The future CFO

Thought Leadership

23 Oct

Realising the future CFO office to drive continuous improvement is a key vector for unlocking outsized value creation and increasing market competitiveness.

As the importance of technology in business operations deepens, the CFO and finance function should be attributed remits across controlling the tech. spend agenda, owning financial / operational data, and acting as a facility for insights – evolving into a more complex role within businesses as the strategic engine room.

Moving into the future, we see outsized value in crystalising the CFO office into this mechanism for continuous improvement and innovation through digital transformation – baselined by financials and underpinned by strategy.

It is the responsibility of the future CFO to act as the nexus for an aligned command and control across key units (core finance mgmt., strategic leadership and growth initiatives and digital transformation) – i.e. ensure that Finance informs strategy informs technology, and ensure this cycle is self-reinforcing to continuously facilitate innovation / generate value.

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Authors

Author Profiles Database

Alasdair Moles

Consultant

Andrew Ng

Partner

The future CFO

Finance functions have been some of the most profoundly impacted sections of organisations through the advancement and adoption of technology. The first generally accepted cloud computing software company, NetSuite, began in 1998 (then NetLedger) as a web-hosted ledger enterprise software and has since evolved into a platform for digitally hosting swathes of business processes. The continued success and expansion of the platform is indicative of an industry-wide change that has, over time, resulted in a tremendous offload of manual human effort (c.35%) onto system-actionable automations.

Modern finance systems handling reconciliations, AR / AP, reporting, budgeting, forecasting, etc., now natively support an automation layer – they can enable seamless data handling that is highly configurable for retrieving KPIs from finance processes and for providing organisation-wide financial visibility. The freeing of human and knowledge capital from these certain automatable everyday tasks has resulted in a tonal shift in the role of the finance function: from standard day-to-day financial operations and reporting into a strategic domain leveraging the increased reporting and KPI capabilities.

So, what is the future of the CFO?

Alignment of financial and strategic decision making
Cohesion across data and strategic insights
Cross-functional collaboration
Strategic use of financial infrastructure
Agility to respond
Long term alignment of finance and operations

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