At the 2024 Finance Indaba, Bongi Ngoma, AGSA’s head of audit, and Walter Sisulu University CFO Morgan Nhiwatiwa stressed agility for future-fit finance leadership.
Finance leaders need to be agile in order to navigate disruptions that will characterise the evolution of the finance function. This is according to Bongi Ngoma, head of audit at the Auditor-General South Africa. Bongi was part of a duo discussing viable strategies for finance teams in the digital age at the 2024 Finance Indaba.
Bongi, who shared the stage with Morgan Nhiwatiwa, CFO of Walter Sisulu University, said there is an ongoing evolution of the finance function and as such leaders need to remain agile and adapt to the changes.
“We have been experiencing a shift in the stream of accounting, evolving from the ancient days of number crunching of doing the debits and the credits, through the whole 21st century to where we are now.”
Bongi highlighted the Zondo Commission and Covid as some of the key disrupters: “The Zondo Commission era was important, although we were in a crisis – it was important as it allowed us to re-evaluate and strengthen our regulations. Covid was similarly a crisis requiring us to exercise our agility and think outside the box. It forced us to actually turn around and come up with ways of sustaining ourselves, and we all came out better from that era.”
The new and looming disruptions, she said, are the adoption of emerging technologies, climate change and geographical wars – even in the financial world.
“I do believe there’s a looming water crisis that we must start to prepare for and we have all seen how the current geographical wars have affected our businesses. As an agile finance leader, you must start to anticipate what else is going on.”
Morgan agreed, adding that it is also important for leaders to have soft elements that can enable them to have a future-proof finance team. He drew on his personal experiences at Walter Sisulu University where he and his team went about instilling change in their finance function.
“When you’re talking about transforming your finance function, you need to create a solid link between people, teams and systems – those three pillars need to be working together. When we embarked on a journey of transformation, the first thing I did was to take an audit, to review what I had, the skills and their capacity. And then have a game plan, first with training and then planning the capacity.”
He highlighted that although the transformation journey, which started in 2019, was not easy – it is now bearing fruit.
“I can now say we are achieving transformation. I cannot overemphasise the importance of communication and sharing your vision, and bringing your people along. It is important to keep communicating, more so about the evolving processes.”
Bongi agreed, closing the session with a call to action to the leaders: “As we commit to continue to modernise and lead with innovation, and future-proof our strategies as finance professionals in this rapidly changing world, I urge you to be disruptively fit in our leadership.
“And for us to be that fit leadership, I want to introduce you or engage you on the four Ps of a future fit leader – people, prosperity, planet and process – we have key responsibilities to foster social cohesion, encourage compliance with governance and regulations, as well as the adaptation of automated technologies, as well as protect the environment.”
