TRANSFORMATION: THE LEGACY FINANCE DEPARTMENT
Forward Stephen Casaceli from Deloitte and Aptitude Software’s Mark Aubin discuss how embracing an ‘always-on modernisation programme’ can carve out a new role for the central finance function It was Lauren Bacall, the smart and sassy siren from the golden age of Hollywood, who is reported to have shared this wisdom: “Standing still is the fastest way of moving backwards in a rapidly changing world.” Bacall could have read out a general ledger and made it sound sexy; but chief finance officers in legacy insurance companies would do well to carve her words into their desks. Because, according to Mark Aubin of Aptitude, a software company focussed exclusively on the digital CFO, and Stephen Casaceli of global management consultancy firm Deloitte, perpetual forward motion is now the name of the game when it comes to a back office function that has traditionally been structured around vicennial technology upgrades and a static reporting calendar. That’s especially so in an era where merger and acquisition activity
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continues to set new records. Total deal volume across underwriters and brokers increased 40 per cent year-on-year through to December 31, 2021, according to Deloitte analysis, and there’s nothing to indicate that won’t continue in 2022, it said. It’s those kinds of strategic decisions – to merge, to acquire or, indeed, to resist the same – that CFOs are now more frequently being asked to advise upon. And, in a bull market, boards are impatient for answers: they want to know within hours, not at the next quarterly review, what the company’s position is. “There is capital out there, we know, because corporations stopped spending [during COVID], or slowed or modified the way they spent, or looked at going to market in different ways, and there were savings as a result of expense management,” says Casaceli.
“And, if I’m a CFO, I want to be able to support my board immediately around an opportunity, rather than say ‘well, let’s wait until we close in June and see what liquidity we have’,” adds Aubin. “The big underlying piece of that is that systems should be automated in order to see the effect, in real-time, of a certain action on the books. That’s going to be huge for the innovative CFO, going forward.” It’s also going to reposition finance within the organisation; instead of being a passive number cruncher, Aubin says the new generation of actuaries and financial analysts are beginning to work proactively across departments that were traditionally siloed from them, helping to address business KPIs. “A lot of the insurance CFOs that run our automation software are now focussed on goals like ‘how do we reduce customer churn?’, ‘how do we reduce any kind of ffnews.com
