Top Technology Trends for Today’s CFOs

What can today’s CFOs do to build better relationships with the CEO and other business executives? The data points to one big area of new opportunity: invest in the latest technologies.

Two weeks ago, I had the honor of presenting to a CFO Summit in Athens, talking about how Big Data, Cloud, In-Memory Computing, Mobile and other technologies can help CFOs with their biggest concerns.

For example, surveys reveal that business executives have a much warmer feelings about the finance function when they are able to provide real-time data and constantly-updated forecasts:

And Finance departments that use predictive analytics to examine leading indicators of performance such as customer sentiment also show big gains in alignment with the rest of their organization:

Surveys show that the number one barrier to Finance organizations being able to take on a more strategic rule is the complexity of today’s finance systems. Staff have to spend too much time on basic duties and have no time to improve their understanding of the operational measures that drive and impact financial measures.

The very latest finance systems based on in-memory technology can help. They reduce complexity by combining real-time actuals with budgeting and analysis in a single, integrated system. Financial data is stored just once, making almost every aspect of financial operations faster, simpler, cheaper, and more effective:

There was one particularly topical technology : I ended the presentation by noting the success of Bitcoin transactions among consumers in Argentina, because the cryptology-based distributed currency cannot easily be made subject to currency controls. Greek banks closed just two days later, leaving many of the CFOs in the audience struggling to pay foreign suppliers and keep their businesses running.

Video of the presentation: