As the pandemic winds down, CFOs can begin to shift out of crisis management mode. So clamping down on spending and looking for new financing methods should now be less important.
In a Zoom interview, Pramod Iyengar, the CFO of global payments platform Veem, said, “Now, it’s about going back and expanding on things that can help the company operate more efficiently.”
In fact, CFOs need to look at how they can expand their duties and take on new and different things. “I would encourage my colleagues to be excited about that and embrace that,” he said.
The CFO role now
Iyengar said that CFOs can best add strategic and financial value to their firms and drive growth by:
- dealing with customers more and becoming more of the “face of the organization”
- being more hands-on with managing investors and stakeholders
- investing in improvements in areas such as IT and procurement
- prioritizing tech for managing cash, cash flow visibility and more accurate forecasting, and
- moving away from manual processes.
Automation and cloud-based analytics will have a lot to do with driving those improvements, he said.
OneStream Software CFO Bill Koefoed agreed that being able to see financial and operational data in close to real-time is top of mind.
In a report for FinancialExecutives.org, he wrote: “2022 is the year that many organizations will drop legacy, on-premise financial applications … in favor of more modern solutions.”