The CFO Summit XXXVIII will highlight the current challenges and opportunities through visionary conference sessions and keynote presentations delivered by your most esteemed peers and thought leaders from North America’s leading corporations. All this, seamlessly integrated with informal networking opportunities over three days, will provide a unique interactive forum. Do not miss this opportunity to network, establish new connections, exchange ideas and gain knowledge.
Speakers from HSBC, Caterpillar, Bacardi, Marathon Petroleum, Hill International, Mars Wrigley, Texas Mutual Insurance to name a few, represent the leading innovators in their respective fields, with a thirst for knowledge and a willingness to share both their success and failures. Attend cutting-edge conference sessions, obtain access to unique expertise and take away new solutions to your day-to-day business challenges. Offering the comprehensive content of a dynamic program and the comfort of a luxurious venue, marcus evans conferences encourage industry thought leaders to learn from each others’ experiences and explore key solutions in the market.
The senior level nature of our delegates allows us to unlock the value of their collective experience through engaging delivery formats and a mix of both formal and informal networking. Our participants are top decision makers, VP, Heads of Finance and CFOs from world-renowned companies.
To find out more please visit the event website: https://bit.ly/3acwuAG
For more info, please send an email to alexiam@marcusevanscy.com
In this new model, decision-makers not only have to make strategic choices more quickly but also need instant access to the right information to ensure those decisions are well-informed.
For CFOs, this means being able to make agile investment decisions but with so many potential ways to go - how can we gather fast, accurate insight to ensure we make the best choices? And, just as important - how can we understand where we’ve made the wrong decisions so we ‘fail fast’ and move on? Halvor W. Stokke, CFO of Confirmit, answers these questions.
Moving beyond numbers
Those outside the finance department often still believe that all that keeps us awake at night is numbers. Of course, the reality is that the finance function has evolved just as much as all other aspects of our organisations in recent years. Numbers are just our route to information - they are passive and only provide part of the story. They’re certainly not the objective of a CFO’s role. Or at least, they shouldn’t be.
To do my job properly, and to make the best decisions for the company as a whole, I need insight – just as any other business department does. And that means being able to understand the bigger picture of our organisation, taking into account external forces such as market trends and the competitive landscape, as well as the broader economy. There is also a host of internal factors to consider spanning product, service, operations, employment and customer practices.
But failing fast in decision-making and investment choices is actually about creating long-term success – by learning from the knowledge we gather at every decision point and adapting our future choices as a result.
This bigger picture which brings all of these elements together simply can’t be gained from numbers alone. It relies on a careful combination of insight gathered from across the business and presented in a way that tells us, based on clear evidence, how the investments and finance decisions we make will affect our strategic goals and our specific business KPIs.
Insight gathered at speed
But we don’t only need this holistic insight. We need it quickly and continuously. We need to be as agile – if not more so – than the market we serve and the competitors within it.
As a software organisation, we’re used to the fail-fast approach that’s long been associated with agile product development. We know that speed of delivery is often more important for success than first-time perfect delivery. Being agile in this way means we can continue to perfect our product while it’s already in the marketplace and deliver value to customers. It also means we’re much more likely to align with the changing needs of those customers.
The modern role of the CFO needs to follow exactly the same approach. Gather as much insight as we can, as accurately as we can, and then make the finance and investment decisions that we believe will have the greatest positive impact at that moment in time.
Our decisions may not always be perfect, but because we can be agile, we can make new decisions more quickly – offsetting the potential impact of previous wrong choices. We also gain the knowledge we need to pull investment more quickly when needed, rather than continuing to invest time, money and resource into a route of poor return.
Integrated data from across departments provides the additional benefit of linking cause and effect, giving department heads the evidence they need for future investment requests.
Failure is an option
Of course, no one wants to be associated with failure. It’s human nature to want our decisions to succeed, and the fundamental goal of a business’s senior leadership team is success and growth. But failing fast in decision-making and investment choices is actually about creating long-term success – by learning from the knowledge we gather at every decision point and adapting our future choices as a result.
Rather than failing fast, I call this ‘knowledgeable speed’. That’s because we’re making immediate informed, data-driven choices to maximise our chances of long-term ROI. This means the modern CFO role is now much more aligned to strategic business development than to fiscal calendars and quarterly reports. Of course, financial and accounting processes and procedures will always be adhered to, but they are part of our reporting suite and no longer an end goal in themselves.
Harnessing the best sources of insight
With such a focus on agility and speed, it may seem odd that we’d see investment in long-term, continuous Employee Experience and Customer Experience programmes as a critical component of an agile corporate strategy. But that’s exactly the approach we advise.
That’s not only because employees and customers are the most valuable asset for any organisation. It’s also due to the fact they are the most accurate barometer of market trends, providing the leadership team with a view on the pulse of a market in continual flux.
Used in the right way, the insight gathered from these two groups can be the catalyst for highly profitable organisational transformation. Not only can it help to predict changing behaviours and inform new strategic direction, but a continual, two-way dialogue with both customers and employees ensures that they are on board with change as it happens.
This is not just a ‘touchy-feely’ approach to management, but a real driver of success, since change driven by everyone is much more likely to lead to long-term results than initiatives led by an individual’s ‘vision’.
A cross-functional approach
It’s this approach to embracing wider business and market insight that sets forward-thinking leadership teams apart from the crowd. When CFOs work with other functions to understand the challenges and opportunities that exist around the business, it’s more likely that we’ll make informed investment decisions. The wider effect of this is that can simultaneously improve a range of KPIs and positively impact the bottom line.
For example, if we work more closely with CMOs, we’re able to create an accurate picture of how the customer experience we deliver impacts financial performance. Similarly, linking our work with HR heads gives us better insight into how employee engagement may be affecting sales, customer retention or service levels. Individually, we can’t make this correlation as, naturally, the data we gather is departmentally siloed.
Aligning data and leadership culture
Integrated business data and insight can only work, however, if we have a closely aligned leadership team. Working cross-departmentally supports our holistic, ‘fail fast’ approach to decision-making because we all understand the fuller business picture and can better identify opportunities for change and growth – regardless of where initiatives begin.
What’s more, each department can prove their individual impact on KPIs, giving a greater understanding of the improvements or changes needed to enhance both departmental and overall business performance.
Integrated data from across departments provides the additional benefit of linking cause and effect, giving department heads the evidence they need for future investment requests.
A continual evolution
Of course, just like the industries in which we operate and the markets we serve, our own roles are continually evolving. While a CFO is still accountable for the financial health of an on organisation, we’re also contributors to a much wider range of decisions than we were five years ago.
Our roles will continue to change as the lines between ‘ownership’ become increasingly blurred. We’re no longer owners of the balance sheet, just as sales is no longer the owner of customers – that’s a responsibility that falls to every employee in a truly customer-centric business.
So, if as a CFO I need to drive financial success in an agile, ever-changing industry, understanding numbers is no longer enough. Understanding everything about my business is now the minimal requirement for staying ahead.
About the author:
Halvor W. Stokke joined Confirmit as CFO in 2017 and holds responsibility for the company’s financial stability and growth. In this position, he focuses on the long-term strategy for Confirmit, including both organic growth and all merger and acquisition opportunities.
Website: www.confirmit.com
Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) have never had more on their plate. According to a recent McKinsey Company report, five functions other than finance now report to the CFO: risk, regulatory compliance, M&A, IT and digitalisation. Stretching themselves across all of these areas makes CFOs not just extremely busy, but puts a lot of responsibility on their plate, especially when they’re doing all this while facing economic uncertainty, strict regulations and scrutiny from investors. When you consider that these leaders, like the rest of us, only have a limited number of productive hours in a day, then how can we make sure they’re focusing on the most important parts of their jobs?
In our demanding business landscape, we need to understand that the CFO is required to be a true strategic leader, not just the head of the finance department.
For CFOs, thriving at work has, for a while now, meant more than being good with numbers. Especially in today’s terms, it means ‘getting ahead’ of any uncertainty and equipping themselves with the power of future-gazing, being able to look ahead and apply reliable insight to any future scenarios. Nearly half of businesses have changed their models to become more agile and the CFO is expected to be the driving force behind that.
For CFOs, thriving at work has, for a while now, meant more than being good with numbers.
The CFO has been given all of their additional responsibilities thanks to their unique position at the helm of the organisation. Our heads of finance are among an elite few with access to data pertaining to all parts of the business. This is especially the case as regulations and compliance laws become stricter, resulting in different business units, even within one company, putting access to their own individual data sets on lock-down. And, if you only have a few people allowed a true oversight of connected data and processes in an age where businesses are driven by data? You take full advantage of it.
Here’s where we need to empower the CFO to do all they can to make the best use of all business information; both by having a platform from which they can easily access and understand it, and secondly, making sure they have enough time in their day to make full use of it.
It’s under these conditions that we’re seeing CFOs start to turn to ERP solutions with embedded artificial intelligence. By both freeing up and maximising their time, they help make the best use of the productive hours they have available. After all, CFOs are still dedicating far too much of their time to tasks that just keep the finance function up and running. Requisitions, purchase orders and vendor invoicing need to happen. But, when cloud-based ERP with automation comes with the intelligent financial management capabilities to handle these routine duties, it not only frees CFOs up from doing them – but makes them more reliable as it eliminates human error. Given recent Accenture research showed finance staff spend an average of 60% and 70% of their time on tasks such as processing transactions, accounting, controlling, compliance and reporting, that’s a lot more time back in their day. This time can instead be spent on the more strategic parts of their job, finding insights that empower the valuable guidance they can give the CEO and help to drive the business forward.
Organisations need their leaders to be pushing themselves where it matters, focusing as much as possible on the bigger picture and going above and beyond in their mission to perfect their business strategy. Equipped with cloud-based ERP applications that add automation to the equation, CFOs can speed up manual tasks as well as eliminate time-consuming and costly upgrades from their routines. Imagine a future where the CFO is able to juggle all the jobs they have at hand, ensuring everything happens as effectively as possible, while also making sure the largest chunk of their time is dedicated to progressing their business. An attractive proposition, right?
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This week Finance Monthly hears from Mohit Manchanda, Head of F&A and Consulting EXL Service UK/Europe at EXL, on the ever-evolving DNA of a CFO.
Business leaders have to stay relevant and ahead of the curve and adapt to the constantly evolving world of finance. This development has become ever apparent for the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) whose role now includes, strategies, operations, communication, and leadership as well as building knowledge surrounding the impact of emerging technologies within the finance sector.
Business outcomes
Advances in data software and automation are opening up avenues for businesses to generate valuable insights that can lead to major productivity improvements. Within the finance and accounting areas, technology is becoming a catalyst for change, driving innovation and providing operational efficiency in business-critical functions.[1] It is essential for CFOs to rethink how to utilise this opportunity to streamline their processes for efficiency, compliance and risk management.
CFOs have many objectives to commit to and by using cutting-edge solutions to enhance the transparency and accuracy of financial data, they can better manage the financial management process. Using automation within finance helps to free up high-value tasks and alleviates the pressure on the CFO to perform traditional activities such as, transaction processing, auditing and compliance.
Human X Machine
It is becoming more and more evident that the CFO will be looked up to, to drive the utilisation of new technologies, however they should try not to get ahead of themselves and forget about the day to day business. Becoming too attached to the hype surrounding Automation and Analytics can put other business objectives on the back burner. For example, managing costs and coming up with new ways to generate profit are tasks that require the CFO to use their own industry knowledge rather than relying on data or analytics.
New technologies can speed up processes and lessen tasks for CFOs; it is important for them to make choices and identify processes where AI, Automation and machine Learning adds value. An investment in one area of a business can create savings in another. In most companies, a high percentage of staff still perform tasks that can be automated through Machine Learning, and these tasks can be performed exponentially faster if self-learning algorithms are applied.
Given the pace of technological change, CFOs should carefully evaluate their point of entry and roll out multiple pilots or proofs of concept (PoC) to test and secure validation before deploying these new technologies.
New technologies can speed up processes and lessen tasks for CFOs; it is important for them to make choices and identify processes where AI, Automation and machine Learning adds value.
Introducing innovative technologies within the finance sector does aid in mitigating lesser tasks for the CFO, however it is not only the technology alone that enables a more streamlined work process. By combining talent, skill set and technology together creates a unified approach, resulting in major improvements throughout the business. For CFOs it means that they can move away from everyday traditional accounting tasks, therefore freeing up time to use their industry knowledge to focus on new business opportunities and provide strategic guidance.
Data & Domain
Organisations regardless of their size will collect large masses of data of which most will never be utilised. It is important for CFOs to understand which data sets are of value and which ones aren’t. Some may be needed for regulatory purposes and others for commercial predictions and products, however by disregarding the sets that are not of value helps to create a more streamlined result.
Starting to experiment with data will help identify potential risks before they are put into production. Machine Learning is all about data experimentation, hypothesis testing, fine tuning data models and Automation. Bringing data, technology and talent together in the form of ideation forums, innovation labs and skunk work projects allows discrete data to be tested for the first time. By bringing in Machine Learning, it can identify hidden patterns that could potentially harm the production process.
In order to drive the business forward, CFOs can translate data and combine it with industry knowledge. The data helps to provide insight within the industry which then contextualises their business decisions. Using data driven decisions CFOs can be confident in their choices within the organisation and use it to back up or prove their conclusions.
Putting data under the business lens enables a CFO to understand the repercussions that can occur through the improper use of big data. A business’ reputation is on the line if data violations occur. Not only will this result in legal sanctions, it will limit business operations, which will have a domino effect on resources and a company’s position compared to its competitors.
Therefore, CFOs should review all of the potential consequences before putting their experimented data findings into practice, including any legal, financial, and brand implications. This is where industry knowledge comes into play, using an expert committee on business data to inspect algorithms for unintentional consequences, results in less risk than normally associated with Machine Learning.
For CFOs to thrive in the digital age, it is essential for them to have a unified approach combining industry knowledge, data, technology and talent.
For CFOs to thrive in the digital age, it is essential for them to have a unified approach combining industry knowledge, data, technology and talent. By employing new technologies, data, talent and knowledge as one package, CFOs can add continuous learning opportunities for critical talent pools, and assist in the overall improvement of productivity within the business.
[1] https://www.business2community.com/big-data/17-statistics-showcasing-role-data-digital-transformation-01970571
The second CFO that Finance Monthly reached to this month is Nick Haslehurst who joined moneycorp as Chief Financial and Operating Officer in 2012, bringing more than 17 years’ experience in global finance to the helm.
Established in 1979, moneycorp is one of the largest and fastest-growing players in the foreign exchange and international payments market. Providing a quick, secure and competitively priced international payments service, the specialist firm helps individuals and a wide range of businesses with FX risk management solutions, allowing them to trade foreign exchange and make international payments across the globe.
In his role, Nick oversees all moneycorp’s support centre functions, from financial control and accounting, planning and analysis, treasury, technology, compliance and legal services.
With previous positions as Global Finance Director at MasterCard Inc’s Prepaid Debit Card Division and Travelex Ltd, Nick is no stranger to revamping and implementing business strategies to help streamline largescale operations and organisational structures. Nick has been instrumental in driving moneycorp’s impressive international growth strategy, including the development and launch of Moneycorp Bank. With over 800 staff across Europe and the US, the company is set for further expansion in the near future.
Moneycorp has just launched its 2016’s H1 Trading results – what have been the company’s biggest achievements in the first six months of 2016? What are you most proud of?
It was an extremely busy half-year for the team at moneycorp and there have been lots of successes to reflect on - not least, a strong set of H1 results which saw the company handle 3.5 million transactions and £11.4 billion worth of currency in the run up to the EU Referendum. Financial performance is obviously a key indicator for any business, but this has to be coupled with long-term investment and continuation of growth for the future. Financial services in all areas are changing at a rapid pace - customers expect more transparency and improved digital interaction - and at moneycorp this is always front of mind.
In April we announced the successful completion of our application to acquire a bank license, and with it, the launch of the new Moneycorp Bank, which will act as a separate legal entity to our main operations here in London. We invested significant time, resource and infrastructure into acquiring the license and we see it as a major step in establishing moneycorp as a leading global FX risk management provider and international payments specialist. Most recently, our international expansion plans have taken us into Romania, where our newly-launched office comprises a foreign exchange dealing and sales team, client onboarding desk and compliance, complete with the use our centralised technology platform.
Technology and the digital transformation of the business was also a sharp focus for us in H1. As well as investing in a complementary offshore technology hub in India, significant investment has gone into the launch of the new moneycorp app, which went live in the App Store last month, allowing global payments and FX dealing on the move. We regard ourselves as a front-runner in technology-led services, so moving moneycorp’s browser-based technology into a fast, simple, international payments app for our customers was a key milestone for the business.
Moneycorp has recently signed a deal to acquire a foreign exchange and payments business in Brazil – can you tell us about the company’s expansion plans? What does 2017 hold for Moneycorp?
At moneycorp, our expansion plans focus on controlled growth within our existing domestic and international markets, whilst establishing a foothold in new markets that offer solid and sustainable growth opportunities, both now and in the future.
In 2015, moneycorp signed an agreement to acquire a stake in a fast-growing Brazilian foreign exchange business. Earlier this year we also announced the launch of one of our largest ever commercial partnerships with global news giants CNN in the US. Both developments have given moneycorp a solid platform to expand into what are two enormous markets with significant growth opportunities. South America and Asia - two continents with buoyant property and import/export markets - are also firmly set within our sights as part of moneycorp’s long-term international expansion strategy.
The roll out of Moneycorp Bank will also be a major catalyst for our plans for international growth into European markets, allowing us to hold deposits in multiple currencies, service the payment needs of corporate and private clients overseas, and offer a full range of FX risk management solutions.
The big topic of the moment for international companies is of course Brexit; the triggering of Article 50, and more significantly, the implications of either a “hard” or “soft” exit from the European Union. Our hunger for sustainable growth remains unchanged following the Brexit result, and this includes our approach towards expansion overseas. Pre-referendum we went through careful contingency planning to prepare for either outcome, and we are now in a good place to continually adapt and eventually implement this plan as the negotiating landscape develops in 2017.
In the event of a “hard” Brexit, we are fully prepared to continue servicing our clients across the globe and pursue our long-term growth ambitions without disruption. Our sights stretch far and wide, and we are aiming to expand into two-to-three new territories each year.
In terms of competition, where does the company stand globally?
Moneycorp is one of the UK’s leading foreign exchange providers and our vision is to be the first choice for international payments. What makes us stand out from the competition is a simple but effective corporate philosophy - if we serve our clients well, success will follow. Like any other business, that means setting the standards for the industry by delivering the best and most comprehensive specialist services to our customers.
What do you anticipate for the future of product and technology innovation?
Foreign exchange is already a technology-led industry and the demand for faster, fully-integrated, autonomous solutions is more important than ever. Customers want a better online experience and moneycorp’s international payments platform and mobile app have been designed with this in mind.
When it comes to product offerings, transparency is key. Customers are more knowledgeable about the market than ever before, which means they want to see clear pricing structures with no hidden fees. Both product and technology innovation must go hand-in-hand to create an all-round more comprehensive offering for customers. Not only do businesses and individuals want to be able to make safe and secure transactions, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but they also want to exchange a range of currencies with ease via a choice of payment methods.
