Most Singapore respondents to a survey believe that Chief Financial Officers should expand their roles beyond the finance function.
About 86 percent of Singapore respondents surveyed believe that chief financial officers (CFO) should expand their roles in areas such as digitalization where 71 percent of finance professionals are involved in decision-making in their organizations. However, they remain left out of other key areas – particularly human capital management (49%) and cyber-security (32%), according to a survey conducted by enterprise cloud applications provider Workday.
«We see modern finance professionals facing a dual burden of being expected to expand their role but often without the data and technology to do so. As a result, it is unsurprising that most large enterprises are shifting their financial systems to the cloud, to both enhance security and increase real-time data analytics capabilities,» said Rob Wells, President, Asia, Workday in a press statement.
Data Challenges Emerging
A lack of data and insights is a core challenge for finance professionals, with 49.5 percent saying that a lack of up-to-date market knowledge and solutions was a significant barrier to providing more strategic advice; followed by a lack of industry benchmarking for comparisons (48.5 percent) and lack of time and resources (46.5 percent).
Most finance professionals in Singapore also lack a single source of truth for data, with the majority (55.4 percent) saying they use at least two or more systems to collate their data. 18.8% say they use more than six sources for data collation, which is the highest regionally.
Technology-Driven Transformation
To promote the expansion of CFO roles, existing systems and technology will need to be improved. However, less than half of the respondents are very satisfied with the current tools that are being used to perform functions, including core accounting (40.1 percent), real-time reporting (38.9 percent), budgeting and forecasting (40.4 percent), treasury management (43.3 percent), internal control deployment (42.7 percent), external audit (41.5 percent).
Only 37 percent of senior professionals in Singapore said that their current tools for providing real-time reporting and analytics were very satisfactory. Almost one-third (31.7%) claim that their teams are not equipped to carry out real-time reporting and analytics.
«As technological transformation and disruption accelerate, CFOs and finance professionals must equip themselves to be agile. Cloud technologies have enabled companies to condense the timeline on the integration and adoption of new technologies. These professionals and their organizations can use the cloud to gain extensive competitive advantages and much more nimble than competitors who must devote resources to managing infrastructure,» said Lee Thong Tan, Regional Financial Lead, ASEAN & North Asia, Workday.
Survey Respondents Across Asia
A total of 337 interviews were conducted either online or face-to-face in February and March 2019 in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong for the survey: Finance Disrupted: The Changing Role of the CFO in Large Enterprises.
Only Vice-Presidents in Audit and/or Compliance, C-Suite Executives in Accounting, and Directors in Financial Planning & Analysis and/or Finance were selected for this survey. All respondents were from companies that comprise of 1,500 or more employees.
