Can CFOs Keep Doing It All?

CFOs are eager to develop their role as strategic business partner to the CEO, but their hands are still tied by compliance and corporate governance responsibilities. That's the pith of an Ernst & Young survey of more than 250 C-suite and board level execs at $1 billion-plus companies around the world.

Respondents felt that finance chiefs divide their time pretty equally between the four key roles of scorekeeper (monitoring and reporting corporate results, compliance, and tax); commentator (reporting to the board and investors); custodian (monitoring and improving controls and risk management); and business partner (participating in strategy, leading M&A, and helping to predict business performance). But when asked which activities CFOs should allocate their time to, 35 percent selected the business partner category. Only 17 percent voted for the scorekeeper activities; the commentator and custodian roles scored 23 percent and 25 percent, respectively.

What's more, a startling 50 percent of the North American respondents (31 percent overall) said that the CFO lacks understanding of the wider issues that the business faces.

That last result was something of a surprise to Donna Dark Campbell, principal and Americas finance domain practice leader in Ernst & Young's advisory services practice. "My experience is that CFOs do have a good grasp of the information; however, what they don't have is the ability to communicate their understanding," she says. "They don't have enough time to really pull together the information in a way that it can be used for strategic decision-making because of compliance and regulatory issues, which are very burdensome.

"They seem still to be very much focused on responding to the regulators and the investors and their demands."

The resulting frustration may be contributing to CFO churn, Campbell thinks, as finance leaders go after other opportunities that offer more strategic prospects.

The study also notes a relatively low level of collaboration between finance and some other key functions, notably R&D, HR, and marketing. While finance has strong contributions to make in these areas, that's not generally happening at the moment.

Part of the explanation, says Campbell, is that "much of that information is still being gathered and managed within the business units, versus being managed at a more overall corporate level. The business units feel they need to have someone within their own organization gathering the information.

"The ways that I'm seeing CFOs being able to get into R&D, marketing, and things like that are by streamlining reporting, streamlining their finance organization, and bringing more of the business unit specialists under the domain of the CFO so that the information then is provided at a more centralized area."

That may well be, but no doubt for many CFOs the idea of enhancing support for R&D, HR, and marketing raises one big question: How will they find the time?

Download Ernst & Young's "What's Next for the CFO? Where Ambition Meets Reality" here.