Team Capital talk with Tommy Laupsa Chief Financial Officer of TON Business Performance Consulting in Bahrain on the role of the CFO in managing enterprise risk and creating value in rapidly changing disruptive environments. 

The need to know is paramount. We are in the midst of transforming financial reporting and planning processes to address the growing demands of external and internal stakeholders for better, more varied and meaningful information analysis. Corporate management and regulators alike are asking for deeper insight into company operations and financial and strategic risks and opportunities. Business markets and company operations are more complex and changing rapidly. Risks are more acute and far-reaching.

The ability to successfully manage complexity and uncertainty has become an imperative in the face of mounting regulatory requirements, changing accounting standards, accelerating mergers and acquisitions, and greater economic instability. We must have the controls and processes in place to deal with increasing requirements of complexity without negatively impacting the timeliness of, and confidence in, the numbers.

While the challenges are great, so are the opportunities for finance to become a more valued and strategic business partner to the management team. The demand for greater agility and more rigorous and trusted financial and business insight, analysis and counsel has never been greater. We as Finance Executives together with our finance teams, having identified this opportunity, will play a strategic role in ensuring business success.

Our highly competitive business environment, with increasing complexity, intensifies the pressure for faster and more accurate consolidation, reporting and forecasting. Studies reveal a variety of factors driving this mounting pressure to perform and include:

1. Demand for analysis, reporting and business insight around a wider range of data sources.
2. Greater business and operational complexity within the domestic and global organisation.
3. Increased competition and change in domestic and global markets.
4. Intensified regulatory pressures both domestically and globally.

A more sophisticated analysis is being required from both regulators and management to ensure better corporate governance and more agile decision making. At the same time, a more competitive market is creating a more operationally complex business, making our role as Finance Executives and the finance processes that we manage all the more challenging, opening up great opportunities for the finance leader.

To meet the sophisticated needs and the rising expectations of the business, the inspired Finance Executive will embrace new technology as a key critical success factor. Technology is accelerating in every other aspect of business and consumer life, where you are accustomed to receiving your relevant information imminently on your smartphone. When you then have to address financial reporting and start adding spreadsheets and respond to process that take days to complete you know there is a great opportunity for the transformation of the finance teams.

The rapid advance of technology and the powerful capabilities we have for data analysis and this all available to finance, is running in contradiction to the speed of transformation of our finance services function – we as Finance Executives will now embrace this opportunity and drive the delivery of organizational value through our own transformation success using key digital technology enablers.