How tomorrow’s CFO can upgrade the finance skills of the future

In this episode of The Better Finance podcast, host Myles Corson and guests discuss how the role of the CFO will most likely require new skills to help leverage trusted technologies.

Podcast host Myles Corson welcomes Simon Bittlestone, CEO of Metapraxis, a financial analytics company, and Andrew Harding, Chief Executive of Management Accounting at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants.

Over the last few years, Metapraxis and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) have been collaborating on a joint initiative called “Tomorrow’s CFO,” created to help set the agenda for the future of the finance profession, and help finance professionals take advantage of technological innovation.

Their research, “The Future of Finance,” including over 5,000 companies and individuals from across the globe, found the CFO mandate undergoing a significant paradigm shift, with the emphasis on communicating value to a wider group of stakeholders and embracing comprehensive digital transformation into the finance function. CFOs of tomorrow are expected to have more meaningful contributions to strategy and the performance of the business, and develop deeper connections across the c-suite.

Technologies such as robotics process automation (RPA), analytics and blockchain are quickly absorbing once manual finance processes, helping to improve efficiency and modeling capabilities. Advancing technology is unlikely to eliminate finance jobs but rather eliminate the enormous amount of manual input time, freeing people to work closer with the business and help better understand trends and key business indicators that may support value creation.

Traditional finance reporting could be fortified by finance analytics and automation to give teams access to the tools required to better visualize performance and make more informed decisions.

Key takeaways:

  • Increasingly, CFOs are required to not only drive internal control systems, but also provide the business with critical decision support and value creation.
  • Finance transformation will require new skills that help understand data and leverage analytics technology and automation.
  • The future of finance will entail continual learning as research has shown the relevancy of a skill to be about four years. Continuous professional development (CPD) programs are a means to stay professionally relevant and competent.

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available. 


Podcast

Season 3, Episode 8

Duration

0h 31m 11s