AICPA & CIMA research on the future state of the finance profession found emerging themes from global discussions with leaders around the world. Some of these themes include automation, hybrid working, sustainability, and moving beyond traditional finance roles.
Rebecca McCaffry, FCMA, CGMA, associate technical director at AICPA & CIMA, together as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, discusses the shift from traditional finance in a digital world, to a new era of soft skills as the value of people and connection takes focus.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- How finance roles are becoming less fixed and more adaptable.
- An overview of focus areas for management accountants and finance leaders across the globe.
- The shift of focus from digital to soft skills, and why those skills are becoming more ingrained into the culture and priorities of accountants now.
- How the younger generation is influencing change in the profession.
Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: I’m Steph Brown, a news writer with AICPA & CIMA, together as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. On today’s episode, I am joined by Rebecca McCaffry, associate technical director at the Association, and we will be talking about what the finance profession might look like in the future. This episode will explore key trends and developments affecting management accountants and finance leaders, and how the finance professionals in these industries expect their roles to evolve throughout this period of transformation.
Welcome, Rebecca.
Rebecca McCaffry: Hi Steph. It’s great to be here.
Brown: Could you tell us a little bit about the Future of Finance project?
McCaffry: Sure. This is a project that’s been running for the last 18 months, and what we’re looking at is the future state of the finance profession and its wider ecosystem. Now back in 2017-18, we carried out a similar project. Part of what we’re looking at now is to see what’s changed in the last five years, and as we both know, a lot has changed in that time. What we’ve done is we’ve used a combination of interviews, roundtables, and surveys to look at the skills and knowledge that accountants are going to need over the coming years in order to really build value for the organisations they work with. Which of course these days is far more than just traditional financial value.
We’re also trying to understand the expectation that those organisations have of the accountants they work with, so ultimately, what this is going to do is to help us develop more relevant tools and resources for the profession because we all need to keep up to date with new developments no matter how long we’ve been qualified.
I think one of the really great things about working in finance is that you never stop learning. Probably the most important outcome of the project though, is its role in making sure the CGMA qualification delivers what employers need. Because at the end of the day, management accountants are always going to be our No. 1 product.
Brown: From this research, what are some of the key trends and areas of focus for finance leaders that stand out to you?
McCaffry: Well, the biggest trend, I think, is that finance is moving beyond finance. We’re becoming far more involved in areas that aren’t our traditional domains, so sustainability is a big part of this. We’ve just seen the first global sustainability disclosure standards. That’s one side of it, the reporting side. But, I feel there’s a much wider role for accountants in sustainability performance management, which is just starting to come through now. That’s very attractive to the younger generation as well.
Another important area is data. There’s so much data around these days. The focus of finance used to be on collecting and collating that data. But now the picture is so much more complex. You’ve got the data itself – it’s often unstructured, often biased, often incomplete, and then on top of that, you’ve got regulation and security concerns to consider. Then we’ve also got this massive influx of data specialists coming through who aren’t necessarily qualified accountants and may not share our professional ethics, so that’s something else we need to consider.
From an employer perspective, it comes back to skills. The impact of automation means our job roles are a lot less defined than they used to be, so we need to be more flexible and adaptable. There’s also the impact of hybrid working to consider, particularly on trainees who might not have the same opportunities to learn from their colleagues as they’d have had when we were all in the office five days a week. You were sitting next to somebody, if you had a problem, you could ask that person to solve it straightaway. A lot of that has changed.
We’ve got a series of reports coming out in the next few weeks which are going to explore these themes in more detail, so we’re going to look at the role and mandate of finance, looking at the impact of digital, and the role of sustainability and ESG, and looking also at workplace evolution and how that’s changed in recent years.
Brown: Currently, how do priority areas for finance professionals differ across regions?
McCaffry: Well, we’re still analysing the data, because we do have an awful lot of it, but I think some interesting things that came out from the conversations that we had globally. It was clear that there are differences of opinion. There’s no one view of finance, and what we found was quite interesting was that different regions had different attitudes towards certain things.
For example, Europeans were far more likely to be interested in sustainability and saw a real role for finance professionals in leading in that area. Other regions had different priorities, so when we went to Pakistan, people talked to us about crisis management. Crisis management being a key skill for the finance professional, and I thought that was really interesting because we often talk about risk management as being important for finance. But of course, a risk is just a risk, it might not occur whereas crisis management you’re right in the middle of it.
I thought that was really, really interesting. If we look at the US, the concern there is very much for the talent pipeline. Are there enough accountants coming through? Can I fill my job vacancies? It does vary across the board. What everybody agreed on was that finance needs to change, we can’t do things the way we’ve always done them, so changes need to be made. So, it was good that everybody is pushing forward in the same direction.
Brown: Digitisation and automation continue to evolve with the profession and vice versa, but I’m interested to hear your perspective on how soft skills and the focus on people is transforming?
McCaffry: Well, this is a really interesting one because soft skills are not the first thing that anybody thinks about when they think about accountants. If you think of our code of ethics, it’s about integrity, it’s about objectivity, it’s about being professional. When we think of accountants, we don’t necessarily think of soft skills. Soft skills, human skills, empathy, things like that. We think of accountants as having integrity, being very objective, unbiased, professional. What we’re really seeing this time round, compared to when we did a similar research project five years ago, was five years ago, everybody wanted to talk about digital. Digital is going to change everything. Technology it’s the way forward. Now it’s all about people.
What’s really coming through is this whole thing around working with others. This relationship management: working with people across the business to get the best results. That’s really come through and to move from being seen as a person who is quite negative: “No, you can’t have any budget. You know you can’t spend that money. No, we can’t afford to do that project.” To being somebody who goes: “Oh, well, let’s look for a way forward.” I think that’s going to be really important. I think the impact of the pandemic can’t be underestimated there. We all value people a lot more than we may have done a few years ago, having spent so much of the last few years away from people.
Another thing that’s quite interesting is the finance business partnering role, which has been around for quite a long time now, that’s really coming to the ‘fore. People are telling me this is really important to the future of my business. But what’s really interesting is when we asked people in our survey about being finance business partners. Do you identify as a finance business partner? Do you feel that you’re a finance business partner? Many of them said, yes, I do. Actually, probably about two-thirds of the people we interviewed said yes, I do feel I’m a finance business partner.
But if you look at what their job titles are, most of those did not have the words finance business partner in their job title. I think it’s perhaps more of a mindset and this would tie in quite well with this fusion of these digital skills, these technical skills, but actually having people blended into that as well, people and leadership. I thought that was really interesting, and I think that the finance business partner mindset is something that we can all take on.
Brown: What has been the most surprising thing this research has revealed so far?
McCaffry: Well, that’d be telling, Steph, because we haven’t published the findings yet. You’ll have to look out for those, but I will give you a couple of things. One is that the ambition of junior finance professionals is huge. When we look at what they want, where they want to spend their time, we look at four areas. We look at information, where you’re pulling data together; insight, where you’re analysing it; influence, where you are using that data, that information to influence within the business; and impact, where you actually see the change that that has made to the business.
Generally, we see that finance professionals at the early stages of their career are focusing very much on information and insight, and CFOs are more at the impact end of the scale. But actually, what we’re seeing is that junior members of staff also want to have the impact. They want to see a direct connection between the work they’re doing on a daily basis and a positive change in the business hopefully, so that’s been quite a change. That’s been quite an interesting one and I think reflects the ambition of the younger generation coming through.
Another thing that I thought was really interesting was the huge value that’s put on these softer skills that we talked about earlier. The vast majority of people we asked said that skills such as critical thinking, innovation, communication, relationship management are going to be absolutely crucial for finance professionals going forward. So, that’s interesting. How do we build this into our qualification and our learning products? And our CPD material and the thought leadership and all these different things we’ve produced, how do we do that? We’ve got plenty to be thinking about going forwards.
Brown: Thanks again to Rebecca for her time and insights. In the show notes for this episode, we will link to the Future of Finance landing page, which will contain further resources on this topic. Some of the research findings for this project are expected to publish in the coming months, with more coming out in 2024. I’m Steph Brown. Thanks for listening.
