CFOs say tech, volatility have changed the job

As recently as five years ago, if you had tried talking with Ann Dennison, CFO of the Cigna Group, about things like generative AI, data, or enterprise architecture, “I would have said [you have the] wrong executive…you should be talking to the head of tech,” Dennison told attendees at this year’s Workiva Amplify conference in Las Vegas.

Dennison was part of a panel of CFOs who, in a wide-ranging discussion, discussed the primary drivers behind the CFO job’s evolution: technology, data, and volatility.

For example, finance leaders have an important role to play in ensuring accurate data, so that organizations can trust the outputs they’re getting from tech tools, Dennison said. Medical insurer and benefits provider Cigna Group built a “finance data office” to connect the data in financial statements or FP&A reports “back to the accounting data, the operational data, the transactional data.” It’s a “single source of confidence” to “mak[e] sure people can trust the data” they’re basing decisions on.

It can’t wait. Since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, “volatility really stopped being just an event…it’s become the baseline,” Workiva CFO Barbara Larson said during the session.

“Decision-making is probably where you feel it the most; you just don’t have the luxury anymore of waiting around for full certainty,” Larson continued. Consequently, “speed of judgment has almost become the new skill.” Business leaders, she said, sometimes must react to quickly evolving situations without all the data yet available, “because by the time we wait for 100% of [the data], the moment’s already passed.”

This changing remit also means that CFOs have become more strategic partners in the C-suite, according to Douglas Schosser, CFO of Northwest Bank.

“We’ve always wanted [to be] a trusted advisor and more of a consultant to the business,” Schosser said, “and I think now, because everything is accelerated [and] we’re in this constant state of new information, people are really looking at finance [and asking], ‘How can I weed through all of this noise and static to get to the more important and most critical pieces?’”

Budding relationship. The CFO has also grown closer with their technology counterparts, Schosser said. “It was always IT’s job to get the data,” he said. “The biggest change is rather than us looking to IT as the answer, I think now there’s a huge collaboration” between finance and IT—“trying to think about, how do we establish controls around the data, how do we get the data where it’s usable, and then how do we make sure that the data is available.”