By Clint Kordsmeier, VP of Sales

Krishnan Raghunathan, head of finance and accounting services at WNS, has identified 4 things that he feels CFOs must prioritize in 2023 in order to ensure their organizations thrive in the midst of today’s formidable business challenges.  Certainly, the most significant being inflation.

As part of his CFO.com article, Krishnan leverages insights from a recent global survey of CFOs conducted by Everest Group and supported by WNS to support his recommendations.

1. Improving Cash Flow

CFOs must transform their finance operations into an insights-led digital enterprise that delivers significant value to the business. Krishnan goes on to say that this is dependent on their ability to balance tech-led and process-led transformation.

Many of the areas that CFOs are turning to include predictive, real-time analytics to support these efforts.  Integrated O2C solutions like Webcollect not only provide deep insight and predictability, but also the ability to enact governance and process changes by leveraging automation and prioritization.

2. Strengthening Risk & Compliance Management

According to the survey, “controllership and compliance initiatives to mitigate risks (regulatory or otherwise) were the second largest area of focus (after cash flow) for most organizations.”

Two areas that solutions like Webcollect can help address include Credit Risk, the aggregation of internal and external data sources to determine if and to what extent you should be doing business with a customer or prospect, and Collections Risk, the ability and likelihood of a buyer paying in alignment with the agreed upon payment terms.

3. Adopting a Hybrid Working Environment

While the pandemic has fueled it’s necessity, new labor trends and marketplace competitiveness, are what will continue to make this the “new norm” (sorry for the cliché).  Cost reduction, productivity gains, and happier employees are more than achievable where CFOs are dedicated to ensuring teams have access to critical information, collaboration tools, and the right set of management tools to drive efficiency & effectiveness.

4. Transforming Financial Planning & Analysis

Krishnan acknowledges that transforming FP&A has been on CFOs’ radar for the last couple of years. However, their findings show that it has now become an area with the highest active investments. He goes on to say that CFOs must integrate new technologies like AI and machine learning into their existing systems as well as ensuring that “change management becomes a culture rather than a one-off exercise”.

In Conclusion

Krishnan acknRaghunathan concludes that the next few years will see these current economic challenges take hold, while the increasingly unpredictable business landscape might trigger new ones. However, he believe, as do I, that those CFOs that take action now and leverage rapidly evolving technologies to ensure that their processes and systems are robust, resilient, and agile will enable their organizations to thrive and gain a decisive competitive edge.