Andries van den Berg, Partner at Deloitte Africa, and Dayne Turbitt, Managing Director for EMEA at Anaplan, explain how connected finance breaks down silos, links strategy to measurable value, and enables CFOs to define future paths in an uncertain world.
The pace of change facing CFOs and their organisations makes keeping up a challenge on its own. But doing this while also anticipating and future-planning means CFOs must shift from periodic planning exercises to a continuous discipline. The concept and methodology of connected finance is becoming central to organisations’ success where markets move quickly, supply chains are disrupted overnight by unforeseeable events, and boardroom decisions demand real-time evidence.
“Connected finance means breaking down silos and creating a singular platform where everybody plans and it easily translates into financial results, which ultimately equals shareholder value if you plan often and accurately,” Andries van den Berg, Partner at Deloitte Africa explains.
Dayne Turbitt, Managing Director for EMEA at Anaplan adds,: “If every silo has its own spreadsheet, you spend decision-making time reconciling data. With a single source of truth, you walk into the meeting and the data is the data. Then you can ask, ‘What if I shift resources? Pull out of one country and invest in another?’ and run scenarios very quickly.”
Connected finance in action
There is no better example of connected finance (the integration of planning and data across business functions, giving CFOs a single source of truth to make real-time, scenario-based decisions that link strategy to measurable outcomes) in action than the relationship between Anaplan and Deloitte.
Anaplan is a global, cloud-native connected planning platform. Its in-memory calculation engine enables organisations to analyse data, model scenarios, and make better decisions at scale, across finance, sales, supply chain, hHuman rResources (HR) and operations. Deloitte, as one of the world’s largest professional services firms operating across more than 150 countries, focuses on finance transformation so clients can maximise shareholder value through structured methodologies. Together, Anaplan’s technology and Deloitte’s methodologies create a powerful fit that turns data-driven insights into actionable plans that directly drive enterprise value.
Dayne explains that while Anaplan provides the powerful technology, its true impact depends on the right expertise to guide it;: “We’re a technology - you can put anything into our platform, and they always say, ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ What Deloitte’s Enterprise Value Map does is identify the key drivers or levers in a business. Deloitte defines those value drivers, and then we put them into technology so clients get real-time access to the current state and can test multiple futures.”
Andries explains further that: “Once we understand which levers truly matter for shareholder value, you plan for those levers and ask, ‘If we shift the dial here, what’s the impact on ultimate shareholder value?’ That’s how you link connected finance to the EVM.”
The benefits of partnership in connected finance
As such, the partnership operates on a simple model: Deloitte brings the process, Anaplan brings the platform. “ERPs are brilliant systems of record but they’re not designed to change at the whim of a senior stakeholder meeting. Platforms like Anaplan bring the edge: you agree a change, plan for it, track it, and pivot fast. ‘Fail fast’ only works if you have data to show you’re on the right or wrong track,” says Andries.
For Dayne, the strength lies in agility and scale;: “It’s a 15-year-old technology, cloud native from the start, designed in a microservices architecture. We call them honeycombs. You can solve a particular problem quickly, and then connect it into the bigger picture. That’s why our implementation cycles are just eight to twelve weeks. We went live in 12 weeks with an FP&A system in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); and 10 weeks for capital planning in Saudi Arabia. And it scales: Fortune-50 workloads, supply chains, and workforce planning because the calculation engine handles truly massive models.”
Dayne illustrates the clear benefits further by sharing successes of some of their clients.: “CBH Spirits improved forecast accuracy by 20% in just 12 weeks; Straumann improved demand forecast accuracy by 18%, worth around CHF 3.63 million annually in inventory impact, and Jaguar Land Rover used connected finance to respond to tariff changes over a single weekend, pausing and restarting shipments to avoid billions in unnecessary duty.”
Benefits extend beyond being financial too, however, as Andries explains the work-life balance outcome for one of Deloitte’s clients.: “A mining planner moved from six-weeks-on/two-weeks-off rotations to working from home because the Anaplan implementation made the job manageable online. When you trust the number, you get time back to think and to be with your family,” he says.
The CFO’s mandate
Central to the purpose of Deloitte and Anaplan’s partnership is addressing the growing strategic role of the CFO. “I’m seeing a surge of CFOs being made CEOs,” says Andries. “Data-savvy CFOs understand how functional numbers translate into financial results and that’s the hidden superpower. They’re not the accounting department anymore; they’re at the heart of strategy.”
Dayne adds that “CFOs have the unique vantage point over the whole business. They know how market conditions, capital investment and profitability connect. In today’s environment, they must pivot quickly, and only real-time connected data from across sales, supply chain and HR makes that possible.”
Into the future
Considering the future, both see Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a practical accelerator and not a replacement of human expertise. “AI isn’t going to take a job; the person who knows how to use AI will. It lowers the barrier to build models. You can describe the logic, and the assistant scaffolds the model; you review and deploy. It supports the human, it does not replace the human,” says Andries.
Dayne agrees,: “It’s a productivity tool. Ask AI to scan dashboards and flag exceptions, for example;: ‘find every country missing budget by 5%’, so people spend their time on judgement and action. You don’t need billion-dollar experiments, instead be. Be a fast follower, adopt proven capabilities now, and improve productivity and accuracy immediately. Ignore AI at your own peril. It just takes a little courage to face the unknown, start experimenting, and through that you’ll find the sweet spot for your company.,” he says.
And nowhere is AI more critical for CFOs than it is in connected finance, where the challenge is not only to understand the past but to model the future, or iterations of it. As Andries says,: “There are very important transactional systems of record in a company that are designed to tell you everything you’ve done, but there are very few systems of record that can allow you to create multiple futures.”
Together, Deloitte and Anaplan show that connected finance is not just about keeping pace with change; it is the engine for shaping the future of the CFO.
