The Modern CFO’s Blueprint for Success: Ankur Maheshwari, Executive VP & Group CFO, C5i

In an era where finance intersects with strategy and technology, CFOs are pivotal in guiding organizations toward success. In this interview, Ankur Maheshwari, Executive Vice President & Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at C5i, talks about the evolution of the CFO role, the integration of AI with finance, and various adaptive practices that every modern CFO should know.

How has the role of CFO evolved over the years?

The definition and expectations of the role of a CFO have seen a drastic change over the years. Traditionally known as the organization’s numbers guy, a CFO was expected to be good at maintaining books of accounts and ensuring frictionless cash-flow activities. Now, the modern CFO is seen as an important strategic partner, actively involved in all aspects of strategy, organization design, and business.

I think of the CFO role today as a classic pyramid structure with three tiers- foundational finance or science of finance, intelligence finance or operational finance, and strategic finance. Foundational finance focuses on efficient and accurate book-keeping and regulatory compliance, intelligence finance helps businesses metricize core operations into measurable outcomes for performance assessment and strategic finance orientation helps evaluate the optimal ways for capital sourcing and allocation. Today, the expectations from the finance function are more indexed on Intelligence and Strategic finance as these are more oriented towards forward-looking and help the organization set out their growth plans.

Today, organizations of all sizes and scales are investing materially in the finance function. The intent is to build strong practices that measure the progress on business outcomes in real time, help forecast better, and manage the limited pool of capital better.  This is turning out to be a big differentiator between companies today.

What are your views on the integration of AI and automation in the finance function?

This has been a game-changer. It has benefited the entire value chain, from foundational finance to strategic finance. At the bottom of your pyramid, if you’ve solved for timeliness and accuracy, it makes a great difference. The core finance involves the highest transactional volume. Even the most minor slippages can have serious legal consequences. This is why you over-index your energies on this activity, because the cost of non-compliance is so high.

Using AI in the finance function can significantly reduce human error by establishing systemic checks and balances. It helps me minimize timelines and increase efficiency. This is the transition of human dependency to a system plus AI dependency.

Additionally, AI helps you analyze better. For instance, in services-oriented businesses like ours, if the people’s cost as a function of revenue went up in a particular month, these tools will give out an alert that this is not in line with past trends and helps you identify what the reasons could be. Most of this can be done proactively as opposed to the finance teams spending several hours doing post facto analysis.

All of this frees up considerable time and bandwidth, allowing the CFO to focus on core decision-making, business strategy, and other important tasks.

Real-time, predictive analytics and insights also enable CFOs to become key strategic leaders in the boardroom, shaping future strategies and anticipating risks with agility and confidence. As the number of use cases for AI increases and technology evolves, organizations will chart their future with the help of AI-enabled data-driven decisions. In all of this, the traditional CFO role will evolve into a more powerful one, that leverages insights to improve business performance.

You have worked with several companies, of varying sizes and at different stages of growth. Keeping that in mind, how should a CFO adapt to different companies like startups and seasoned corporates?

I think I am quite fortunate to have witnessed the diversity of growth stages within the same organization and the opportunity to work with companies of different sizes. One thing I have learned is that when an organization is embarking on a transformation journey, the first thing they should do is change the orientation and focus of the finance function before making any significant changes in the rest of the organization.  This helps in aligning the right measurement metrics of success that the company wishes to achieve.

I’m a firm believer in what gets measured, gets done. If you’re asked about a particular metric every month, after a while, you naturally start building a framework to ensure that you are consistently showing progress on that particular metric. So, working with the leadership, the CFO figures out where the company has to get to and arrives at the right metrics relevant to the organization. Sometimes, you have to invent metrics as they may not have been used before but they will help you assess the progress of the business better. You invent the metrics that are perfectly relevant from a business standpoint.

What challenges do CFOs face, especially when it comes to risk and regulatory practices? What would your advice be to companies?

More often than not, this is an underinvested function in every organization, when it should be a very high priority. I will give you a poor analogy. I always joke that despite our lives revolving around our Wi-Fi network, we end up buying the cheapest or most basic router available, exposing the entire network to considerable risk. Similarly, from a company’s standpoint— if the finance and risk systems in an organization remain underinvested, the risk exposure for even the smallest slippages is very high and can result in material legal consequences.

So, for a CFO, the process and controls should be very strong and non-negotiable. Laws are changing rapidly worldwide, and we need to stay on top of every update, see what’s relevant, and adapt to it.

However, compliance does not imply rigidity. One can easily take the most conservative interpretation of every regulation and make running the business very difficult. The approach has to be pragmatic. Success lies in interpreting the intent of the law, aligning the business practices to it and yet remaining focused on the business objectives.

What key financial metrics do you focus on in the tech sector, and why?

Honestly, this is difficult to answer, because the metrics are different for different organizations. It also depends on what stage the organization is in – growth-focused, margin-focused, cash-flow focused, etc. So, while choosing the right metrics is important, it is also important to keep assessing the life span of a metric and the relevance of a metric to the business after a point. Just because something was relevant for your business 10 years ago, does not mean you continue to monitor the business on the same metric and add a few new ones. You have to learn the art of knowing when a metric is no longer relevant and which ones are right, so you adopt those and evolve to them.

Hence, I believe that if a company has a culture of metric madness, chances are, nothing is getting done right. In my opinion, one should never have more than 5 or 6 key metrics. The measurement metrics are called key performance indicators (KPIs) for a reason. The word itself has ‘key’ in it. Nothing can be ‘key’ if you have 20 KPIs. So, it’s very important to figure out what the keys to your business are, and what you’re really unlocking through each of them. If you have that clarity, that’s what matters.