Mary-Anne Musekiwa, Zakariya Alli and Welela Dawit will reveal what modern finance really looks like.
In today’s digital world, finance leaders are called upon to transform from chief finance officers to chief value officers. In fact, many have already taken up this new title as they spend less time performing transactional activities, and more time delivering insights to drive better business decisions.
In this new world, analysing a company’s financial risk, managing financial planning, and ensuring records are compliant is no longer enough. Finance leaders have had to learn new skills in order to keep up with their new roles as partners in their organisations.
At the live Finance Indaba on 20 October, starting at 1pm, Microsoft South Africa CFO Welela Dawit and senior finance manager of enterprise Stefan van Heerden will unpack the four pillars that make up the modern finance function, namely: business process automation, strategy and forecasting, financial analysis and reporting, and risk management.
During a CFO South Africa hosted webinar Welela said that finance plays an incredibly relevant role in investor relations, managing stakeholder expectations and communicating what the ESG strategy is. She added that ESG is centred around data and “when it comes to data, the custodian of data is finance”. The finance function will have a significant role to play as ESG disclosure becomes a regulatory requirement for companies.
Finance skills of the future
As CFOs move to a new era of finance, they are increasingly acknowledging that finance skills aren’t all they need represented on their teams, and that businesses today need the insights of the creative thinkers of the art fields, the technical insights of other science disciplines, the sustainability focus of ESG practitioners, and of course the technical skills of the next generation.
In a session starting at 10am, Sage MEA VP of services, partners, and alliances Peterjohn Bishop, Coronation Fund Managers CFO Mary-Anne Musekiwa and Fasset CFO Zakariya Alli will discuss what types of skills are the most sought after, and whether finance is still the future of finance.
During the CFO Cape Town Summit in June, Mary-Anne explained that, when some of her team members expressed interest in learning how to code, she had to invest in their growth, even if it had nothing to do with finance. “They then brought AI and bots into our finance division, and took away most of the mundane tasks we used to do.”
A new technological era
The blockchain revolution sparked by Bitcoin has paved the way for the revolution that’s coming in finance. But what happens after, in the new world of decentralised finance (DeFi)? Ex Anglo and Altech Group CTO, partner and director at Bridge Capital, and tech expert Steven Sidley, will unpack what happens next as crypto begins to reshape entire industries.
In this session, starting at 3pm, the co-author of Beyond Bitcoin, Decentralized Finance and the End of Banks will reveal who the winners and losers of this new revolution will be.
Don’t miss out on these three sessions, or you might just end up in the latter category!
