Accenture’s Dzingira Matenga explains that good compliance and governance can add value to any organisation.
Accenture, which helps CFOs unlock shareholder value by improving their finance functions through the application of technology, data science and automation, will be sponsoring the Compliance and Governance Award at this year’s CFO Awards.
“For a long time, people have treated finance as a very convoluted and cluttered back-office function, where CFO’s roles are narrowed to focus on being the custodian of the P&L, Balance Sheet and financial controls within a business,” says Dzingira Matenga, managing director at Accenture. “However, a lot of CFOs have had to embrace a ‘chief value officer’ mentality in order to unlock more value for their shareholders. Part of that value-unlock is driven by good governance.”
He explains that a well-governed organisation commands a higher premium in the eyes of investors and capital markets. “Research suggests that investors will pay up to 30 percent more in terms of a market premium for an organisation that has good governance.” This, he adds, also reflects in your customer perception and ultimately market share and revenue growth.
Dzingira says that, the turning point for CFOs to evolve into chief value officers, is when they deliver ‘Finance-as-a-Service’ – a service finance provides to colleagues in operations, sales, marketing and logistics to help them meet their KRAs. “At Accenture, we help CFOs deploy technology within finance to free up their capacity to focus on Finance-as-a-Service.”
However, he adds that compliance and governance is also a people issue, and even if you have the technology and processes in place, people in the organisation still need to “live and breathe integrity” and good governance. “I hope that the winner of this wonderful award is the organisation that spends time inculcating these kinds of behaviours amongst their staff and colleagues, living compliance and governance, over and above simply policing it.”
