Risk & Economy » Growing responsibilities of CFOs are leaving companies at risk- report

Growing responsibilities of CFOs are leaving companies at risk- report

Extra burden leaves less time for finance leaders to be looking for and addressing risk within their organisations, according to findings of a survey for Coupa Software.

Although the role of the CFO is shifting dramatically towards strategic decision making and combating business risks, finance leaders remain bogged down by backward-looking tasks that threaten their ability to fulfill these evolving responsibilities, according to a survey of 500 finance leaders,

According to the findings of the survey conducted for Coupa Software, in partnership with WSJ Custom Content and Dow Jones Intelligence, 60% of CFOs and other senior finance leaders said that their role has expanded to have more extensive participation in strategic business decisions.

In addition, 70% said they are stymied by functional, backward-looking tasks, such as developing budgets and managing financial reporting, even though they’re expected to define the strategic relevance of a company, drive direction and success, and adapt to ever-changing currents. This leaves less time for these executives to be looking for and addressing risk within their organization, said the report called The Strategic CFO: Thriving With Risk.

The report takes an in-depth look at the evolving role of the CFO, the challenges he/she faces, and the factors that make leaders not only survive, but thrive with risk, said Coupa Software.  “In addition to 500 quantitative insights from CFOs worldwide, five qualitative interviews were completed with finance executives from five major global organizations. The report also offers a new risk framework from Coupa that CFOs can use to score their organizations across a set of twelve risk factors,” the group said.

“As the purview of the CFO expands, respondents cite fraud risk (53%), business environment risk (46%), and operational risk (44%) as their top concerns and priorities for improvement. Yet the relative importance that respondents attach to these top categories does not appear to reflect their current state of organizational readiness,” said the report. “The research shows that about half of finance executives report that they spend the right amount of time managing any given area of risk, and only 4% say they spend the right amount of time managing every area of risk,” it added.

“Today’s CFO must be able to focus on combating strategic and operational risks to add the most value to their organization and their shareholders,” said Todd Ford, chief financial officer at Coupa. “This report highlights the gap between where CFOs know they need to be, as true strategic business partners, and where collectively our field is today. Getting there requires the right combination of technology, people, and process that gives CFOs the visibility and control they need to make smart decisions from spend to strategy,” he added.

The survey also found most senior finance executives describe their role as having expanded substantially in the last two years to oversee more diverse types of business and operations risk management (59%) and make more intensive use of data analytics (57%) However, senior executives also say they spend most of their time managing financial reporting, audit, and compliance (37%), compared to other listed priorities like managing business risk (29%)

A majority of executives believe that fraud risk (51%) will increase most in severity in the near future, followed by business environment risk, and operational risk (tied with 41%), according to the report. “Large enterprises are under threat from more directions than any other type of organization. Nine-out-of-ten executives say they are “concerned” or “very concerned” about each area of risk in terms of the threat each poses to the success of the organization, from business environment risk (89%) to supplier risk (89%),” it said.

Half of respondents to the survey sad they strongly agree that they have the right strategy in place to manage risk overall (50%), and even more express the same level of confidence in their peoples’ skills to tackle risk (54%). “But that confidence often does not extend to their technology: only 38% strongly agree that they have appropriate technology in place to manage risk,” it added.

Of the 500 senior finance executives conducted in April and May 2019,  CFOs and heads of finance represented 54%, chief risk officers (CROs) and risk directors made up a tenth, and direct reports to each formed the remainder. Sixty percent of respondents were in the US, a quarter in Europe, and 15% in the rest of the world. Forty percent worked in organisations with annual incomes between $250m to $1bn, 28% with $1bn to $5bn, and 32% exceeding $5bn.

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