1. Anticipate market change
To help their organizations navigate uncertainty and disruption, CFOs are combining data, predictive analytics, and intelligent forecasting with human insight.
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Accelerate growth
Drive value
Rethink service delivery models
Modernize skills, upgrade talent
Inspire trust
Anticipate market change
Activate the digital agenda
Learn how data powers performance
Uncover new opportunities
CFOs are upping their strategic game, using all available financial levers—actively managing, assessing, and prioritizing the portfolio of initiatives that will drive growth and create sustainable advantage.
2. Accelerate growth
CFOs are using digital capabilities to redesign work and focus resources on adding value, through scalable and efficient processes and improved business insights.
3. Activate the digital agenda
CFOs can reshape the conventional approach on value creation in favor of new thinking to actively manage multi-segment portfolios for market-exceeding returns.
4. Drive value
Discover a new frontier for value capture
New ways of working are prompting CFOs to redesign Finance organizational structures and target operating models.
5. Rethink service delivery models
To align newly dispersed workforces with reimagined business processes, CFOs are investing in workforce data literacy and using intelligent automation to support higher-value activity.
6. Modernize skills, upgrade talent
To measure, monitor, and preserve emerging categories of value and risk—intangibles like customer trust and ESG reputation—CFOs are evolving their financial and risk systems to keep pace.
7. Inspire trust
Start delivering new strategic value
See how optimized portfolios can drive value
Learn how organizations are evolving
Start adapting to stay ahead
As CFOs work to future-proof the business against disruption, their priorities will include:
Support for sales, marketing, and customer service initiatives to capture new customers and cement loyalty.
Evaluation of M&A-driven opportunities to expand into new markets or capture the competitive advantages of scale
Pursuit of new capabilities, products, and services through discretionary investment
To effectively partner with the board and C-suite, CFOs will need to focus on the following areas:
Leverage prebuilt digital integration frameworks to leapfrog generic hurdles and focus organizational attention on company-specific issues.
Use dynamic investing approaches, design thinking, and market-speed operating model concepts to unleash innovation in the business
Champion a Finance-led data governance framework as the baseline from which to drive data quality and data standardization across the enterprise
To assert leadership in the digital agenda, a CFO must:
Optimize the allocation of scarce resources (e.g., capital, talent, management attention) to decide which businesses to run better, where to buy to scale, and where to leverage divestitures as a value lever.
Assess the maximum value each business can create, and develop a stress-tested narrative for why the company is the best owner.
Examine the range of business models in the portfolio to disaggregate all the underlying businesses.
In order to confidently reshape multi-business portfolios, CFOs must answer critical questions about their portfolio businesses through the following actions:
Offshore, nearshore, and onshore arrangements focused on targeted value delivery, rather than pure cost reduction.
Managed services structures for mission-critical activities, such as regulatory due diligence during M&A transactions
Global business services partnerships as talent resource alternatives to offset intense competition for critical Finance talent
In order to successfully evolve the delivery model, CFOs will need to become well versed in such concepts as:
Advocacy for the integration of emerging technology such as blockchain, machine learning, AI, and other cognitive computing into traditional Finance processes.
Bringing together disparate cultures of data science and traditional Finance acumen, including organization redesign and creatiwon of new hybrid roles that merge functional specialty and data skill sets
Investment in continuous workforce retraining and upskilling to support Finance and accounting careers focused on business strategy and partnership
Their challenge is no less than the creation of customer-oriented Finance cultures, focused on partnership and value creation with the business. New CFO realities will include:
Evolving Risk from a passive compliance function to a strategic lever for opportunistic growth, innovation, and resilience.
Mastering accounting principles and Finance frameworks that measure and monitor the tangible value of environmental, social, and corporate governance assets
Diffusing risk competencies from specialized back-office function to awareness and practices embedded across the enterprise
As stakeholder trust evolves to become an increasingly important component of enterprise value, the CFO challenge will grow with it, to include:
Implementing proactive approaches to acquire cutting-edge capabilities, including strategic alliances with external providers of technology, expertise, and implementation savvy.
Continually evolving risk management practice to support business continuity and sustainable competitive position under all scenarios
Combining internal and external data streams to fuel powerful forecasting models, always augmented by human insight
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Traditionally, CFOs were viewed favorably if they could help their leadership adapt quickly to keep pace with changes in the marketplace—whether by freeing up capital to pursue innovation, cutting costs when necessary, or making difficult choices about technology investments. But as the pace of change accelerates, the CFO role has evolved to one of active collaboration in the design of target operating models for the business and the funding of capabilities to make them an operational reality. CFOs sit at the nexus of business strategy, financial planning, and operational metrics and, just as important, control the source data and reporting outputs that informs decisions in each of these areas.
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As CFOs have taken on strategic roles outside of Finance, expectations they can deliver against a growth agenda have increased exponentially. CFOs must now come to the table with their own point of view about which strategic levers will best support growth. Their perspectives will be informed by insight drawn from analysis of very large data sets, tailored to sector specifics, and synthesized with the CFO’s own operational insights. Traditional budget planning and capital allocation mandates give CFOs an outsized voice in how the enterprise pursues growth.
Until quite recently, the digital agenda was considered primarily the purview of the CIO, the CTO, and others with significant experience in IT. As data rather than technology hardware becomes the critical value lever, the historic role of Finance at the hub of data flows has elevated the role of CFOs. Technology is just the tip of digital capabilities. To help the business successfully migrate to digitally powered operating models, digitally experienced CFOs take a holistic approach comprising customer-centric business strategy, cross-enterprise scale and connectivity in digital solutions, and attunement to the ripple effects of digital adoption on organization, culture, and behavior.
CFOs intent on creating above-market financial returns in their complex portfolios can get squeezed between management myths about what creates value, and the unflinching eye of capital markets whose assessments can clearly differ. By adopting a new way of thinking that leverages learnings from research on portfolio value creation used by activist investors, CFOs can create a fairly valued portfolio through two key levers – sell more and sell fast, and reinvest aggressively in the core.
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As the Finance function is asked to deliver higher value to the business, at greater speed, CFOs are reconsidering their human capital and workforce strategies. In the largest organizations, they need time-zone and geographic delivery options to meet expectations. As data and analytic Finance skills become increasingly important, CFOs also contend with competition to fill critical roles. The advanced technology and digital goalposts will only keep moving. So, some CFOs will turn to external partnerships in order to complement in-house resources with specialized Finance or Risk expertise, offload noncore functions, better manage their technology investment ecosystem, or gain capacity to manage continuous process change.
While attention focused on the reality of virtual workforces, advances in extreme automation of business processes has changed the nature of work itself. This revolution, only in its earliest stages, has already disrupted legacy entry-level accounting roles. Touchless closes are an imminent reality—with widespread predictions that traditional accounting will disappear. Three-quarters of CFOs expect automation to significantly impact their Finance teams. The choice: Evolve their organizations to become next-generation providers of insight to the business or risk the loss of historic stewardship over enterprise financial agendas. CFOs need a keen sense of their company’s target operating model and the mix of traditional Finance and new digital skill sets required to support it.
Regardless of company, regardless of industry, there is no more valuable asset than trust. As digital market dynamics expand the risk surface of the enterprise, CFOs are intensely aware of the ways trust can act as a multiplier of benefits or a liability that erodes value. CFOs are the stewards of trust, since they provide the clearest view of the metrics that signify a company’s success (and its weaknesses). Likewise, CFOs are expected to play a key role in areas such as cybersecurity that contribute to the public’s overall confidence in a company. Perhaps most importantly, CFOs are the organizational owners of the risk management agenda. By effectively managing risk, CFOs inspire the trust of their leadership and, by extension, of the broad universe of stakeholders in a company’s success.
