Or it may be that in a challenging time, CFOs are more conscious than ever of the value of enabling new ways of working. The technologies that enable virtual working come with their own risks. While these should be managed by IT and HR, it’s usually the CFO who is regarded as most responsible for managing risk—especially when the response to it requires a coordinated effort from different parts of the business.
Joakim continues: “Being a part of the digitalisation conversation isn’t really a challenge for Treasury departments and CFOs, the hard part is doing their own work on finding and leading the initiatives selected to drive digitalisation. Treasury departments and CFOs face a huge workload dealing with their day-to-day business process tasks. This is one of the main reasons that prevents them from driving digitalisation initiatives as much as they would like to. Somehow they have to clear a space in their schedule to take a step back and force themselves to address digitalisation as this will undoubtedly help them immensely in the future.”
From a purely financial perspective, the immediate costs of enabling remote working are relatively small as technology investments go, but funds still need to be found—at a time when more than half of CFOs also expect a decrease in revenue and/or profits for the year.1 And a long-standing shift to (more) remote working is likely to have knock-on requirements for investment in core networking and cloud platforms. Meanwhile, plans to cut costs in facilities/capex investment can’t be expected to yield results quickly. So where do you turn? The advice that we gave in last year’s blog still stands, especially with respect to investigating different funding options.
Joakim says: “For Treasuries, it’s important to go through their areas of expertise and analyse how they can do things in different ways in order to bring new value to the company. One of the major digitalisation efforts for Treasuries is robotisation and automisation. In order for Treasuries to make sure that they have an integral role to play, they need to step up and own these initiatives themselves. Anything that helps either grow top line or save costs will be welcome. If anyone can make a business case about a digitalisation initiative that’s viable, it’s the Treasury department.”