Finovate Global: Workforce Management and Capacity Planning with Cinareo Solutions’ Karen Elliott

This week’s edition of Finovate Global features an interview with Karen Elliott, CEO and Co-Founder of Cinareo Solutions.

Headquartered in Ontario, Canada and founded in 2022, Cinareo Solutions complements workforce management platforms, helping them streamline contact center operations and mitigate risk by enabling precise resource allocation and decision-making that is driven by data.

Cinareo made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2025 in San Diego, demonstrating how its SaaS solution provides scenario-based capacity planning for both contact center agents and support staff. The company’s technology leverages industry-recognized statistical models and simulations to help businesses meet customer demands as well as vital financial KPIs.

We caught up with Karen Elliott recently to learn more about the field of capacity planning, the role of enabling technologies like AI, and how Cinareo Solutions helps contact centers ensure that the right person with the right skills is in the right place at the right time.

What role does capacity planning have in workforce management? What makes it challenging and how does Cinareo help companies better meet those challenges?

Karen Elliott: Capacity planning is the strategic backbone of workforce management. It determines how many people you need with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time, to meet service levels without overspending on labor. In contact centers, capacity planning sits upstream of scheduling—it uses historical data, forecasts, and business assumptions to set headcount and budget requirements weeks, months, or even years in advance. Effective planning ensures customer demand is met efficiently and profitably.

The challenge is that unpredictable demand, scattered data, and outdated tools make planning a constant challenge. Most organizations resort to using Excel spreadsheets and spend hours or even days of manual labor and embedded formulas to try to figure out the optimal plan. Cinareo streamlines the process by ingesting your data and enabling rapid “what-if” scenario modeling and multi-skilling simulation to create optimized plans for both agents and support staff with the click of a button.

Not only does Cinareo handle planning with ease, but the platform also creates financial budgets and recruitment and training plans so you know who to hire, and when, to ensure you meet your service targets.

Who are Cinareo’s primary customers? How do you reach them?

Elliott: Cinareo is an industry-agnostic platform for all contact centers. We have customers worldwide in financial institutions, telecom, travel, utilities, retail, and even government. We partner with CCaaS and WFM solutions to integrate directly into their platforms so that data can flow seamlessly into Cinareo. Any organization with variable demand, labor-intensive operations and service or cost targets would get huge benefits from using a platform like Cinareo.

We have a wide network of referral agents and ISV partners that recommend Cinareo to their clients when they see a clear need. Cinareo offers webinars and monthly product showcases to demonstrate the power behind the platform—or can even arrange custom demos and proof of concepts to make sure potential customers truly understand the benefits of a modern planning platform like Cinareo.

What in your background led you to pursue innovation in this field?

Elliott: I spent 12 years at the IBM Innovation Center earlier in my career within the User Experience group with a key focus on user-centric software solutions. After leaving IBM, I co-founded a professional consulting firm that specialized in contact center optimization that helped organizations improve their people, processes, technology, and knowledge.

Years of consulting highlighted a huge gap in the market in regard to capacity planning. We worked with countless private and public sector organizations that would build these complex spreadsheets to determine their optimal staffing and we decided there needed to be a better way, so we created Cinareo. It was built to complement any CCaaS or WFM platform in the market and integrate into whatever was the customer’s platform of choice. If customers switch platforms, they can take Cinareo with them—having a portable, agnostic solution was key to the design.

Another important goal was designing a platform that was simple and intuitive based on years of experience in user-centric design. We even have our customers as active members of the planning and design of the solution—this ensures that everything we build is focused on the needs and requirements of the people using the software.

What role do enabling technologies like AI play in developing innovative workforce management solutions?

Elliott: Capacity planning remains relevant in contact centers even if AI is involved, and it can take on a different but crucial role in optimizing the overall performance. While AI can now handle routine queries or simple updates, the reality is much more complex. Cinareo helps determine the right mix of AI-driven processes and human resources to meet the demand efficiently. Our customers are modelling their operations using Cinareo to determine the ideal balance of human agents vs bot and the ROI on an investment in AI as well.

Incorporating AI into Cinareo is a given—we are already full steam ahead in our strategic plans to ensure that AI-driven capacity planning can make a dramatic difference. But true innovation in customer support isn’t about replacing the people—it is about giving people the ability to work faster and smarter – and we are doing that with Cinareo.

You recently launched Flexible Monthly Planning. What is the value proposition with this new offering?

Elliott: We initially offered Cinareo as a strategic, long-term capacity planning platform where users could build 12-, 24- or 36-month plans. However, as we continued to enhance Cinareo, our customers were telling us they wanted more flexibility in their planning, so we built in the capability to do weekly planning up to 52 weeks in order for contact centers to create tactical plans over the short or medium term.

To continue to expand on Cinareo’s flexible platform, we recently launched more flexibility into our monthly planning as well, so customers can build a plan for any number of months up to 3 years in advance. These enhancements were all driven by the needs of our clients since our goal is to have our software reflect “the voice of the customer” and truly be user-centric.

You made your Finovate debut at FinovateSpring earlier this year. How was the experience?

Elliott: We had a fantastic debut at FinovateSpring! We generated a lot of great interest in the solution from the demo we provided. Prior to FinovateSpring, we had recently started onboarding more fintech clients and noticed an uptick in interest from banks, credit unions, and insurance agencies looking for a solution like Cinareo. We thought FinovateSpring would be a great opportunity to demo Cinareo to a wider audience and get fintech companies to see the realm of the possible with a modern capacity planning solution. There is such a clear need in this sector for a solution that will not only improve CX and EX, but also provide important KPIs like the cost per contact to help with financial management.

What can we look forward to seeing from Cinareo in the months to come?

Elliott: We are excited over some of the new features that are set to launch in the months to come—we have been scaling up significantly to meet customer demand. A couple new features that are soon to be released are multi-lingual functionality in addition to the ability to compare a plan with your historical data in a quick and easy way. We will be offering our clients a way to see how their plan performed against their actuals in both performance and staffing—down to the 15-minute interval level. This new feature will help our customers understand trends and patterns and be able to improve their planning moving forward.

That is just the tip of the iceberg—we have so many more exciting things planned over the next while. We would love to increase our customer base to have even more voices driving the future of our software! If you want to see how Cinareo can solve your capacity planning challenges, feel free to contact us.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Middle East and Northern Africa

Whish Money teams up with Mastercard to enable cross-border payments to Lebanon.

Bank of Algeria joined the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) launched by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank).

Qatar-based AlRayan Bank went live with Finastra Corporate Channels.

Central and Southern Asia

India celebrated National Fintech Day earlier this week.

Ukrainian fintech Fintech Farm launched its mobile banking service Tezbank in Uzbekistan.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) announced plans to unveil new Information Systems Audit Standards to enhance audit practices for startups, fintechs, and e-commerce companies.