CFOs and senior finance executives are dealing with a growing number of responsibilities and demands as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report.
The report, from consulting firm Protiviti, found that the pandemic has been a wake-up call to finance departments that weren’t already investing, or weren’t investing enough, in cloud-based systems as they have struggled to shift to the remote work environment. Eighty percent of the 1,057 finance leaders surveyed ranked security and privacy of data as a top priority, while 78 percent cited enhanced data analytics, and 72 percent cited cloud-based applications.
Maxfield Marquardt is senior counsel and director of regulatory affairs at Trusaic.
Nikolai J. Sklaroff has spent more than 28 years in the public finance industry, as a generalist with special expertise in credit engineering difficult and unusual financings. During his public finance career, he has served as an investment banker for 17 years as well as a senior rating analyst and a financial advisor. He joined Wells Fargo Securities as the senior general infrastructure investment banker in San Francisco in 2011. He has also worked as a senior investment banker with Citigroup Global Markets (originally Smith Barney) and J. P. Morgan Securities. Prior to becoming an investment banker in 1997, Nikolai was a senior Moody's Investors Service rating agency analyst and member of Moody's rating committee for eight years. Nikolai began his career as a financial advisor with Public Financial Management, Inc. in his hometown Philadelphia. A frequent speaker at industry conferences he has also served on multiple boards and advisory committees.
Matt Posner is founder and principal of CSG. Mr. Posner has more than a decade of experience in public finance and policy. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance on infrastructure finance problems facing the country and spent years educating staff in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission on public policy and market implications. Mr. Posner has been quoted on his views and published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg News, The Bond Buyer, the Municipal Finance Journal and the Government Finance Officers Association’s Government Finance Review, among others. Court Street Group LLC is a research and consulting firm based in Brooklyn, New York. At CSG, we build bridges among Washington, Wall Street and the Fintech worlds with strong market research and extensive, independent policy experience. CSG also has ties to Latin America and helps clients navigate there.
Of those respondents who are CFOs and vice presidents of finance, 72 percent ranked cloud-based applications as a top priority to address over the next 12 months. Seventeen percent ranked cloud-based applications as the most important finance priority for their organizations to address, signifying a big jump from the 8 percent of respondents who indicated so in a similar survey by Protiviti last year.
“Having the right technology infrastructure and cloud capabilities is now considered a baseline in order to operate effectively and efficiently and will continue to be as organizations move into a hybrid work environment,” said Chris Wright, managing director and global leader of Protiviti’s Business Performance Improvement practice, in a statement. “COVID-19 disruptions underscored the critical nature of a truly digital finance workforce and companies without advanced technologies and digital processes faced a difficult transition to remote work. We’re now seeing an increasing number of boards and CEOs tap their finance leaders for guidance about whether their organization is allocating enough resources to their technology infrastructure.”
Labor models are changing, in part as a result of the pandemic, with 18 percent of the finance leaders surveyed saying their organizations are relying on managed services providers, while 29 percent are augmenting their staff to handle financial planning and analysis with greater speed and agility.
