Corporate Finance is Dead
This weekend I came upon some web pages that discussed the future of CFO (or more broadly, finance). These pages are part of Ernst & Young website and contains 4 PDFs that one can download. My broad takeaway from the PDFs is that the path to CFO or the upper financial levels are basically gone. The typical entry level is gone and has been replaced by the shared services centers or offshoring and provides no pathway to the upper levels, and, in reading between the lines, the shared services centers or offshored positions will likely be replaced by automation. You might come into finance at the mid-level but I suspect that will go away too.
So how is finance evolving? Well, they are striving to become business partners, which, for some, will be a bit of a stretch. They are not exactly people people: the ones I know have been more about the bottom line or cost savings whereas other parts of the business include other factors in the decision making process. There's been a bit of tension there. Finance is too much a mouthpiece for shareholder values instead of thinking broadly about societal impact. The other roles finance is striving to get into are strategy and analytics. Strategy would require them to be bigger picture thinkers than they’ve been so far, stretching
beyond the bottom line focus, at least for the ones that I know, and the area of analytics is the province of data science and could potentially face automation since analytics basically deals with numbers.
Further out in the future, finance will simply not exist. You might have one or two financial advisors or a small team but the full spectrum of accounting activity will be embedded in the software, reducing accounting errors and false entries, and the forecasting/financial planning will probably be pushed out (via software) to the managers running the business. It might be that forecasting would be done by predictive analytics software and the managers just adjust some figures due to missing data such as recent knowledge about client intention or supplier moves that are not in the system. But most likely no financial person will be in the picture.
This picture is at variance with the latest prognostication that finance/accounting jobs will be increasing in the near future. Yes, there will always be a need for some finance/accounting person, but just not as many. I’m not sure where the disconnect is but I do believe that finance/accounting jobs will decrease unless they can make the jump into business partners and strategists, but then, those positions are not finance but strategists, marketers, operations, etc. Everything else but finance.
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