Chris Ewen VP Finance UKI, Sage

The role of the chief financial officer has changed in the past decade like never before. Shifting from studying past performance through historical financial data, to being real-time analysts, and then visionaries with predictive tools at their fingertips. We’ ve considered the‘ then’, the‘ now’, and the future. So, what should CFOs concentrate on next?

The modern CFO adds‘ technology mastery’ to their toolkit, broadening their awareness of the trends, challenges, and opportunities that lie behind the figures they have always relied on.

Those who do so are now on par with CEOs as the most powerful leaders in business today. Why? Equipped with technologyenabled insights to ascertain their company’ s financial health, the modern CFO can influence innovation, investments and real change that elevates the business to the next level.

The company’ s beating heart Today’ s CFO isn’ t hard to find. They are highly visible on the company floor, talking to people of all levels, listening, and responding to requests from across the business. They lead from the front.

As the CEOs indispensable confidant, the CFO can often be found by their side, influencing strategic decision making with the company’ s overall financial data front of mind. With digital technologies at their fingertips, the CFOs ability to present accurate, concise, and relevant financial data supports the CEO to make big decisions in a timely manner. Yet, the modern CFO is far from an exclusive figure. They also interact continuously with teams across the organisation, from sales and customer services to marketing and HR, gaining an understanding of how future investments in technology and talent could elevate teams to reach new levels. Interconnected cloud platforms and applications enable the CFO to immerse themselves in any business function to truly understand their financial performance, challenges, and opportunities.

CFOs have found their place at the heart of the company— both literally and metaphorically. This central position is their route to leading better-informed decisions on whole-company strategies and policies.

The focused decision maker The modern CFO is not working alone but instead bringing their human teams together with emerging technology. AI and machine learning are helping their human colleagues, CFOs included, to predict, project, and plan for the future.

The CFO is operating in an environment that can enable fast, efficient, large-scale data processing to produce accurate insights. Not only that, but these technologies get to know the business as they go, becoming more refined and delivering better insights over time as the AI learns.

Critically, CFOs are bastions of long-term strategy and vision. You won’ t find them sweating the small stuff. Reading every line in the ledger is out because AI technologies have the power