Financial Excellence With Game Changers, Presented By Sap

The Buzz 1: Most of the countries negotiating a global overhaul of cross-border taxation of multinationals have backed plans for new rules on where companies are taxed and a tax rate of at least 15%… A global minimum corporate income tax of at least 15% could yield around $150 billion in additional global tax revenues annually. 130 countries, representing more than 90% of global GDP, had backed the agreement at the talks. New rules on where the biggest multinationals are taxed would shift taxing rights on more than $100 billion of profits to countries where the profits are earned. [reuters.com – 2021-07-01] The Buzz 2: As of 4 November 2021, over 135 countries and jurisdictions joined a new two-pillar plan to reform international taxation rules and ensure that multinational enterprises pay a fair share of tax wherever they operate. [oecd.org] Look up! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s global minimum tax. Will your company be hit and if yes, how hard? Global minimum tax rules, aka “Pillar Two Model Rule

The Buzz 1: “Purposeful storytelling isn’t show business, it’s good business.” [Peter Guber, CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, co-owner of NBA’s Golden State Warriors and MLB’s LA Dodgers] The Buzz 2: “Good stories surprise us. They make us think and feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that a PowerPoint crammed with bar graphs never can.” [Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow, co-authors, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void, and Make People Love You] The Buzz 3: “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world.” [Robert McKee, Story Mentor] These wise words about storytelling impact today’s Finance planning and analysis function, as the CFO’s team sees the value of weaving a narrative around actual events, explaining variances, and providing guidance. As the role of Finance evolves to a strategic business partner, the team needs to equip itself with the right tools to be a great storyteller. Beyond old-scho

The soccer great Pelé [the all-time leading goal scorer for Brazil with 77 goals in 92 games] famously and wisely observed, “No individual can win a game by himself.” Pelé’s words stand true beyond the soccer pitch. In the business world, they resonate even louder for the Finance function. To bring the entire organization together in Planning and Analysis as well as strategy, Finance needs to adopt a “business partnership” mantra. While it’s generally accepted that all lines of business in an organization will “plan”, bringing these plans together collaboratively requires financial and operational skills, technical savvy and most importantly, leadership. As a leader and a business partner, Finance can become instrumental in enhancing the Planning and Analysis function to become an xP&A group – Extended Planning and Analysis – for organizational success, especially in our financially dynamic and turbulent times. We’ll ask Anders Larsen Liu-Lindberg at The Business Partnering Institute, Pras Ch

The Buzz 1: “Sustainability is no longer a nice-to-have extra. It’s a critical piece of the puzzle for companies looking to stay ahead of the competition and protect their bottom lines.[smart.arqlite.com] The Buzz 2: “For companies focused on ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) efforts, metrics matter…Each industry and organization will have different metrics that are material to their business.” [gobyinc.com] The Buzz 3: “Some companies report only their greenhouse gas emissions…others publish glossy reports about their CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiatives or use their ESG ratings as a badge of honor.” [hbr.org] Yes, sustainability strategy and reporting are hot topics and management priorities for organizations’ internal and external stakeholders. Why? They can tangibly impact the ability to access finance, attract talent and grow market share. The big picture: Worldwide compliance requirements are driving sustainability initiatives, but the metrics to manage and report against can va

Ah, taxes! A bit of “humor” on a definitely serious topic for every enterprise: * Benjamin Franklin: “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” * Bonnie Raitt: “Solar power is the last energy resource that isn't owned yet – nobody taxes the sun yet.” * Arthur C. Clarke: “The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.” Ok, time to get serious. The EY 2020 Tax and Finance Operate survey reported that 51% of all respondents expected an increase to their organization’s tax risk profile from complying with emerging digital tax filing requirements, while a whopping 84% expected it to increase the workload of the tax and finance function. EY’s 2022 Tax and Finance Operations Survey found 84% of respondents are actively transforming to tackle challenges. Talent, legislative and regulatory changes, and future-proofing technology are key concerns for Tax and Finance functions. And the COVID-19 pandemic worsened some challenges, acceleratin

The Buzz 1: “As specialized tools and technology have emerged, the role of CFO has evolved. CFOs of companies large and small need to embrace flexibility, develop global strategies, and shift their focus to look forward rather than back.” (www.teampay.co/insights/cfo-quotes/) The Buzz 2: “When you are a successful company, you have to fight really hard to make sure you avoid complacency, arrogance, bureaucracy.” (Marianne Lake, CFO of JPMorgan Chase) The Buzz 3: “The CFO needs to be supported by a strategic FP&A team that is excellent at all levels… a team that is prepared for where the company is going—not where it’s been.” (Jim Johnson, Former CFO of Adaptive Insights) Amid globally turbulent times, today’s Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) function is striving to spend less of its time “Planning” and more time delivering value-added “Analysis” to its business constituents. How? Finance and its IT support teams need to focus on the future, utilizing the available modern tools – Artific

The Buzz 1: “Tasked with guiding the growth of companies, building digital organizations, and transforming the finance function, CFOs must first identify their objectives and then decide whether they will lead with people, process, or performance.” (HBR Executive Brief: The CFO Agenda: Transforming the Finance Function) The Buzz 2: “CFOs say that their time on transformations would be best spent on role-modeling new mindsets and behaviors, setting high-level goals, and communicating the transformation’s results—when, in practice, they are most often charged with traditional finance-oriented responsibilities.” (McKinsey: Mastering change: The new CFO mandate) The Buzz 3: “Behavioral competencies are key to the business partnership role—a ‘seat at the table’ must be earned. A CFO needs to be a visible leader in the business, an excellent communicator, and an influencer.” (Paul Ainsworth – www.toptal.com/) Modern Planning & Analysis transformation offers many benefits to the organizations that embrace it

The Buzz 1: In his 2007 book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, author and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. He calls this the Black Swan theory. The Buzz 2: “If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.” The Buzz 3: “We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences…generally are more meaningful.” Gone are the days when, as a whole, Planning & Analysis for the office of the CFO and the enterprise could be ‘just OK.’ With black swan events becoming the norm, requiring guidance and scenario modeling, FP&A can no longer wait on gathering data from convoluted spreadsheets and uncollaborative business units. Yes, the pressure is on the CFO to deliver highly credible plans

The Buzz 1: CFOs often perceive cybersecurity to be the responsibility of IT, but as more finance processes run remotely, CFOs need to develop security measures specifically for the finance function and not rely solely on the organization’s blanket security protocols to safeguard financial data. (www.gartner.com) The Buzz 2: Finance leaders in the midst of leading or co-leading a broader transformation initiative (42% of CFOs, per Deloitte’s CFO Signals™ survey for Q2-2021), may want to make modernizing their security model part of that effort. (deloitte.wsj.com) The Buzz 3: CFOs and their teams are the gatekeepers for the critical data required to generate forecasts and support senior leaders’ strategic plans and decisions…At the top of the four areas of technology that show the most promise for use in finance: automation and robotics to improve processes in finance.” (www.mckinsey.com) Yes, organizations must find ways to thrive in today’s disruptive business environment, with its shifting geo-politic

The Buzz 1: We’ve all heard these 'old saws' and know they're true: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” “Plan your work and work your plan.” The Buzz 2: “We don’t hand aircraft pilots 50 pages of Excel reports after they’ve landed the plane, telling them they went to the wrong airport or they ran out of fuel. They have real-time insight into the external environment and the aircraft operations.…It’s essential for FP&A and performance management to be viewed holistically like that…We should be helping to successfully land the aircraft.” (Jack Alexander, author: Financial Planning and Analysis and Business Performance Management) The Buzz 3: “Gartner coined the term 'xP&A' in 2020, but…Expanding FP&A beyond finance has been a best practice for several years – referred to by many names: connected planning, collaborative enterprise planning, integrated business planning, and company-wide planning….” (https://insights.sap.com/what-is-xpa) Bette

The Buzz: “Data is now more valuable than oil” a popular business sentiment. * In 2006, British mathematician and Tesco marketing mastermind Clive Humby shouted from the rooftops, “Data is the new oil.” * Now “Data Isn't The New Oil — Time Is”. (Michael Kershner, founder of ILC) * Oil has reigned for centuries as one of society’s most valuable resources…But in today’s 'data economy,' it can be argued that data, due to the insight and knowledge that can be extracted from it, is potentially more valuable. (Therese Fauerbach, CEO, The Northridge Group) While this metaphor can be further debated, the power and abundance of data in its various forms hold a special place within the enterprise and especially within the Office of Finance. But how the Financial Planning and Analysis [FP&A] function leverages operational and financial data in their day-to-day activities often remains a mystery. With systems that connect data in a meaningful manner, what can Finance to do change processes and make impactfu

The Buzz: Michael E. Porter at Harvard Business School introduced the concept of a value chain in his book, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance [2008]. Competitive advantage cannot be understood by looking at a firm as a whole. It stems from the many discrete activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, delivering, and supporting its product.” He adds that it's important to maximize value at each specific point in a firm's processes. Finance organizations have increasingly evolved from backward-looking reporting to analyzing information in real-time, both from a financial accounting standpoint as well as management accounting. Taking this a step further, finance is actively engaging in advising other parts of the business based on predictive modeling. Logistical processes – ranging from procurement, supply chain, sales and customer experience, to even human resources – are all reflected in finance, providing a holistic view of an organization. Finance t

The Buzz: The CFO role has expanded beyond financial duties to encompass strategic responsibilities across the company. After closing the books 12 months ago on the extraordinary year that was 2020, which threw unprecedented challenges across mostly unprepared industries and businesses worldwide, we began 2021 with high hopes for the start of a recovery, with the office of Finance having a central role. Reality check: This optimism was tempered, with CFOs facing some of their toughest tests this year. Today, with just 17 days before the dawning of 2022, we look in our rearview mirror at how 2021 has highlighted areas of concern in the agility and responsiveness of Finance systems. For many organizations, investments in systems that offered greater flexibility, agility and the resilience to cope with future challenges became paramount. Along with this, the pressing need to combat cyberattack threats and address information privacy concerns led to an increasing focus on risk management and the prevention and

The Buzz 1: “Change management is a critical skill in today’s c-suite… Change management is a challenge for every organization.” (Dave Sutton, toprightpartners.com) The Buzz 2: “Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.” (Philip Crosby, 1926–2001, aka “The Fun Uncle of the Quality Revolution”, author: Quality Without Tears and Quality is Free) The Buzz 3: “Change before you have to.” (Jack Welch, former GE CEO, named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine) The Buzz 4: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed!” (Peter Senge, organizational learning expert, author: The Fifth Discipline) As finance and risk teams embrace technology more quickly than they did in the past, change management has never been more crucial to facilitate efficient adoption and effective implementation. With more organizations moving towards modern technologies for Finance – including automation and artificial intelligence (AI) – there is often resistance to change as well as fear of being “replaced” by

The Buzz 1: The early development of accounting was closely related to developments in writing, counting, and money.…Accounting records dating back more than 7,000 years have been found in Mesopotamia, and documents from ancient Mesopotamia show lists of expenditures, and goods received and traded…all emerged in the context of controlling goods, stocks and transactions in the temple economy of Mesopotamia.” (en.wikipedia.org) The Buzz 2: “When I talk to other CFOs about process improvement, they often tell me that their top priority is closing the books faster…Poor-quality data can’t be trusted, and it takes a lot of labor to scrub bad data.” (Perry D. Wiggins, CPA) The Buzz 3: Of the 2,300 organizations that answered APQC’s General Accounting Open Standards Benchmarking survey, the bottom 25% said they need 10 or more calendar days to perform the monthly close process. … the top 25% can wrap up a monthly close in just 4.8 days or less—about half the time of the bottom 25%. … at the median are the organiz

The Buzz: “FP&A [financial planning and analysis] used to hold all the cards; they had all the data at their fingertips. Nowadays, valuable data resides across the business. It’s a battle to find out who has the best data, much less what this data is. Otherwise, a vacuum will develop that smart executives will fill up with their own data. The CFO has to be on top of information flow at all times.” (Mark Partin, CFO of BlackLine) The recent FP&A Trends 2021 Survey highlights that many FP&A practitioners struggle to create time to work on value added activities. From the most senior to the novice FP&A practitioners, there is still (too) much time spent on non-value-added tasks such as gathering data, excess time providing meaningful insights and having trust in the data. How does FP&A overcome these challenges? Tune in to hear FP&A experts' insights on how easily the available, yet disruptive technologies – such as AI/ML, Integration tools and an xP&A (extended planning and an

The Buzz 1: “The subscription economy is not new. In fact, the membership-based business model has been around since the 17th century…Recently, the membership-based business model has been gaining a foothold…Experts believe that the membership-based business model is the revenue model of the future.” (boldbusiness.com) The Buzz 2: “Building long-term relationships with customers is the route to value in the Subscription Economy®. Yet the Quote-to-Cash (QTC) process at most B2B companies—even those with subscription businesses—is optimized for linear transactions, not relationships. This results in complexity and cost to the provider and a poor experience for the subscriber.” (subscribed.com) The ‘new normal’ has challenged businesses worldwide during the COVID pandemic. Instead of focusing on revenue growth, most companies were just trying to find new ways to serve their customers and survive, including pivoting their business model to offer product-related services and subscriptions. Some have developed p

The Buzz 1: “AI will optimize or transform ‘nearly every activity in finance.’” (Craig Wilton, Gartner, quoted at www.cfodive.com/news/artificial-intelligence-gartner-finance-trends-2020/573233/) The Buzz 2: “Tech is in everything… 2021’s CFOs need to be more tech-savvy than ever. Indeed, with so much big data, A.I., and robotics technology available for CFOs to utilize, learning and incorporating tech into the traditional finance role is key.” (fortune.com/2021/06/21/cfo-technology-big-data-ai-robotics/) As we begin to come out of the pandemic, the ways of doing business have inevitably changed. Companies have discovered ways to be more flexible, respond faster to changing economic conditions, better serve customers, redefine supplier relationships, and create more efficient internal processes. CFOs at mid-market companies in particular are more invested in going beyond the status quo. By embracing automation and artificial intelligence (AI), they are optimizing their own processes to then provide valued

The Buzz: “I’m not paid or evaluated on the accuracy of my crystal-ball predictions. I’m paid to enumerate every possible outcome and do something about every possible outcome well in advance, when it’s still possible to do something, because once it’s happened it’s too late.” (Marty Chavez, Former CFO, Goldman Sachs) Is your organization struggling with finance transformation and future steering? How differently should you approach long-term thinking and planning, to be better prepared for future events and disruptions? It’s time for answers! A comprehensive enterprise-wide planning strategy goes beyond visualization and reporting. It entails enabling extended planning and analysis across the various lines of business, leveraging real-time insights and predictive capabilities for effective decision-making to bring everyone together. Innovating and empowering your business users through modern cloud-based solutions and models accompanied by AI-driven insights will help your organization stay agile and gain

The Buzz 1: “Indirect attacks against weak links in the supply chain now account for 40 percent of security breaches.” (Accenture Security / Third State of Cyber Resilience Report, www.ironnet.com) The Buzz 2: Cybersecurity in the supply chain cannot be viewed as an IT problem only. Cyber supply chain risks touch sourcing, vendor management, supply chain continuity and quality, transportation security and many other functions across the enterprise and require a coordinated effort to address.” (csrc.nist.gov) In a renewed focus on supply chain risk management and protection, and to vet their suppliers’ cybersecurity maturity, the US Department of Defense and federal government have established the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). Direct suppliers and others will be required to reach a prescribed level of maturity and be certified by a third party just to qualify to do business with state and federal agencies. Industry observers expect these requirements will be adopted in the commercial