What are the Current Focus Areas for Finance Leaders in their Organizations and How Informative are Perceived Key Market Drivers?

In a recent post, Thought Logic introduced a survey we conducted with our network of finance leaders to ascertain the relationship between their perspective on market drivers and their prioritization of finance capabilities in their business. Last time we revealed how various market drivers ranked as top-of-mind for respondents and highlighted the top 3: Interest Rates/Inflation, Competitive Landscape, and Talent Scarcity. Responses did vary drastically depending on company sizes, however, with small and mid-sized companies often voting to the reciprocal of large companies.

In this posting, we will review the responses for top priority finance capabilities from our survey. The questions focused on 8 major organizational capabilities relevant to a finance team:

Priority Finance Capability Areas of the Future

From the survey, most respondents focused less on Processes and more on People, Insights, and Technology capabilities. Findings indicate that people, data, and cashflow management are of most importance. Of the capability areas listed, large and small cap companies place an inverse level of perceived impact, while mid cap companies vary in their response.

Technology and People proved the top focus areas for finance leaders in their organizational capabilities. Once again, there was a disparity in responses depending on the company size of those surveyed; however, there was not as much alignment between small and mid-size companies as in the market drivers results. All three company size groups prioritized different focus areas. Large companies emphasized efficiency in resource utilization as well as investments in more costly automation and digital transformation. Smaller companies prioritized cash flow, spending, and growth, while mid-size returned an overwhelming emphasis on change, operational, and process improvement. Not surprisingly, the availability or limitations of capital is certainly comparable to company size and surely impacts finance leaders’ organizational strategies, but perhaps a larger discussion is understanding how market drivers inform the investment focus of larger companies and the budgetary discretion of smaller companies, for example.

Priority Finance Capability Themes

Survey Results

Respondents favor capabilities from the Insights, Technology, and People categories over Processes as the most important focus areas of their company from a finance and accounting perspective.

How much of capability prioritization is intentional proactivity and how much is reactive? Are successful, future-focused leaders consistently ahead of the game in correctly perceiving the most influential market drivers and responding accordingly? Lastly, how changing are these perceptions and goals, year over year? Follow our LinkedIn for continued insights from this study.

For more questions on this survey or to start a discussion with our Finance Practice on how market drivers are impacting the financial strategies and functional capabilities of your own team please contact Daniel Boyles.