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.
Andy Kunzweiler, CFA, is the direct indexing portfolio manager at Morningstar Wealth.
Previously, he was a senior portfolio manager at Northern Trust, where he managed direct indexing portfolios for a diverse clientele ranging from foundations and endowments to corporations and nuclear decommissioning trusts, to family offices and ultrahigh net worth individuals. He began his career in the analyst program at UBS Investment Bank and graduated from Boston College. He is a CFA charterholder and a member of the CFA Institute and CFA Society of Chicago.
Corinne Carr is a seasoned insurance regulatory and transactional attorney with 30 years of experience, including 15 years as a partner in BigLaw. In private practice, she regularly represented clients whose primary industry is not insurance such as logistics, shipping, marketplace, ecommerce, insurtechs, retail and manufacturing clients. Carr designed and implemented shipping insurance, embedded insurance, product warranty, service contract, and other insurtech programs for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500s. She is widely recognized as the "go to" resource for designing innovative, but compliant, structures to boost revenue during the purchase and post-purchase customer experience. Corinne joined Route as its chief compliance officer in June 2022.
Mona Shah, JD, MPH, is the senior director of policy and strategy at Community Catalyst, a national organization dedicated to building the power of people to create a health system rooted in race equity and health justice, and a society where health is a right for all.
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.
