At a recent CFO South Africa webinar in partnership with OneStream, senior executives from Valterra Platinum and PPS shared how they are transforming finance operations with AI-driven platforms, unified data and streamlined reporting.
Top finance minds at a recent CFO South Africa webinar titled Discover how top finance leaders are revolutionising their businesses shared how they are building teams that deliver sharper insights, faster decisions and greater control in a changing economic landscape.
The 60-minute session, attended by over 200 top finance execs, featured senior executives Thobile Mukuna, planning analyst at Valterra Platinum; Isaiah Nyati, group finance senior manager at PPS; and OneStream regional sales director, Lorraine Venter.
Together they unpacked how to overcome fragmented data, outdated systems and manual processes that slow decision-making; apply AI in planning and forecasting with practical examples; and achieve faster ROI through smarter consolidation and reporting.
Lorraine began by reflecting on the day-to-day pressures faced by finance teams, saying they are asked to do more on a daily basis. They are asked to do faster closes, smarter planning and real-time insights. “And yes, most of your teams are probably still juggling the disconnected tools, the siloed data, the manual workarounds and having to pop over to your neighbour and say, ‘Listen, did you get that email? Do my numbers look right?’ That’s really where we feel that OneStream comes in to help organisations,” she says.
She explained that OneStream’s vision was to become the operating system for modern finance by embedding within the finance community. A global 2025 survey of 2,000 CFOs and CEOs highlighted three priorities: giving businesses a unified view of data, modernising the finance stack with AI and supporting finance to modernise its own operations after years of funding transformation in other functions.
“OneStream focuses on three pillars. Firstly, core finance – managing essential accounting and reporting functions. Secondly, operational analytics, allowing you to steer your business in real time. And thirdly, financial prediction and AI, to propel your business into the future with powerful insights,” added Lorraine.
Challenges faced by CFOs
A live poll reinforced the challenges facing finance leaders, with 46 percent of attendees citing manual processes and spreadsheets as their biggest barrier, followed by lack of system integration at 32 percent.
Thobile shared how Valterra Platinum, a newly independent company spun out of Anglo American, is navigating these challenges. “We are a vibrant, brand new company, which has recently just emerged from the Anglo American group of companies. We are the world-leading primary producer of platinum group metals. Our assets are spread across South Africa and Zimbabwe, and we boast of the world's largest PGM deposits in our endowment,” she said.
Her role in corporate development focuses on capital investment decision analysis, regulatory support for resource declarations, asset valuation and long-term financial planning.
“Where we found ourselves was like Lorraine had said, we consistently asked for more accurately and quickly. And our problem really was around we had a system which was our workhorse, reliable, but then it was behind the development curve, meaning normal day-to-day things, they just took longer and were cumbersome to overcome,” Thobile said.
“We were slaves to tools or technology. Our desire really was the technology or the tools needed to serve the analysis to draw insights, rather than the analysts trying to drive the tools.”
Isaiah outlined PPS’s challenges as a mature insurance group with over 70 years of history and more than 15 companies across South Africa and Namibia and added that their core focus is really assisting professionals with tailored insurance solutions.
“The different businesses all have different finance teams looking after the finances, which then becomes quite important for us to have a structured and efficient way to capture and report our results,” he explained.
Answers in automation
The insurance datasets, spanning premiums, claims, commissions and reinsurance, are vast and require collaboration across actuarial, broker, regulatory and reporting teams.
“We always reported on time with great quality results, but it usually came at a high cost to our team. We wanted to reduce the amount of time spent on late nights and weekends during the year-end. The answer really lies in automation,” Isaiah added.
For PPS, OneStream offered a single version of the truth that could integrate with multiple ERP systems across subsidiaries. Isaiah highlighted that with OneStream, they were able to integrate all those systems and almost at the click of a button get that data flow into a single place where they could run consolidation and also prepare financial statements on one system.
“We’re almost able to generate an almost complete set of financial statements once your TB closes and then you just worry about the more narrative parts of the reporting,” he said.
Thobile noted that Valterra Platinum had unique requirements due to its long-term planning horizon. Having the largest deposit, they have to plan about 100 years ahead. Their key deal breaker from the onset was having to be able to plan 100 years ahead.
“Where most of the competing service providers were not able to do that, we leveraged the expertise of implementation partners to crack this,” she said.
Isaiah emphasised the importance of preparation and clarity before deployment and added that by the time they got to implementation, they were very clear on what their problems were, what exactly the objectives that they wanted to achieve were, what was high priority or non-negotiable.
Getting involved
“You have to be extremely clear on your goals and that should distil into a very detailed set of requirements. What was also very key was getting the right implementation partner,” he said.
On ROI, he highlighted the efficiency gains and staff wellbeing benefits and explained that people are very important to them and that they were a lot happier by the end of their audit process and on a monthly basis as he and his team prepare results for the board because of the tool.
“For senior leadership, the availability of more real-time data and higher quality data is a big win,” he said.
Meanwhile, when looking back, Thobile reflected that over-enthusiasm was a challenge for her team, and said she and her team thought they could take on a project build plus deliver on day-to-day deliverables, and didn’t even see our loved ones for a while.
“I think I would change that. Spend more time in planning rather than execution, and approach your project in small modules so you get quicker uptake of the new technology.”
She also stressed the importance of involvement, “Hop on early to understand the administrator side of things. Having an implementation partner that also understands your business is key because you can then guide how the outcome would look like.”
