant, walk into a client’s office. Instantly, the room shifted, and people straightened up. Sanjeev had never seen a professional command that kind of quiet authority before. He went home and made a decision.
“The experience lit a spark in me. I decided to pursue two professional exams simultaneously. One was chartered accountancy in India and another was cost and management accountancy. Both of them are difficult exams in India. After four years, without any formal coaching, I managed to clear both of them while I was working. I felt it was a great achievement. Persistence won,” he says.
After gaining experience at a multinational in India, Sanjeev set his sights on an overseas opportunity. Kenya came through a contact. He flew in for a few days in 2008 to have a look around, liked what he found and joined WPP Scangroup as a finance manager. Eighteen years on, he is the CFO, having moved through financial controller, deputy CFO and group finance director on the way up. Each role added a layer. By the time the CFO position arrived, it felt more like a responsibility.
A philosophy of value
“Many mentors joined and left. The problems were the same but they had different solutions and different mindsets for how to solve them. I learnt a lot from watching everybody come and try to find their own way through the same challenges,” he says.
His philosophy of finance has distilled itself over those years into three principles: protect value, create value and communicate value. He applies them in that order and measures himself against them constantly. The stewardship element is the one he talks about with the most conviction. East Africa’s financial systems are still maturing, he argues, and that means finance leaders here carry a responsibility that goes beyond the organisation they serve. The decisions made in quiet rooms ripple outward into the broader ecosystem, sometimes for years.
When he joined WPP Scangroup, the organisation was running multiple platforms and reconciling data manually across all of them, an arrangement that was slow and unreliable. He led the implementation of a single ERP system to replace it. The resistance he encountered came from the team, who were afraid the system would cost them their jobs.
“I addressed this through clear communication about the purpose of implementing the system and the benefits it would bring. I was clear that there were no job security issues. We implemented structured training. Once they understood why we were doing it, everything changed. We established a single source of truth. We reduced the manual work. We could rely on the data. That system is still running today,” he says.
Embracing digital fluency
It has been running since 2011. The organisation is evaluating it for the upgradation regularly, given how much the digital advertising landscape has shifted since then. WPP Scangroup has built its own products in response to those shifts, including a platform that helps clients identify the right influencers for their campaigns and another that provides an integrated media dashboard delivering detailed ROI reports across all media sources, including ATL channels like TV and radio, digital platforms, social media, mobile apps, and websites.
For this reason, Sanjeev believes digital fluency is not optional for CFOs. The convergence of finance, technology and data is already here, and the leaders who have not yet made peace with that are running out of time.
“CFOs who embrace this and real-time insight will shape the future. Those who do not will struggle to stay relevant. I am telling you, whatever industry you are in,” he says.
Sanjeev often pulls his team into the difficult conversations rather than shielding them. He lets them make decisions, with support available when they need it, and holds them accountable for the outcomes. As he sees it, growth comes from accountability paired with belief.
Context and stillness
Early in his career Sanjeevwas fixated on accuracy, but over time, he came to understand that it is necessary but not sufficient. WPP Scangroup has around 25,000 shareholders, and some of them are not finance experts. When results come out, they want to understand what happened and why. Translating complex financial realities into plain language is, in his view, one of the most important things a CFO does.
“Numbers don’t lie but they do need context to tell the right story. Leadership is not just about accuracy. It is about influence, trust and communication. People don’t follow spreadsheets. They follow leaders,” he says.
Sanjeev does yoga and meditation to keep his mind steady. He travels when he can and has been to the Masai Mara more than ten times. His family has even stopped counting. He goes for the stillness as much as for the wildlife. There is no network out there, no calls from the office, nothing pulling him in a different direction.
The seasoned finance leader has one tagline he uses internally at WPP Scangroup, a phrase that captures the discipline he considers fundamental to running any organisation well.
“Earn before you burn,” he says.
