These figures are overall aligned with global trends, respectively 80% and 80%.
Besides this strategic role, Romanian CFOs will remain the main stakeholder to drive cost efficiency in the organization with 88% of them declaring they will need to advise business leaders on this topic, 81% by providing data-driven decision support and 73% by setting targets and measuring the outcome of enterprise-wide business transformation. On the contrary of their peers globally, only 54% (vs 74% globally) of CFOs see cost benefits of adopting new technologies.
In the Finance of the Future, CFOs purpose will be to add value to the business by serving with a strong focus on trends and scenarios, acting as one agile service, providing insights and analytics in almost real-time at significant lower cost. To realize this shift, Finance leaders will have to leverage upgrading the Finance operating model and optimizing organizational structures, adopting new technologies, enterprise Performance Management and predictive analytics, real-time information, and reporting.
As per the EY Romania CFO Imperative study, the current role of Romanian CFOs today is more oriented towards protecting value and optimizing value (38%) and less on growing value (24%), while the future ideal state shifts the focus of the Finance leaders towards the growing value activities (40%) and less on protecting the value (22%), keeping a significant interest for optimizing the value (38%).
The survey was conducted at the end of 2021, after more than one year of experience in working in COVID-19 pandemic conditions and provides a deeper understanding of the unique experience CFOs have faced.
“Despite a very compliance-rooted culture in Finance functions, Romanian CFOs surveyed express their wish to catch up with their western countries peers on creating value for their business. This is visible from Strategy design and roll-out to technologies like Analytics and Intelligent Solutions to increased focus on forward-looking data-driven metrics shared with stakeholder communities. They also envisage participation to the climate change challenge through European CSRD (Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure) implementation”, said Guillaume Macczak, Associate Partner CFO & GBS Advisory Services at EY Romania.
The onset of COVID-19 two years ago brought a new normal and a new way of doing business for all organizations and functions within, bringing challenges and opportunities for Romanian Finance leaders.
In 2022, the primary goal of the respondents remains costs optimization (42%), followed by restarting some of their deferred investment projects (13%), while still benefiting from usage of Governmental measures (19%). Yet, 16% of the respondents are not considering any special additional measures related to COVID-19.
On an opportunistic approach, COVID-19 crisis accelerated organizations need for a new kind of growth. 69% of the respondents said their companies have identified a range of COVID-19 related improvements for their business.
This crisis provided an unparalleled catalyst also for Romanian Finance leaders to take on the digitization of the function. Digital adoption and cost savings from working from home have taken a quantum leap towards Future of Finance, for most organization respondents (55%).
Despite engaging in cost optimization initiatives, 84% of Romanian CFOs declared they will not or probably not reduce the number of employees in Finance functions. In the meantime, 80% of them declared they won’t create new positions either. Nevertheless, there are some new post-pandemic positions in Finance function that are likely to increase in popularity: Chief Digital Officer, Crisis Manager, Data Analytics Officer and Risk Manager, as mentioned by some of the respondents.
Building the necessary infrastructure to support a digitized world and stay current in the latest technology was essential for 62% of the respondent CFOs. The benefits from these heavy investments in IT technologies will have a long-lasting impact on the new way of doing business if companies want to remain competitive in a post-COVID-19 world.
There have been significant variations in how CFOs were able to respond to the unexpected challenges on productivity of their teams in a fully work-from-home environment, some of them being relatively stress-free (38%), some being particularly hard hit (32%) or not having a clear outcome (30%).
Main areas where technologies related to Intelligent automation are used in Romanian Finance functions are transaction processing (43%), consolidation and reporting (31%) and data hosting and data management (29%).