Why CFOs should Utilize Modern Technology?

Over the past couple of years, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) role has seen change, from just being a financial controller, now have are more strategically involved. Economic uncertainty increased regulation, and an ever-pressing need to cut costs and grow revenue have taken their toll. Deloitte’s current framework, the ‘Four Faces of the CFO’, offers an exciting insight into this change. As a strategist, they are vital influencers in driving business change by investing in improvements and technology innovations that add value to the company.

The shifting role of the CFO beyond its traditional scope requires the help of technology, with support from other business functions such as sales and marketing. From analytics to AI, to boost efficiency and derive valuable insights on behalf of the company, CFO would need them all to uncover new sources of revenues to fuel growth.

There are ways on how technology can help the CFO not only manage challenges of change but also take better decisions for the company to grow:

• CFOs need to think like Chief Data Officer. Data on cloud and devices is growing, and it is essential to organize, manage and read this data accurately. They need proper reporting to the business backed by IoT that meet financial needs and connect seamlessly with an organization’s technology stack.
• CFOs need to get involved in data security as data breaches can have a disastrous impact on profitability. Then they need to help and fund setting up data security policies and process improvements. Hence, this is now being included as part of the due diligence process along with tax and other financial health aspects.
• CFO needs to enable great transformation. To be analytical, predictive and prescriptive, they need tools such as data science, advanced statistics and modelling that connect to data sources from across the organization and generate a dashboard of actionable insights and drill down into key performance indicators dynamically. This is why Automation and cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are crucial to enabling the CFO. It allows automation of daily tasks to reduce manual processes and solve operational problems of the finance and accounting users. For large MNCs, functions such as group-wide financial consolidation that take weeks to finish can be completed in hours with a suitable ERP solution where the holding and subsidiary can run on the same ERP platform.

For example, tying together expense, invoice, procurement data, customer experience and HR data will provide a complete view of cost, spend, and ROI in terms of money and time across all departments. This means that the entire organization will look to the CFO to coordinate the multitude of responsibilities that lead to the standard and shared goal of transformation and growth.

Technology projects don’t happen in a vacuum; it impacts the complete ecosystem. CFO is the custodian of growth and profitably with minimal risks. Therefore embracing cutting edge technology with pattern recognition, learning capabilities, and end-to-end integration can deliver unparalleled productivity and accuracy.

Hence, the confusion for the CFO is not where but how much companies should spend to compete in an increasingly complicated digitalized space.