Company insight Putting the ‘I’ into CFO
Digital transition is increasingly becoming the topic for finance professionals at the virtual water cooler. It’s one thing to talk about it, another to do it though, as Geeta Ahuja of TCS explains. She warns that as the CFO is being tasked with that transition now more than ever, it’s time for them to gain a real understanding of what it really means.
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rom Jurassic Park to a world where AI is the master of the universe, spend just half an hour with Geeta Ahuja and you’ll be sure to have your conceptions challenged. It was 30 minutes set to a soundtrack of frustration and passion in equal measure. It was often hard to keep up, but what else would you expect from one of the financial world’s leading thinkers? Ahuja’s extensive and impressive career dates back to the mid-1990s, first working with Citi Bank before starting a stint with GE that would last two decades. That latter role would take her to the boardroom of the multinational giant as its CFO for oil and gas. For that reason, perhaps, when Ahuja speaks the world of corporate finance listens – or at least it should.
Her message couldn’t be clearer either: the role of finance is changing thanks to the digital transformation companies are going through, and if CFOs don’t make it part of their “growth playbook agenda” they will find themselves as outdated as the dinosaurs on Steven Spielberg’s fictional island.
Geeta Ahuja, head of finance (analytics) at Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
and make sense of its, and their impact on business performance,” she says. The CFO, moreover, has to be the master of deep
“The ‘New Age CFO’, in my view, needs to be able to decipher a technological language and make sense of its, and their impact on business performance.”
Followers or leaders? Today’s CFOs are clearly aware of the transformation that’s currently underway, but far too many of them are not prepared for what’s coming. Ahuja, for her part, believes many CFOs, including herself to some degree, are falling short of the mark thanks to what she calls their “inadequate technological knowledge”. “The ‘New Age CFO’, in my view, needs to be able to decipher a technological language
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learning and AI as now, in order to be a successful bastion of corporate finance, technological and statistical tools should be at the “helm of your financial thinking”. In addition, the creation of deep learning models that AI is currently only superfluously experimenting with is especially important when it comes to financial expertise. CFOs’ trust in AI for high-risk KPIs will continue to improve as personalised AI avatars come into being to
mimic role-based critical thinking. This is the secret sauce of profitability in today’s financial world. Today Ahuja is head of finance (analytics) at Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The global provider of IT expertise and business intelligence prides itself on its diversity, with almost 529,000 employees representing 157 nationalities across 46 countries. The company says its mission is to help customers across industries achieve business objectives by providing “innovative, best-in-class consulting, IT solutions and services”. “Every day we’re helping customers meet their financial, digital and automation simulation goals,” says Ahuja. TCS’s client base is as diverse as the company itself, coming from a variety of industries including retail, finance, manufacturing, education and more. This ideally positions Ahuja and colleagues to know what companies are (and aren’t) doing right as the digital transition gains pace. “Analytics are obviously at the helm of the CFO’s boardroom right now,” she says. “The CFO has taken the brunt of the business impact of digitisation, even today as we face Covid. Structuring data and analytics correctly are at the very epicentre of any transformation, I think we all know that.”
CFOs are seeing the change Last year, TCS said organisations around the world were beginning to seriously consider what impact digitisation might have on their business. The TCS 2020 CFO Study found CFOs were asking how they could turn enterprise data into real-time insights that drive growth, how they could better support future-ready digital business models, and how they could leverage new technologies such as blockchain, analytics, machine learning and AI, to enable new
Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
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