
The Finance Function Needs a Talent Upgrade
The mandate for finance is evolving from simple bookkeeping to serving as a trusted business partner. To succeed, CFOs must develop their current workforce and recruit talent from new sources.
Chief financial officers have to juggle two primary tasks: driving transformation within the finance group and orchestrating the function’s everyday activities. We partner with CFOs to help them master both challenges for long term success.
BCG’s Center for CFO Excellence draws on the firm’s extensive experience in working with finance functions across diverse industries to help CFOs and their teams achieve the highest standard of performance and efficiency—something we call finance excellence. Our CFO consulting approach, which has been the basis for in-depth collaborations with finance leaders around the world, focuses on six core topics.
BCG engaged with a global investment bank to accelerate its finance transformation and address key operating model questions. Our work with the CFO and the team to redefine the operating model for higher efficiency and greater effectiveness resulted in cost savings of up to 20% in several areas.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, we helped an international airport operator analyze and refine its capital allocation decision process. This swift pivot on a key CFO strategy led to a capex cost savings of €1 billion.
The mandate for finance is evolving from simple bookkeeping to serving as a trusted business partner. To succeed, CFOs must develop their current workforce and recruit talent from new sources.
Finance functions can use two related capabilities—dynamic planning and advanced business intelligence—to turbocharge their role as forward-looking strategic advisors.
Companies can gain breathing room to operate under stressful conditions; withstand the scrutiny of shareholders, creditors, and regulators; and pursue market opportunities.
Corporate leaders have a pivotal role in bridging the divide between institutional sustainability commitments and day-to-day investing practices.
Our Center for CFO Excellence team helps help finance leaders transform their finance function operating models to achieve higher efficiency and effectiveness, unleash the power of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, orchestrate companywide transformations to drive the corporate value agenda, and more.