Strategic Principles Every Modern CFO Should Be Embracing

Pensive man standing in company office to think about business strategy and innovation

The role of the CFO is rapidly changing as traditional financial management procedures merge ever closer with operational activities.

Finance leaders no longer sit alone in their office analysing the financial impact of data, trends and strategic decisions.

The next generation of CFOs is becoming much more engaged with other departments and require a different set of skills to drive forward new behaviours.

The Future Role of the Finance Function

Next-generation finance teams will spend more time analysing operational insights and using predictive financial modelling to drive efficiency and scalability.

Finance leaders will need to invest more in software and analyse reliable data through the use of dashboards to build the foundations for their evolving responsibilities.

Your teams will be required to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. They will need to integrate a range of financial management systems to effectively manage the business operations and provide valuable input into your firm’s strategy.

You will need to adjust your recruitment policies to build agile finance teams who can adapt to new technologies, in addition to traditional hires who have backgrounds in accounting, finance and business.

Learning New Skills

The ability to influence people will become an essential requirement of the CFO role. Change management skills will also be vital to focus teams on working more strategically across your organisation.

Finance leaders will need to set a range of challenging goals to drive operational change and to work much more closely with key employees to achieve them.

Changing Cultures

Business cultures will need to change in order to become a truly data-driven organisation that makes decisions based on timely and accurate information. 

Companies will need to replace low-value manual, tedious or repetitive tasks with automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, in order to divert their workforce towards more value creation tasks and to act more strategically.

Summary

Finance functions are evolving rapidly as new technology replaces manual tasks. Data-driven insight dashboards are aligning the processes required for financial management and driving operational change.

Finance leaders are becoming much more focused on influencing key employees to adopt financial strategies and driving operational change. New skill sets are required throughout the finance function, including more emphasis on personality and charisma.

Future finance professionals need to be adaptive to change and demonstrate a strong understanding of technology integration, data analytics, and business operations and strategy – in addition to being financial experts.

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