NAVIGATING CHANGE: AREAS OF FOCUS FOR CFOS IN THE CURRENT FISCAL YEAR FOR BUSINESS GROWTH

Despite the setbacks posed by the pandemic and the subsequent economic meltdowns, the year 2023 has proven to be even more challenging and unpredictable than its predecessor, 2022. With obstacles such as higher capital costs, currency fluctuations, and recessionary pressures, the business landscape has come to recognize the urgent need for adaptation. In this evolving environment, Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) have assumed a critical role in navigating these turbulent waters, ensuring the survival and success of their organizations.

The current business landscape demands that CFOs transcend their traditional role as mere number crunchers and instead navigate the challenging waters of strategic decision-making. In order to weather the storm of uncertainty, companies must embrace critical thinking as a cornerstone of their operations, fostering adaptability to the ever-changing times. As the world increasingly embraces AI and ML technologies, global teams are exploring investment opportunities, making it crucial for teams to prioritize digital transformation and cultivate trust and collaboration.

As technology continues to dissolve boundaries, global teams must adapt to growth enablers and prioritize innovation. The modern business landscape necessitates the emergence of a new “finance function” that harmonizes diverse and skilled talent, analytical expertise, and strong leadership. This integrated approach brings vision, strategy, culture, and inspiration to life, fostering collaboration and propelling organizations forward.

Speaking his mind on the same, Anand Venkateswaran Vice President, Finance, Target in India said “For finance leaders, this means an increased focus on innovation and building new capabilities to solve complex problems. Today, finance teams are evolving into multi-disciplinary teams of professionals with technical and subject matter expertise that are transforming functions within core finance.”

According to Kavitha Ramesh, Chief Financial Officer at ANZ, a robust foundation is crucial for embarking on this transformative journey. “Maintaining financial and operational integrity will be critical for organizations to succeed and thrive,” she says adding, “There is a continuous emphasis on embracing digital transformation by adopting digital technologies and embedding process improvement, standardization, automation, controls, and eliminating non-value add activities. These must be prioritized to improve operational efficiency, enhance customer experience, and mitigate risks.

With the growing complexity of regulations and the increasing importance of ESG (environment, social, and governance), the focus must be on strengthening the governance and compliance framework. Although we believe in challenging the status quo in banks, we need to do this by applying caution.”

On the flip side of the conversations around transformation and evolution lies the debate of optimisation. The ideal strategy will be to ensure an approach that reduces cost and improves loss cost accuracy to drive profitability.

Elaborating on the same, Hemlata Nevetia, CFO & Director Shared Services, Allstate India shares, “There is ruthless prioritization in everything we do this year and beyond to focus on process transformation and digitalization of operations, digital sales and distribution channels (leverage our exclusive agents’ channel), intelligent claims, as well as accelerated underwriting”.

However, any transformation has to be mindful. “While digital transformation is a term that gets thrown around a lot, we see digital as the key enabler of critical infrastructure and capabilities we need to conduct our core business… Sometimes the need may be to favour “buy” over “build” tech for pushing time-to-market mandates, while our near-term focus will revolve around creating an ecosystem to drive value-realization.”, she adds.

So even as companies compete for talent and innovation, it has to first build within to grow beyond. Binding it all together, Mr Abhilash Raghavan, Chief Financial Officer, ANSR said “2023 will see increased collaboration between the CFO and the CHRO to create talent pathways that maximise opportunities for people while expanding productivity with the use of technology.”