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.
Peter Pezaris is New Relic's Chief Design and Strategy Officer, leading user experience vision and design and design system and quality. Prior to New Relic, Pezaris was the Founder & CEO of CodeStream, a service that helps development teams discuss, review, and understand code. Before CodeStream, Pezaris was Founder & CEO of Glip, a team collaboration platform acquired by RingCentral in 2015, and Multiply.com, a social commerce platform acquired by Naspers in 2010. He also founded Commissioner.com, one of the first online fantasy sports platforms, which was acquired by CBS in 1999. A seasoned entrepreneur and tech executive, Pezaris is a recognized expert in the collaboration and social networking space, pioneering several of today's most commonly used features in real-time messaging. Pezaris holds BS degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Camay Pascucci is vice president, wealth management, at OneDigital Retirement + Wealth.
She has spent her career empowering clients to reach their personal financial planning goals, with previous roles at BNY/Mellon, Fidelity Investments, Scudder Investments and Charles Schwab & Co.
Julia Voloshchenko is the PR Manager at Workcore.
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.
