Recent economic conditions have highlighted the importance of the CFO’s role in managing new challenges and opportunities. Industry and sector pressures are increasing and the CFO is taking a more prominent role in decision making. To support this increasing role, Finance will have to improve its effectiveness and efficiency in executing its core functions. It must also provide deeper insight into internal and external issues in order to improve decision making. Finance is becoming a “Value Integrator” by combining the improvements in efficiency with business insight. Finance must deal with many challenges in order to support this role:

• Developing staff in the Finance organization
• Executing continuous Finance process improvement and driving enterprise cost reduction
• Strengthening compliance programs and internal controls
• Measuring / monitoring business performance and providing inputs into enterprise strategy (e.g., growth)
• Supporting / managing / mitigating enterprise risk
• Driving integration of information across the enterprise
• Supporting / measuring environment and socioeconomic responsibility initiatives.

• Improved efficiency in financial operations that can help the enterprise outperform its peers
• Streamlining core finance functions can directly reduce costs
• The improvements in financial effectiveness can raise the quality of analytics and help the firm to react faster to changes and threats
• Raising data integrity will improve the validity of analytics and decisions
• The combination of timely and reliable data with advanced analytical models can improve decision making
• Improved insight will help the enterprise anticipate and plan for external forces
• Greater insight can be key factor in improving the financial success of the enterprise