The role of the chief financial officer (CFO) — the finance director — has transformed over the past decade due to the global financial crisis, rise of big data and the impact of social and digital media.

Traditionally, the CFO role entailed supervising, managing and engaging the work of the financial controller, credit manager and insurance manager, and duties such as managing investments, analysing expenses and tracking regulatory trends. All pretty challenging tasks in themselves, but the expectations of the chief executive (CEO) and the boards of directors of the CFOs require that the focus of the role changes.

Organisations are in a state of continuous change, and the CFO needs understanding and experience beyond the basic finance function to identify areas for growth and operational excellence across all business domains.

This requires a range of skills, from the foundation and basics of the finance function to a strategic level, focusing on the outside world.

The 2015 KPMG Global CFO Survey revealed that CEOs expect the CFO role to be more important in the next three years. In the survey, the CEOs highlighted the following four key areas as differentiators:

Big data — 85 per cent said their CFOs’ ability to gather and analyse data is the surest road to growth;

People skills — 97 per cent said attracting and retaining top talent was the path to improve the finance function;

Global reach — 48 per cent listed global experience as the most important attribute of a CFO; and,

Being tech-savvy in the mastery of IT like cloud-enabled ERP systems.

The CEO and Boards now expect CFOs to lead the way in areas such as strategy and guide key business initiatives, which have traditionally been aligned with other c-suite roles (such as chief operating officer and even that of CEO).

To succeed in today’s business environment and to thrive in tomorrow’s, the CFO needs to excel in five areas.

1. Having a strategic outlook and an intimate knowledge of the business which enables focus on growth and optimisation of the value from investments.
2. The CFO is also expected to understand emerging technology and where things are headed; cloud-based solutions, emerging work and collaboration platforms.
3. Driving innovation will also be a key role, which entails developing new creative ideas based on data insights to help drive change towards cutting costs and fuelling innovation.
4. Investing and retaining talent, which means employing diverse talent as well as attracting talent to organically grow the business, and sourcing from diverse backgrounds by working closely with human resource executives.
5. The art of effective communication on complex financial results and business performance to both internal and external stakeholders is extremely crucial.

To enable the CFO to focus on more strategic and value aspects of the role, the more traditional aspects of the role should run as efficiently as possible.

The finance function strategy will, therefore, be geared towards providing the CFO and the business with insights, thereby taking on the role business partnering and decision support, as opposed to traditional book-keeping.

David Mbatha is an associate director with KPMG Advisory Services Ltd