NTT Data CFO Rebecca Pole has urged finance professionals to adopt a long-term, investment-focused mindset and to rethink traditional hiring.
Rebecca Pole, CFO at NTT DATA, has called on finance leaders to adopt a bold new mindset that moves beyond short-term ROI and embraces sustainable, people-centric investment. She spoke at the Executive Communities Women’s Dinner held in Johannesburg recently, during a panel discussion titled The New Value Equation.
She challenged attendees to consider the broader, long-term impact of financial decisions, particularly in areas like technology, diversity and employee engagement.
“Finance is typically known for saying, ‘no’. If something can’t be turned into a financial metric with a return on investment, it’s often dismissed. But I’ve started challenging my teams to ask a different question: Can we afford not to do this? That simple shift in language changes the conversation entirely,” she said.
Citing data from research institutions such as Gartner, Rebecca noted that employee engagement can increase productivity and profitability by over 35 percent, while things like quiet quitting may cost companies up to four percent of their wage bill.
“Those are numbers boards can no longer ignore. The investments we make in our people and technology directly affect how our people show up for customers, and that has a knock-on effect on profitability,” she said.
Rethinking traditional hiring in finance
Rebecca emphasised the importance of quantifying soft investments and viewing them through a strategic lens. “Year-on-year, the returns may be difficult to measure, especially when we are wired for short-term gains. But sustainable business requires long-term thinking.”
As businesses prepare for the demands of the future, Rebecca stressed the need to rethink traditional hiring in finance. “We’re not just hiring CAs anymore. We’re asking if we need engineers. In our AI space, we’ve hired BCom students who are now learning next-gen skills,” she said, adding that younger recruits with digital fluency and adaptability may reach leadership faster than previous generations.
She pointed out that younger professionals are not bogged down by the legacy systems or drudgery work that older generations had to push through. “They won’t spend hours pulling data from 10 different systems or building pivot tables. They’ve trained different muscles, they’re fast, agile and they think differently.”
This shift in generational skills requires a re-evaluation of what finance, HR and CIO functions value in talent. “If we don’t adapt how we think about hiring, we risk falling behind, again, in the next industrial revolution,” she warned.
Turning to technology, Rebecca urged leaders not to view tools like AI as short-term cost-cutters. “If you think AI will mean more output with fewer people, you’re missing the point. What it will do is help us contain the cost of the future, and that improves return on sales and shareholder value over time,” she said.
Understanding the board
She acknowledged the difficulty in getting boards to understand the value of such investments, especially when they’re used to pulling only two levers: revenue and cost.
“But if you’re still in that mode of thinking, you’re in yesterday’s world. We need to start demonstrating the link between non-financial metrics, like staff attrition, technology adoption or employee engagement, and actual financial returns,” she explained.
Rebecca also highlighted the disconnect between budgets and values, pointing to HR, diversity and inclusion functions as common first casualties during budget cuts.
“They’re the easy targets. But cutting those investments is cutting into the heart of your business’s future resilience.”
She reminded the attendees of finance’s role in enabling purpose-driven leadership, saying it is important that leaders must move beyond being just the mirror reflecting where the numbers are.
“If we invest in our people and technology today, the financial results will speak for themselves tomorrow,” she said.
