CFO of the Future Summit discusses how business are using technology to keep up

Photos: Patrick Furter Fulu Ravele, Renergen CFO, Senele Mbatha, Discovery Vitality CFO, and Mhanqwa Khumalo, Pfizer SSA FD

CFO South Africa hosted special guests Graeme Codrington, Jan Hofmeyr, Mikateko Tshetshe and Ian Russell at the Equinox Innovation Centre in Sandton. The speakers shared how technology is changing the way we live and the way we do business.

On 5 November 2019, CFO South Africa – in partnership with Oracle – hosted the CFO of the Future Summit at Absa’s Equinox Innovation Centre in Sandton. Close to 100 of South Africa’s top CFOs gathered to learn, network and share their experiences and concerns around digital transformation.

After CFO South Africa MD Joël Roerig kicked off the evening, CFO South Africa community manager John Deane opened the floor to TomorrowToday Global CEO and futurist Graeme Codrington.

Graeme pointed out that the 2020s are a few short weeks away, saying that everything we’ve done in the past two or three decades has been building blocks. “What will happen in the next 10 years is that those systems will develop a life of their own,” he said.

Graeme then asked the CFOs to imagine themselves in 2050 and look back on the 2020s and consider the systems they would consider to be ridiculous. Doctor visits, parking garages and office blocks were put forward as concepts we’d move on from in the not-too-distant future by the audience. Graeme then challenged the audience to think about what this would mean for their own roles in the future of business.

The audience was then split into two groups to hear from two CFOs who have undergone a finance transformation in their organisation. OUTsurance CFO Jan Hofmeyr explained how the insurance company is now embarking on a cloud journey. “Wearing a CFO hat, I have to look at the cost of developing systems when they are available in the cloud.”

About the journey, he says that it’s daunting, but then you find your rhythm. “We don’t bet the farm on new technology, but run the systems concurrently for a few

Precious Hawadi, NTP Radio Isotopes group executive for finance, and Elisa Mkhize, Clinix Health Group CFO

Marinella Vigouroux, Howdon Africa CFO

Jan Hofmeyr, OUTsurance CFO

months to make sure that the new one is delivering, and to remain cloud agnostic as far as you can,” he said.

Unilever VP finance for Africa Mikateko Tshetshe explained how Unilever brought in EY to assess and trigger thoughts about automation. This 12-week programme reviewed the company’s end-to-end processes, using global, Unilever and industry best practices to identify which processes could be automated and eliminated. Mikateko said that the key call out from this process is to make sure that you are doing this holistically, including your staff in the process.

She explained that her finance team identified tax reconciliations as an area that could be automated. Introducing robotic process automation in this department whittled a two-week process down to one day.

The audience then came back together to hear the closing words from BCX ex-CEO and author of ‘The Other End of the Telescope’ Ian Russell.

Hlengiwe Khumalo, Necsa CFO

“We are all digital immigrants,” Ian said. “We have come into this technological world that we live in today relevantly late in life and have had to work out how to use it. We do our best.”

On the other hand, he said that the children of today instinctively know how to use new technologies. “These kids are digital natives.”

Ian highlighted some things that we can do to stay relevant: –Embrace reality and make it your friend. –Work out what is your why. Why do you go to work and why does your function do what it does? And what is the why of your organisation? –Create an ability within your business to fail early, fail fast and fail forward. Encourage people to do things differently in a safe environment that always rewards glorious failure than actually looks after minor conservative success because we were slightly less bad than last year. –Embrace diversity. You need diversity in all parts of the organisation in terms of industry background, ways of working and how you get stuff done. l