Michael Ballou

Michael Ballou is a Managing Director in FTI Consulting’s Data & Analytics practice and is based in Boston. Mr. Ballou’s work sits at the intersection of financial expertise and advanced data analytics, specializing in helping private equity firms and corporations unlock value in their data and partnering with law firms to conduct the rigorous, detailed analyses that investigations and litigation demand.

For private equity and corporate clients, Mr. Ballou surfaces insights that drive smarter decision-making across the full transaction and operating lifecycle. During both buy-side and sell-side transactions, his work includes conducting data health checks to support IT and financial due diligence, as well as data strategy assessments to evaluate the potential value to be enabled by a target company’s data and analytics platform.

Operationally, Mr. Ballou delivers actionable visual reporting to business leaders by transforming complex, multisource data environments — including customer relationship management (“CRM”), enterprise resource planning (“ERP”), human resource information systems (“HRIS”) and various operational data platforms — into clear, reliable models and reports that inform decisions at every level. The analytics platforms he builds improve financial processes like budgeting, forecasting, order-to-cash and monthly close efficiency. They also optimize sales performance, including target identification, quota setting, market penetration, pricing and lead-to-order and connect operational data to key performance drivers that surface the right information to the right individuals. This work increases business velocity and reduces risk from manual processing. Once reporting is deployed, Mr. Ballou brings deep expertise in designing data governance frameworks that keep analytics running cleanly — formalizing data definitions, mappings and quality standards and implementing data delivery operating models tailored to each company’s needs and capabilities.

In the legal arena, Mr. Ballou has designed and executed analytical testing programs for complex financial fraud, regulatory and compliance matters at financial services firms and corporations. He builds technology-enabled models that process large volumes of transactional data to identify suspicious patterns across trading activity, cash disbursements, vendor relationships, expenses and other financial domains. His ability to translate technically complex findings into clear, concise root-cause analyses makes him a trusted partner for law firms navigating high-stakes matters.

At the core of Mr. Ballou’s approach is a straightforward conviction: Detailed source data holds significant potential, and the right analytical framework can unlock it. He works closely with business leaders and functional stakeholders to ensure his analysis not only answers the right questions but delivers findings that are clear, defensible and actionable.

Relevant Experience:

• Modernized the financial reporting suite for an $8 billion travel company, shortening monthly closing and replacing cumbersome tabular reporting with interactive visual dashboards
• Designed master customer and product data models and a governance program for a $3 billion telecom company, enabling enhanced go-to-market capabilities and new CRM implementation
• Built a transaction-level data model to uncover export sales of restricted products to sanctioned buyers at an $11 billion semiconductor company
• Extracted client trading and payments data from a multinational bank into a secure analysis environment to identify patterns associated with unauthorized trading by a portfolio manager