As the leaders of today’s finance functions continue to work hard to boost their relevance and value added to the business, they are shifting their focus outward to those financial management activities that contribute the most to better business decisions that improve the bottom line. their biggest challenges lie in creating the efficiencies needed to gather and process basic financial data and continue to deliver traditional finance outputs while at the same time redeploying their limited resources to enable higher-value business decision support activities.
For the member firms of KPMG international, a top priority is helping our clients optimize the operation of their finance functions and position their finance teams for lasting success. Since 2006, we have conducted biannual surveys of senior finance executives around the globe. our purpose is to examine how finance functions are evolving over time and identify their key challenges going forward. our research aims to capture and distill the leading practices and priorities of the finance teams of the world’s best performing companies. By distinguishing the key attributes of high-performing companies that consistently outperform their peers, we can pinpoint those features of their financial management strategies and priorities that put them ahead of the pack.
0ur 2013 survey has enabled us to find out the current state and future aspirations of finance functions and how things have changed since our previous global CFo research conducted in 2011 and the years before. in particular, we polled senior finance executives at over 440 organizations worldwide to capture their views on the following key questions:
- What are the strengths, weaknesses and critical capabilities across your core finance process areas and activities?
- How is your finance function’s role evolving in the development and execution of new business strategies in the aftermath of the global financial crisis?
- What changes to finance operating models, controls and systems are you expecting in the next two years? What are the drivers for these changes, which of these changes will present the biggest challenges, and how can finance organizations overcome them?
- To what extent is your company willing to invest in further improving the efficiency and effectiveness of its finance operations, and in broader finance function transformation?
- To what extent has your finance function been successful in shifting its focus away from basic transaction processing and financial reporting and control activities, toward more strategic and forward-looking business performance, decision support and risk management activities?
To deepen our understanding of how senior finance executives answered these questions, we drew on the collective knowledge and experience of several KPMG Financial Management advisory leaders and subject matter experts globally, across all major industry sectors and finance disciplines. through this multidisciplinary lens, this publication presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of the finance function, going beyond the obvious to describe how organizations can drive tangible improvements in their quest to derive more efficiency, effectiveness and value from their finance functions.