CFOs today must drive digital transformation

The insurance company's CFO today must take the lead in business transformation around digital capabilities and also navigate the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, said speakers at the virtual 14th Asian Insurance CFO Summit which took place over the last two days.

In his opening address Mr Mahadevan Natarajan, senior director of Financial Applications APAC at Wolters Kluwer/CCH Tagetik, said that preparing for the IFRS17 compliance journey need not be a daunting task anymore for insurers who must see it as an opportunity with resources available in the market to help them adopt the standard. In order to provide transparency, standardisation and streamlining to provide comparability of financial results across insurance companies and also beyond the industry, IFRS17 compliance will be mandatory from January 2022 or 2023 in different countries.

Referring to the IFRS timeline, he said that typically preparations last for 18 to 24 months and so companies need to start early to meet the 2022 deadlines. “The actuarial, finance and IT teams must work in tandem to get the organisation ready for compliance,” he said. He emphasised that insurance companies must also ensure that their solutions have a defined workflow for completeness and correctness.

Highlighting the benefits of the CCH Tagetik-enabled financial reporting and planning, Mr Natarajan mentioned that its powerful engine makes it possible to explore the full potential of the insurance company’s corporate data and put insights into action.

“The platform empowers financial processes with granular data; collects, validates, transforms, and normalises data; explores your data according to unlimited dimensions and is easily configurable by finance and business users and allows data governance through a data flow and audit trail and also provides expenses and cost allocations,” he said.

CFOs in the next normal

Workday's CFO practice lead, Asia, Mr Lee Thong Tan said that remote delivery of financial services will be essential in the future and mentioned the three key outcomes which companies need to adapt to navigate the next normal. These are: insight, efficiency and agility. “Companies must provide comprehensive operational insight for better decision making, increase operational efficiency through process simplification and resource optimisation and align data, processes and technology on a foundation to support continuous change,” he said.

Effective leadership skills for today

Renowned leader, speaker and chartered accountant, Mr Peter McKenzie, in his presentation highlighted the qualities of stoic leadership, which he feels is the need of the hour. “Leadership is key to engaging staff and a stoic leader is one who connects with people,” he said. Mentioning the acronym VUCA, he highlighted how a stoic leader is one who will move from volatility to vision, uncertainty to understanding, complexity to courage and from ambiguity to agility. “As a finance leader, we must be always ready with a plan and be prepared to run a more resilient race,” he said.

Speaking of leadership attitudes needed in today’s challenging environment, Mr V S Ravi, CEO and founder of Invictus Leader, said that the key quality of a leader should be that he must be approachable. “Some leadership habits that must be cultivated include being open-minded about disagreements and recognising various facets of a problem before arriving at a solution decision,” he said.

The two-day summit has the theme “CFO Morphing: The strategic link to CEO, board and business success” was organised by Asia Insurance Review and sponsored by Wolters Kluwer/CCH Tagetik.

Source: Asia Insurance Review