Chief monetary officer (CFO) and finance groups are sometimes identified for his or her fiscal duties – accounting, bills and monetary planning – that assist guarantee a company is compliant and runs easily for long-term monetary well being. Over the previous few years, the position of finance groups has drastically advanced to incorporate driving innovation. Throughout the pandemic, CFO steerage was essential to maintain organizations working – by carefully monitoring income and bills and at occasions, making powerful enterprise selections. Now, these groups are being requested to increase their position to grow to be futurists and play a number one position in transformation. To study extra about this evolution, Microsoft performed a survey with U.S. finance leaders to get their perspective on the way forward for finance.
In Microsoft’s new Financial Guardians of the Future report, we examined how monetary groups and leaders are working at the moment, challenges they’re dealing with, and the position of know-how of their day-to-day lives. What we discovered is that CFOs and their groups are dealing with a brand new, pressing directive: placing the proper steadiness between strategic innovation whereas defending the long-term monetary well being of their organizations – all throughout an unsure financial local weather.
Hanging the proper steadiness: Financial guardian and innovation driver
In our analysis, we uncovered that almost all finance leaders really feel they’re being requested to ship on conflicting goals – to speed up the tempo of innovation whereas additionally guaranteeing model belief and mitigating dangers. They need to each scale back prices and enhance development to ship short-term revenue and long-term imaginative and prescient and company function. Regardless of their popularity as risk-averse adversaries to innovation, 79% of finance leaders consider that to satisfy future wants they need to play a major position in proudly owning enterprise innovation and empowering transformation throughout the group. Now greater than ever CFOs and their groups are targeted on transformation and the longer term.
We’re already seeing this evolution in clients we accomplice carefully with. London Inventory Trade Group’s (LSEG) CFO Anna Manz’s position goes past efficiency administration and driving an environment friendly perform into delivering the large strategic selections. Most not too long ago this included LSEG’s collaboration with Microsoft to empower monetary markets with subsequent era information, analytics and workspace options. It’s difficult LSEG to consider how they will work with clients and develop merchandise in another way, and it’s essential {that a} cross-functional workforce together with finance perceive the dimensions of the chance and the potential to execute. Combining LSEG’s unparalleled depth and breadth of economic information and analytics and deep information of economic providers, paired with Microsoft’s know-how and embedded Microsoft workplace workflow, creates an incredible alternative to convey essential transformation within the monetary providers {industry}.
Drive worker satisfaction by AI and automation
Whereas finance groups are being requested to tackle greater than ever, they don’t seem to be seeing incremental will increase in individuals resourcing. Hanging the steadiness between automation and a company’s most vital asset — its individuals — is essential for the way forward for finance. Doing extra with much less isn’t about overburdening an already taxed workforce, it’s about augmenting human capabilities with automation, enabling workers to maneuver enterprise ahead. Eighty-two % of finance leaders discovered AI and automation essential to serving to evolve their workforce’s position to assist their group’s strategic targets. Implementing AI and automation can release beneficial time for finance groups to deal with work that drives enterprise technique and modernization.
As finance professionals search extra methods to work smarter, not tougher, low code automation instruments take away IT limitations. Empowered with automation and AI, individuals are extra linked, collaborative and able to deal with extra strategic work.
Agility and innovation are essential when dealing with the sudden
Enterprise agility is crucial, and finance groups are doubling down their efforts to maintain up with shifting markets. Organizational well being has grow to be more and more depending on linked information, environment friendly processes and action-oriented insights that facilitate agile, data-driven resolution making.
Microsoft’s Financial Guardians of the Future report discovered that 88% of economic leaders really feel overwhelmed by their group’s information. To deal with this want, Microsoft is saying the primary of many new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance: Enterprise efficiency analytics which empowers finance professionals by equipping them with sooner reporting and analytics. This new functionality streamlines monetary reporting by centralizing information from a number of enterprise workstreams into an easy-to-use interface. Powered by Dataverse, this functionality permits customers to create and share personalised stories, and get safe, close to real-time entry to essential monetary info. With improved visibility, finance groups could make knowledgeable selections and supply well timed monetary insights to enterprise leaders.
However this product development couldn’t be accomplished with out our clients’ partnership. Robert Walters, a world recruitment and expertise administration firm, is a chief instance of how progressive know-how and agility helps CFOs drive robust cross-functional partnerships and digital transformation. Robert Walters partnered with Microsoft to switch their total finance platform, all in the course of the pandemic. The outcomes? An on-time, in-budget success, which led to streamlining the supply of knowledge to groups, enabled real-time information visibility, and in a single particular occasion an annual value financial savings of 150,000 kilos. By using progressive applied sciences and fostering a strategic partnership between the CFO and chief info officer, the corporate successfully unified information and knowledge, driving sooner, data-driven decision-making. With this hyper-connect enterprise strategy their recruiters have the knowledge they should drive higher outcomes for recruits and shoppers.
Empower your workforce by prioritizing job achievement, collaboration and sooner innovation
It comes as no shock that workers need to spend much less time on repetitive and transactional duties, and extra time working as a workforce to drive higher enterprise selections.
At Microsoft, we’ve been on this journey for years, reworking our finance operations utilizing our cloud-based merchandise together with Azure, Excel, Energy Platform, Dynamics 365 and Groups — one thing we name Fashionable Finance. However this goes past know-how. We’re reimagining what is feasible and that required a cultural shift to reevaluate our processes, alleviate ache factors, foster a tradition of studying and innovation, and empower our individuals to do their finest work. One spotlight is that we now have many citizen builders on our finance workforce who’re leveraging low-code know-how to remodel enterprise processes. These initiatives have saved us over 977 hours of guide labor yearly, with over $25 million in financial savings and an enormous enhance in productiveness.
Once we mix individuals, processes, and instruments — that is the place the true magic occurs. Don’t underestimate the significance of tradition, tips on how to construct a workforce and a tradition that enables studying, units the tempo of industry-wide transformations and encourages innovation.
Fashionable Finance is right here to remain
We live by a interval of historic financial, societal, and technological change, however for all of the uncertainty we proceed to see on this planet one factor is evident: Enterprise leaders are turning to finance and progressive know-how to assist them do extra with much less, to navigate the sudden and emerge a lot stronger. Monetary transformation is a journey, not a vacation spot.
