Programme

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Keynote Panel Discussion

In a complex global economy, ensure your business stays agile and responsive enough to meet the changing needs of your market, your customers and at the speed in which they need to be met. Looking beyond the 2019 general election and Brexit; how can the UK finally move on from constant scenario planning and take back control of their business planning for a new decade and beyond? Join our panel of speakers as they share insights from their own strategies in preparing for the next decade as well as their predictions on what the future holds.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Focus on growth opportunities: How to increase sales and profit after the ‘Brexit – austerity’ with a new government in place.
• What do we need to regain our UK Business strength?
• Predicting the changes and leading your business to success.

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panellists

What is organisational agility and how can it drive digital revenue growth? How does it impact finance leaders? We conducted a global survey to find out.Tim Wakeford, Vice President, Product Strategy at Workday, will share the key findings and explain how your organisations can stay ahead in the age of continuous innovation.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Enable continuous planning: Dynamic planning helps organisations react quickly to changing market conditions and potential threats to the business. The main obstacles to real-time planning are inflexible legacy technologies and bureaucratic organisational culture

• Build agile structures and processes: A change in business plans often forces changes to organisation structures or business processes. Leaders build flexible structures and processes to adapt to changing business plans, including having the systems in place to understand skills gaps in their business,
• Embrace measurement and control: Agility and speed are dependent on robust, accurate and timely measurement and control.

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Keynote Address

Historically the Finance function has been seen as a “back office” and a non-changing function. Shifting mindsets from that of merely survival after the 2008 financial crisis, the modern CFO is facing an unprecedented era of change which has been further escalated by advances in exponential technologies such as AI, machine learning, robotics, blockchain and use of big data. In particular, the rise of predictive technologies will bring fundamental change in the capabilities, and as a result the expectations, of the Finance function and CFO.

Advances in exponential technologies allows us to derive key insights from data which are vital to the future of the business. However, data collection will only get you so far and it is up to the CFO to demonstrate an exceptional strategic mindset, leadership skills and ability to translate the data to actionable steps as part of the broader business strategy.

How can the CFO further grow the influence and mandate of Finance and show leadership in the business wide digital transformation to achieve a competitive advantage?

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• How do you develop a digital strategy which aligns with the business strategy and the business model?
• Transforming the finance function with minimum disruption.
• The steps required to unlocking the true potential of technology

Panel Discussion

A changing market means changing consumers. Ensure your business remains relevant to your customers and is proactive and responsive to adapt to the key drivers that will determine your future growth and industry relevance.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• In unprecedented speed of change, how can the CFO future forecast reliable to ensure the business achieves further growth.
• Effective use of capital (people and financial).
• The role of the CFO in driving value across the business.

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Panel Discussion

As the Finance function is beginning to build momentum in digital transformation, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Finance and IT function need to collaborate more closely together in order to drive automation forward and achieve further business growth.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Understand the CIO mandate.
• How to deliver a strong business case for technology investment in finance to the CEO and Board.
• Risk considerations and how to avoid common mistakes in procurement.

panellists

Panel Discussion

With the skills requirement for finance professionals continuously evolving to meet the needs of a changing market, how do you attract and retain the key skills needed in your business?

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Staying competitive and attractive to millennials –What does the next generation of finance professionals look for in their employer?
• How to best nurture and develop the talent in your team to see through your vision.
• Maintaining strong engagement from your team in an increasingly automated function.

panellists

95% of CFO’s have said that their roles have changed dramatically in the last 5 years.

The remit of the CFO has expanded to oversee and sponsor Digital Transformation in an organisation. With a responsibility to bring all areas of an organisation together to deliver value with short term investment, driving to deliver long term change.

Navigating unchartered territory and an unprecedented skills gap puts the pressure on the finance function to deliver transformation in an ever-changing landscape.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Key concerns that are top of mind and keeping Finance Leaders up at night
• How like-minded CFOs are setting the pace for digitalisation in their industry
• How to identify your transformation goals and align skills to execute effectively
• Discover what are your quickest wins? People, Technology or both
• Plan to implement for tomorrow, what do you need to ask of your organisation

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Locked away in your ERP and EPM systems is a treasure trove of information that has the potential to transform your business and offer you a competitive advantage. But getting at this information can be a real challenge. You are often looking at a world of time-consuming, error-prone, manual processes that dump data into spreadsheets, and then you run the risk of decisions being based on incorrect data.

Join us for this session in which we will explore some of the challenges of accessing ERP and EPM data and offer some suggestions for how you can unlock the value of your financial data while mitigating the risk associated with manual processes to enable more proactive decision making against data you trust.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

During this session you will:

• Discover some shocking industry statistics about your ERP
• Understand what is required to report with world class performance
• Learn how to tell the right story with your numbers

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Finance functions are facing new and ever-changing challenges and their approach to these needs to be different from the past. We see more change, and more swirl than ever before, yet at the same time the fundamentals of a good finance function remain the same. This includes both what finance functions are doing, their use of technology and the skills required by finance professionals of the future. Now, more than ever, Finance needs to be ‘In the Business’! A changing landscape also highlights the need for a more inclusive and diverse finance function with the breadth of skills and viewpoints critical to succeeding in the future world.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Finance functions – Journey to Transformation
• The Changing World of Technology in Finance
• People, Skills and diversity and inclusion are all key to the finance function of the future

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speakers

Lunch Discussion

Join this by-invitation-only lunch to network, share your perspective and gain unique insights from colleagues that you can transfer to your business.

Sustainability is big news in 2019 and will continue to be high on the board agenda for 2020. Quite simply, it is time to act, but who owns sustainability and should finance play a lead role? As the guardians of what an organisation spends, undoubtedly yes. But since suppliers typically represent 80% of the cost base, a lot of accountability and risk is centred outside of the organisation. How and where you spend your money is at least as important as internal strategy and behaviours.

In this session we explore what CFO’s should be asking of their organisation and their suppliers when it comes to sustainability. We will look at how to set up a sustainability programme, discuss what others do well (or badly) and consider the emerging role of procurement as organisations may need to balance doing good with doing well in uncertain economic times.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• How to set up a sustainability programme.
• Which organisations to look up to.
• Balancing doing good with doing well.

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Lunch Discussion

Join this by-invitation-only lunch to network, share your perspective and gain unique insights from colleagues that you can transfer to your business.

The path to the Future of Finance is paved with a set of technologies that have been developed with integration and automation in mind. The finance function will connect to other departments in a way we can’t even imagine now.

How do you make the right decisions as a finance leader to invest in the right tech at the right time to deliver the most seamless transformation and fastest ROI.

Talk candidly with your peers and industry experts to avoid the common mistakes that can lead to failed or over budget projects.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Communicate transformation internally, as a long-term project that delivers in the short and medium term
• Prioritise transformation technologies, implement a strategy that gets you ready for Blockchain and AI
• What doesn’t work, how do you avoid failed projects

speakers

Lunch Discussion

Join this by-invitation-only lunch to network, share your perspective and gain unique insights from colleagues that you can transfer to your business.

Large multinational companies are breaking ground using Artificial Intelligence to automate manual, error-prone spend auditing. They are making cost savings by eliminating mistakes, waste and fraudulent activities, and enabling growth through the smarter use of resources that automation allows. With the right AI solution, organisations are discovering high risk transactions before payments are made, reducing the need to claw back money once it’s left the bank account.

In this session we will discuss the challenges of manual spend auditing and describe the transformation initiatives that companies such as Airbus, Amazon and Smith & Nephew are achieving with AI. We’ll address the perceived challenges in adopting an AI based spend audit strategy, and illustrate the very real benefits in reducing spend, complying with policy and streamlining process.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Why auditing 100% of spend is critical for growth.
• How AI is used to comply with corporate policy and regulations, reducing the risk of costly breaches and fines.
• How to move away from recovery audits by discovering errors and spend leakage before payment is made.

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Thought Exchange Roundtables

Take the opportunity to directly engage, network and collaborate with senior colleagues on a topic of your choice. The CFO Agenda’s Thought Exchange Roundtables offer attendees the opportunity to directly interact with the programme and drive the conversation forward on their chosen debate. Co-developed with our audience, the roundtable debates have been chosen by our attendees through a pre-event vote.

Delegates will be able to select a discussion to join from carefully identified topics such as:

• Getting ready for exponential technology.
• Bridging the skills gap in technology implementation – What solutions does your business need?
• M&A – The CFO’s role in strategy business growth.
• Talent acquisition and team development.
• The future role of the CFO.
• Cashflow forecasting in uncertain times – Affording growth.
• Industry specific debates for CFOs within (for example):
  • Healthcare
  • Automotive
  • Retail
  • Pharmacy
  • Financial Services
  • Energy

Keynote Panel Discussion

Digitatisation will change your market, business, skills requirements and customer engagement regardless of whether you, your team and your business are ready for those changes or not – those who don’t adapt will get left behind. Join our panel of speaker to explore how you can take full advantage of the technological tools available (big data, AI, machine learning, robotics etc.) to create a lean Finance function that will help you meet your business objectives and how to best implement them for optimised ROI.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• The world is shrinking in terms of strategic alliances – How do we increase our connectivity?
• Transitioning from legacy systems to the future with minimum disruption to the business.
• Understanding which technologies/solutions best suit your business needs and how to implement them with minimum disruption to the business.
• How to prepare for the accelerating pace of disruption.

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speakers

A high level and simple overview of the journey the Tetra Pak Finance function took when transforming its Finance function to World Class.  The presenters will take you through a multi-year journey covering the key levers behind the change: People, Processes, Systems and Data.  They will openly share successes and challenges they experienced along their journey so far

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Set a “true North” for the organisation and how to stay persistent to the ambition
• Getting the balance right between changes to people, process, data, systems
• You cannot transform on your own, collaboration is key

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Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Sustainability – How well is your business doing?
• The role of the CFO as an essential driver to the business sustainability plan.
• Achieving business success through increased focus on sustainability.

As value-minded assessors, CFOs have an important role to play in companies’ digital transformations.

Shifting your department’s purpose from low-value manual work to high-value evaluation and guidance can only happen with strong automation and reliable analytics. Often, this will entail auditing and re-engineering existing processes to obtain the highest possible returns.

Based on our experience, implementing the right tools as part of your digitisation effort will both simplify your work and produce significant savings in areas often overlooked.

Our speakers will share insights on how digitising your travel and expense processes can generate a substantial ROI. They will also illustrate how it can help you determine appropriate levels of control and data collection so that they are supporting rather than hampering your transformation efforts.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Learn how an automated expense solution supports your controllers in processing more expenses, faster, letting them focus on higher added value tasks.
• Put money back into your bottom line with previously unclaimed VAT.
• Identify and eliminate fraudulent claims effortlessly by automating detection.

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Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• How to identify and proactively prevent exposures to risk.
• The human risk factor – Dealing with intentional and unintentional security breaches.
• Risk to your capital – FX management in uncertain times.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• Finance as an enabler of growth
• Delegation with control
• Make better decisions with real-time visibility

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As the Finance function undergoes a complete transformation in terms of its role within the business, how do CFOs increase their influence and raise their agenda to the Board and CEO? Ensure you are the right person to lead the changes required in your business by building the key skills that are essential to lead and build your agile Finance function, equipped with the right skills and tools to meet the coming changes ahead. Challenge, be challenged and build influence in your space to drive growth and meet the future with confidence and certainty. Join our panel of speakers as we ask them to look to the future of the Finance function and share their thoughts on the how the role of the CFO will change in the next decade.

Key Outcomes and Takeaways:

• The next decade will bring more challenges but also endless opportunities for the proactive CFO – how to harness the potential?
• How to translate the finance mandate to non-finance people
• What will the finance function look like in 2030?

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panellists