Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance. The CFO role is changing rapidly, moving from cost controller to strategic visionary. And with every change comes opportunity. We are here to help you take advantage of this transition. to win at work, drive your career forwards, and lead with confidence.
Join Hannah Munro, Managing Director of ITAS, a financial transformation consultancy, as she interviews key experts to give you real-world advice and guidance on how to transform your processes, people, and data. Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance.
Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the CFO 4.0 podcast. My name is Hannah Munro, your host for today and with me today is Mark Green. So Mark Green has been connecting people in technology for over 20 years.
He is now continuing that journey as a technology evangelist at Sage, a job that engages many important small and medium businesses across the country.
He's seen the struggles and the successes of technology adoption firsthand so he's here to help us discuss those implications and talk about the role that technology is going to play in the finance team of the future so welcome mark lovely to have you on the show
wonderful to be on the podcast hannah what a success your cfo 4.0 podcast series is i've had great fun what uh listening into the others and now we get to watch into them as well so for those of you listening on spotify Well, I mean, you're probably getting a better experience because you don't have to see me. Or
me, to be very fair. So it's brilliant to have you on the show, Mark. And we've been talking about technology and about the finance, the team in itself for quite a while now. But tell us a little bit about what a technology evangelist actually does.
So. Like I said, I've been connecting people and technology for a long, long time. But technology evangelists do many, many things. What I love doing is helping craft technical narrative about our products and technologies, but in a way that connects with various different audiences for various different reasons.
And at Sage, I work as part of the solutions function, connecting with customers, but also internally as well.
So basically helping to spread the news about the technology that's coming out and helping people figure out what technology can help them with as well.
Very much so. Sometimes you can take the technology that a company makes and then go out into the world and see how it applies. But I look at it in a slightly different way.
still meeting in the middle but seeing what's needed in the world and being that credible voice of authenticity out in the industry and bringing that into the same place in the center here at sage and it's and it's fascinating because i get to have discussions with you about all these sorts of things as well uh the cfo 4.0 journey is one that people don't really
think is starting yet. CFO 3.0, of course, very much de rigueur for all of the conversation about forward thinking people. But to see 4.0, a really future thinking concept, really makes us plan properly for the future that comes so fast. I think it should be a good session today.
yeah and that's that's the interesting piece isn't it and the one thing that's really accelerated change at the moment um for a lot of people is of course uh the fact that covert's hit that volatility that it's bringing to you know to all businesses doesn't matter what industry you're in so what do you think are the current challenges in the world of finance and
what are you hearing from customers out out and about
well the current challenge challenges are very, very important, but so many people dive in to try to fix problems before really doing a good assessment of what their current situation is. There's a lot of people talking about various technologies that can be adopted, various ways to solve problems, but you need to understand that you are solving problems for yourself.
Are you applying solutions to problems that don't exist? because you might be doing things really well in certain areas. And so if you start to change them without really taking stock, then that's not a very good way to do it. That said, technological adoption is progressing. It's speeding up tenfold, especially over COVID, just like you said.
The finance is the bedrock upon which many businesses have had to fall back this past year. And so those challenges we had to overcome. Some haven't, and we have seen fantastic businesses fall by the wayside, which is incredibly sad.
However, the ones that were able to maintain themselves, were agile enough to plan a decent way out of the current situation, which we all thought by now would be over, but isn't. You have to have an agile business. I mean, lots of people relied on experience and just knowing how business worked. Come and see me. I'll tell you how we should do it.
You know, the experienced board members. Well, no one planned for COVID-19. In 2019, we were sitting there going, oh, Brexit's the worst thing to happen.
Although, quite frankly, access to capital financing is so hard right now, businesses really, because it's so restricted, businesses really have to make sure they keep a close control over their cash flow, because ones with decent cash flow can weather the journey a little bit more easily and keep the payroll going. And the ones that don't, can't.
But like I said- And it's
really interesting that you were saying about the fact, the concept of finance teams relying on experience rather than data, and no one's been through this kind of challenge before. And I guess that's, that's one of the biggest issues, isn't it? Is that no one knows what the future looks like.
And so, you know, if we take a step back and have a look at that from a business perspective, how do businesses cope when they don't know what's gonna happen and they can't rely on that experience moving forwards?
Yeah, well, some experience can definitely help. So the experience of being able to help people in your organization adapt to change, When you make decisions about your company, you need people to adopt them. Or push back with more information to back up their reasoning.
So you need to have the information yourself, but also provide that information to your teams so that they are able to better make the decisions. And people making decisions is where it's going to change.
So there's been a lot of operational jobs which now are going to have to change to more strategic jobs, becoming business partners and helping the business through certain changes rather than the whole workforce just doing those operational bits. Look at the stock market, for example.
That was people waving bits of paper, making sales, buying stocks, and then the stock market got automated. And now humans can't see the stocks being sold as fast as they're being done. It's happening in the blink of an eye, all automated. We're just unable to keep up with that automation process.
So the people who would have done that as a job are totally not needed. But they've not lost out particularly, they've ended up being those people that can make strategic changes and guide businesses through the processes that have now been automated.
And if we put that into a finance context, so what technologies do you think are really going to drive that change in that finance role? So from the operational, the transactional handler to that more sort of strategic visionary?
So in various areas, firstly, self-service will become the norm. We're looking five, 10 years into the future. We are totally happy with doing, well, the majority of us, totally happy with doing banking on our mobile. In fact, I far prefer doing banking on my mobile. It's totally secure, fingerprint sensors and all that, so that's excellent.
But why do we not see a prevalence of that in business? Well, we are going to. And so things like that, self-service will be the norm. And it is something I think finance will be uneasy about. But it is coming, so we're going to have to get on board.
People will expect the systems to be there, especially the growing workforce or the new workforce coming into jobs will expect everything to be able to be accessed from a mobile phone. And of course, that introduces then security issues. And security issues are prevalent working from home as well. Does everyone have a shredder at home? What if you print something out?
Does it just go into your recycling and get put out? Well, if it does, then your company has just broken a bunch of regulations. So you need to make sure that you can keep control of these systems. And it's by not having pieces of paper. And it's by having things in the web browser easily accessible.
So people don't have to print off Excel spreadsheet and save it to the desktop.
I must admit that's been one of the transitions we've definitely seen is that shift and the acceleration of the shift to paperless, you know, the, and not just sort of storing documents, but actually, you know, automatic scanning, you know, taking an invoice from a supplier just gets emailed to account and actually entered without anybody having to touch it.
And then it just comes down to authorizations and how does that get pushed into the system? So there's some interesting shifts that we're already seeing in terms of technology as well.
Well, scanning invoices is lauded as one of the ways to automate i would say that that's uh that was ways to automate um if you're investing in a way to scan in documents then i think you're you're wasting your money because no one's going to be producing paper based in invoices soon anyway so instead why not link up with your suppliers It starts off as data
in their system, so connect it to your system. And then there's absolutely no way that those numbers can be entered incorrectly because it's a piece of information. Just get the integration done once and then it happens immediately.
And this brings us on to a really interesting point that I think is really poignant for the conversation and for looking forward when we look at 2025, 2030. A lot of the operational jobs, punching things into computers, are just going to go. All of that's going to be done for you. The automation will have taken care of that.
And so there's going to be a lot of the workforce who are trained for these operational jobs and have a choice either to become more strategic, be business partners and be able to work with the businesses on their goals and how to use the money, use finance to achieve those. But if you just stay as operational, those will be the first ones to be automated out.
Now, yes, of course, the decisions of CFOs and finance directors can also be automated with enough data and analytics. You can do a lot of that decision-making based on the information and based on huge algorithms, but that will be a later stage.
The early ones, jobs to go, if you want to be a little harsh about it will be those either data entry or smaller operational transactional jobs and there's three things that can then happen for that workforce either they'll just do nothing about it and so loads of people will end up out of work massive unemployment the second way is perhaps for the government to
step in, like they do in other countries. Like in Japan, they do similar. If there's a lot of people out of work, they just pay them really good unemployment benefit to just stay there, because they don't need them. But obviously that's a burden on the government, and that's therefore a burden on all of the other people. So that's not necessarily the best option.
So lucky option number three, we do have one, and it has been brought to light far more due to the covid situation than ever before and it is take for example the four-day week is a phrase commented on by by lots of people for years but no one's actually been able to work out a way that it could be adopted or reasons why businesses would would really bother
well cities are no longer really the the place where business must happen you've got centers of commerce where offices and busting people would be but that is an expensive way to do it and now people have proved the whole world has proved that so much of it can be done from home Why do I need to go into the office?
So my other half used to spend three hours a day commuting, at least three hours a day commuting, on the central line, which if you don't know, it's called the central heating line.
It's pretty bad, to be
very fair. Pretty warm in the summer. It's awful. And then it's pretty terrible in the winter as well. Anyway, I digress. Three hours commuting. And when COVID hit, she sort of sat there at quarter past five in the afternoon saying, what do I do now? And we've got used to having leisure time as just the thing we do in between work.
Leisure time is far more important than that. And we shouldn't see it, shouldn't see leisure time as just something we do to recharge again, ready for work.
What we should see is work as a thing to do to enable our leisure time an active leisure not just passive on the sofa because we're exhausted actually doing a thing that is productive for our body mind and spirit and all that so leisure time really good to to go for people spreading out into the countryside where costs are less than it is in the centre of
the city, businesses don't have to be in the centre of the city, and people living in the centre don't have to be in the centre of the city. In London, you could get a parking space for as much as a house outside of town. The economics are crazy about that.
But it does mean that if somebody said, would you swap 20% of your salary for an extra day off for the rest of your life. If the four day week, a lot of people say, oh, work for four days, we'll pay you the same for five days. No, four day week, get paid for four days, but everything costs 20% less.
It's kind of the same thing, but the ideology is different. So why don't we use the automation to provide us a better standard of life. Time that we can spend with our families, hobbies, the things that life should be. My brother sells a great story of when you're young, you've got no money and lots of time.
And when you're much older, you've got lots of money, but no time.
So this bit in the middle, wouldn't it be great if instead of having no money and no time wouldn't it be better to have enough money and lots of time well if we can automate all of the stuff we don't want to do and keep our jobs strategic then that's a fantastic thing to aim for and it's a way that companies can automate a lot of their finance and we're
going to automate a lot of people's jobs out of the way. So we've got to find a positive somewhere for these people and actually changing people's life actually for the better is a great one.
And I think it's more than, obviously, the four days is an interesting concept. And I think there's a lot of studies around it, haven't they, in terms of how they're trialing it. But I also think there is a piece around the new roles that are going to come out of all of this technology as well. Because it's not just about finance.
And I think, you know, technical accounting, you know, the system's always going to do majority of that and all that transactional entry. And I guess it's then taking that time to focus on how else the finance team can add value, even if it is just for four days a week. So,
you know, we talked about... Because the technology can enable the endless close. I mean, for some reason, we expect to do all of the transactional work And then at the end of the month, add it all up to see if it balances.
I mean, I know things can balance on the way through as well, but why does the reporting happen at month end and quarter end and year end? Why not have the reporting be a present state at whatever state that is? Because all of those transactions have been automated with the use of technology.
And I think if you think about the way that COVID is at the moment, how fast things are changing because of it, that for me is the biggest argument for the continuous close is actually, we live in a world where waiting a month to figure out how your business is doing is no longer viable.
And actually, at the moment, people are spending hours just putting data out and playing spreadsheets because they can't get to the numbers. So how do we give them those tools to actually get them to a point where the point the data's entered is entered correctly and in a way that can be used for reporting purposes?
Oh, completely. The data has to be entered by a computer. It has to already be in the system. When it comes in, then we don't end up with data cleansing issues because there will be financial standards that data transfer will have to adhere to, just like the banking standards. but they'll be able to be adopted across all kinds of things. And it's starting.
You see some suppliers demanding it in certain formats, but that will certainly grow and it'll only help people.
And I think it's quite exciting because I speak to all of these incredibly talented and able people Accounting technicians and finance directors, and so many of them are wasting their days typing numbers into spreadsheets and trying to figure out why something doesn't match. And that can't be...
And you hear it, it's not an exciting way to spend your day, even if it does mean that you get to go home and do something else. Actually, one of the things that I'm really excited about is that all of this technology is actually going to make the work in finance so much more interesting and rewarding as well, I think, for a lot of people.
Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone went to university just so that they could end up punching numbers into a spreadsheet. And I would well imagine that a lot of the things that people found interesting with regards to that don't necessarily get to do in their job because all of the spreadsheets have got to be done.
And even if it's not spreadsheets, even if it's computer systems, you've still got to type things in. For some reason, people still want to see how to enter journals. I know it has to be done. but at the moment it has to be done. And the reason it has to be done is because things don't quite balance and adjustments need to be made.
I certainly foresee a future where that won't exist, that will just not be a thing. So people can go and the things that they found interesting, just like you say, you get to do that. You'd be real business partners to business. Now business, some of them will exist to serve their shareholders.
So there'll certainly be a pressure on spending less to do the same if you can. Some companies even have to spend less to do the same at the moment. So we're almost going through a trial of it. And it's the systems that have helped people. A friend of mine is an IT director. He's great.
The company is loving him right now because everyone's just working from home. Everything is secure. And he had the foresight to get it all set up early. Not everybody has had that lucky advantage because it's like disaster recovery. Do we really want to pay for that now? It might never happen. I bet people are making it now.
And do you know what? That's a really good question. motto for people to sort of take on board is that, you know, we knew that something like this could one day happen. We never ever believed it would, but it was always, you know, they've talked about pandemics, they have pandemic plans in government, et cetera, and it's now happened.
And we're now talking about the shift in the role of finance and how it's coming quicker than we think. And actually, I guess the shout out is to all of those finance directors and leaders within these teams is get ahead of it. and how do we get, how
do you get yourself into position? Because younger, newer businesses will come into the market and disrupt, but disrupt because the easiest way to do something will be to use the new, easiest technology that's available. You don't have the requirement to migrate from another system. They just start on the really cool one.
So if you exist as a business now, you are going to need to change at some point. And so if you're going to need to change at some point, why not get ready now? Because then you're only setting yourself up more and more for success.
And I guess it's that shout out, isn't it? To really think about what your department and what your team is going to look like in five years' time. And to be honest, I don't even think it's going to take five years for a lot of businesses.
You know, I'm having conversations now with a lot of businesses that are saying, you know, we're looking to scale, but we want to stay at the same number. There's only two of us. And what technology can you support us with to help us achieve that? And that's a really interesting conversation because it's not just about losing jobs.
It's perhaps about not creating jobs. And I think that's a shout out to a lot of people coming into finance is where do you want to be? What career are you going for? But there's a whole piece, isn't there, about for those that are already in this situation and have a big transition path, you know, start the journey early so it's not such a big shock.
Oh, for sure. I mean, we can use automation to create time for us to do what we do best and what we enjoy. I mean, I used to write websites a long time ago. Literally, HTML, coding, right, next, please. Start the table here. then start the line here, then add some text in, close the line, and then close the table.
I mean, now I created three websites the other day just on Wix, wix.com. So the skill of learning how to create a website is now reduced to a very small part of the population because you have some experts that do it and they make that available to everybody to just adopt really easily. So that happens with the way that people access the internet and websites.
It's happening in lots of other places as well. Peter Drucker said, the best way to predict the future is to create it. And I think that's really interesting because we do get to create the future that we want for ourselves if we think far enough ahead.
And I guess the shout out is now, that's an amazing way to think about it, isn't it? So actually what future are you creating for yourself and your team? What is the finance team of the future that you want to be in looking like? And you know, this revolution is going to happen regardless of whether you want it to or not.
And how do you become at the forefront of it and how do you help drive it rather than waiting for it to happen?
Well, there will be a company that does what your company does or what one's company does. And it'll come along and provide prospects for employment to make a difference in the world by using the skills and knowledge that you have, rather than the ability to sit at a desk and punch keys on a keyboard. More and more of that will happen.
And so those companies are going to exist. Are you going to stay what you're doing? get there. Well, you've got to try to get there, but you've already got a company in place. You have to be able to adapt and adopt the technologies of self-service and you've got all the security to worry about. You keep hearing that data is important.
Well, you've got lots of data, you're sure, but not quite sure where it is.
And when you do get a way to look at it through analytics dashboards, you suddenly look at it and go, well that's insight into how bad my finances are or how how bad the reporting was over the past few years now i can see where all the gaps were um so you so i think um it's going to be a completely fascinating journey over the next 10 years um things
change so dramatically and they're only going to get faster i looked at my um i i don't know whether it's a new feature But I clicked on the drop-down box on Amazon this morning and it came up with, do you want to see your orders from 2013? I didn't even know I had an account with Amazon in 2013. But I ordered two things that year.
They were both Harry Potter books. In fact, they were both the same Harry Potter book because at the time, we got one to read and then one as like a good copy to keep in case they were worth a fortune. I don't have them anymore. I probably should have kept them. Moved that on to 10 years later and I ordered 107 things in, well, it was 2015.
But that's, I think I was still, still buying things but but now amazon found a way to automate me needing to go out to the shops um and you know i've calmed down a little bit now it's not quite as much being spent on amazon but things things like that happen and they have the foresight to create all of this stuff i don't think they if they'd have put
their business model uh forwards anyone would have been particularly accepting. What, so you're going to just take over the entire retail market? That's not gonna happen. Well, there's all sorts of other things, especially related to finance, that people are gonna say, yeah, I don't think that's how it's gonna work. But things do change.
And so having the tools to be able to change, and the foresight to have a think and join this podcast as frequently as possible will be the only way to do it.
Thank you for the promo there. Yeah, and so, okay, so that's, do you know what? Apart from joining this podcast, yep, and joining us every week, I might add, guys, what do you think people can be doing now to help prepare them for the future?
Take stock. Take stock of your own business, understand what you can do, and then do a decent amount of scenario planning. And be harsh to yourself as well. Imagine your business with 25% of the workforce, something no one would have ever done until this year, and then they go, oh yeah, I can see that that might actually happen.
Well, so imagine your company with 25% workforce. Imagine your company with 75% moved to strategic roles. What would you have them do if you could pick?
Would you go through 75% of your staff and ask them what they loved doing rather than what they do do what's their passion why did they forge a career in finance in the first place i think it would be fascinating and then get that list and then figure out um which direction you want to go because um you can go and create whatever sort of thing you want and
these technologies are going to enable the hell out of anything you want to do
And that, I think, is the piece, isn't it? Is take a step back, have a think about what you could do. But it's not just you that has to do the thinking. And I think that's really important, is that getting people to imagine what their roles could be and what life could look like if everything was automated.
And starting those conversations early, for me, is the big thing. Because it's going to happen
fast, I think.
And I guess, for a... a podcast with the title how technology is changing the role of the cfo we've talked a bit about technology but technology changes we get data insights at the one moment and then blockchain another and ai the next but there will be iterative versions of all these things um But what's fascinating for me is how we are able to adopt and adapt
these to the people in our organizations and what that means for the society that we're building in our company. Because they are very much enablers of amazing things. I don't think you should ever pick a technology and then do it because someone tells you that you've got to do that technology. Don't say, oh, blockchain's the latest thing. Let's go and get some.
then you're just chasing after well i don't know what you're chasing in the wrong place
The latest hype, yeah.
I
think that is a big tendency, isn't it? Everyone just wants to be on top of the next big thing. And actually, the smart people are those that know where they're at and they know where they want to be and they're picking the right tools for the job because the wrong technology choices can be catastrophic.
So it's about finding the right tools. I think the biggest thing for me is the way in which... Automation will give us back more leisure time to do the things that we love doing, to move the industry back. Yeah, just to give people the opportunity to spend more time with their families, do all those things we found out when half the world was furloughed.
And suddenly we realized that we do like going for a walk at lunchtime. or spending time with family or hobbies. I think that's really, really important. And if you can enable that through the use of smart technology, then you're going to look back and decide that you've done good in the world.
And you know what's really interesting is that the last, well, the first industrial revolution and the one that created the steam engine was the one that created the first vacations. So prior to that date, people weren't able to actually go and explore somewhere new.
And it will be really interesting to see whether those of us in 100 years or 200 years look back on this era and go, that's the one that created the work-life balance. That is the one that actually drove a shift from living to work to working to live.
Well, we used to do a six-day week. And in fact, because you could have a day off to go to church, and some people didn't even get that, seven-day week. And some people, don't forget, do huge amounts of hours as well now. But I don't worry about technology making people obsolete.
I only see it as... helping us live better lives and that's why i love it that's why i do do this job
and that is a brilliant um vision and philosophy i think for technology it's one we often forget so thank you mark it's been wonderful talking to you and thank you so much for coming on the show
great fun thanks very much hannah speak soon
speak soon Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed this episode. I actually have a favour to ask. Reviews and shares are incredibly important to the success of any podcast. If you could spare a minute to share this episode on your social network or leave us a comment to tell us what you liked, I would really appreciate it.
Feel free to tell me what topics interest you most. I would really love to hear your feedback. Don't forget to check out our latest CFO 4.0 webinar on budgeting and planning in a volatile environment. Click the link in the show notes or visit www.itassolutions.co.uk and click on our events page for more info and great content.
And if you want to reach out at any point, tell us what you liked, tell us what we can do better, then feel free. Just email us at cfopodcast.itassolutions.co.uk. Thank you and speak soon.