Future-Ready Finance Operations (2024)

• 73% of CFOs say they’re best positioned to drive organizational resilience, but only 7% say that has been their most impactful initiative.
• Future-ready operations are key for CFOs to change how work gets done and boost profitability and efficiency.
• There are three ways for CFOs to accelerate operations maturity and identify new sources of value across the organization.
• To get started: think about the operating model as two parts (core and strategic), create a connected finance experience and tap into ecosystems.

While 73% of Chief Finance Officers (CFOs) say they are best positioned to drive organizational resilience, just 7% say this has been the most impactful initiative they delivered to the business in the last two years. Even with good intentions and investment dollars, improving operations is complex. Yet operations maturity is key for CFOs to fully embrace their evolving role and meet the growing expectations and demands of the business and Board.

Accenture’s global research indicates that operating model maturity is advancing among global organizations. It reveals four levels of operations maturity: stable, efficient, predictive and future-ready—each, grounded in and enabled by progressively more sophisticated technology, talent, processes and data insights. Achieving the highest level of maturity means that organizations have become "future-ready."

However, from the CFO’s perspective, the enterprise has work to do to reach future-readiness. Because they are increasingly expected to protect the financial health of the company and manage the future, CFOs have a role in driving the enterprise's operations maturity.

When asked about their companies’ overall operations maturity today, just

The evolution of the CFO’s role, from transaction processor to strategic partner, has been ongoing for years. Most CFOs (79%) say that the pandemic accelerated its urgency. Now, they can build on this momentum and become strategic partners to the business in a more sustained way.

However, finance leaders say their organization’s biggest challenges to improving operations maturity are strategy (25%), followed by structure (21%). The first step in overcoming these barriers is for CFO’s to think about the finance operating model as two connected parts: "the core" and "the strategic."

By applying digital technologies like automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize core functions, CFOs can leapfrog operations maturity levels and run an efficient and compliant controllership function. This frees finance to double down on strategic operations—providing the data and insights to:

• enable dynamic scenario planning
• increase forecast accuracy
• make more informed business decisions

What truly elevates finance as a strategic partner is the use of real-time data and insights. And CFOs understand this—99% said that it’s important to have real-time processes and operations in place to inform better business decisions. Ultimately, real-time data is a game-changer for how businesses drive growth and competitiveness, even during times of high volatility.

As important as real-time data is, finance organizations struggle with drawing insights from it. Data is often trapped across systems and organized manually in spreadsheets—27% of finance leaders say that inconsistent, inaccurate or inaccessible data is preventing them from realizing their full potential as drivers of strategic change.

With 66% of finance leaders reporting that data is in wide use or at scale in their organization today, a world of possibilities exists for CFOs to go beyond capturing data to capitalizing on it by:

Creating connected finance experiences
Make data the center of the organization by breaking down silos, elevating data quality, modernizing data platforms, and managing and governing data holistically.

Taking digitization to the next level
Expand the use of automation to free up the workforce for value-added activities such as advanced financial modeling that forecasts future risk. Invest in AI and use it for forward-looking, predictive insights such as assessing leading indicators of demand.

Putting cloud technology at the heart of finance
Leverage cloud in even more strategic ways to support transformation at scale and speed to gain benefits beyond lowering infrastructure costs. The cloud, for example, can be used to create a shared data platform that brings business units together as a connected, intelligent enterprise.

CFOs have always understood the importance of operational resilience. In fact, 74% of CFOs say that the finance function will champion a new way of operating across the enterprise.

This expansion of their role creates opportunity for them to take the lead in improving operations. This starts with advancing finance operations towards future-readiness. Progress here can start a ripple effect of change that spreads across the entire enterprise.

If you fast-track the journey, your operations can become a true catalyst for competitive advantage. And, along the way, you can elevate your business decisions to realize tangible, sustainable, transformational value and growth.