As researchers, we’ve asked ourselves this question many times over the last 12 months.
But the answers can come only from the profession.
Future of Finance 2.0, led by a multi-disciplinary team from the AICPA & CIMA Global Research & Development and Curriculum teams, is our investigation into the role of management accountants in a context that is at once familiar and unsettling. Through our interactions with more than 500 finance leaders, financial professionals, regulators, academics, and students, we examined and investigated the ambit of finance in a rapidly changing world, highlighting the critical factors and proficiencies necessary to our evolution and advancement as a profession.
A project of this scale must necessarily take a phased approach, and we took the decision to publish our findings throughout the year to provide the management accounting community — employers, regulators and policymakers, academics and tuition providers, and management accounting practitioners — with the most up-to-date information. After all, the Future of Finance belongs to you as much as it does to us.
During June and July, we published the findings of our literature review in a four-part series. This set the scene for Future of Finance 2.0 by providing an overview of academic and industry research published between 2019 and 2022. These are a great way of getting up to speed on four key topics:
Finance in the Hybrid Workplace
The Race to Digital Adoption in Finance
Data and Data Analytics in Finance
Technology in Finance
From our interviews and roundtables, we identified four emerging themes, the findings of which were published between August and December 2023.
The changing role and mandate of finance
This report outlines the role, identity, and mandate for the accounting and finance profession, from foundational principles to more recent expansion into new areas such as technology, sustainability, and new modes of leadership. We identify management accountants as savvy analysts, communicators, decision-makers, and business partners who are growing and improving organisations internally to influence their organisations’ business models and ever-changing environments.
The digital journey of finance
Our conversations with accounting and finance professionals confirm that we are collectively on a continuous, evolving transformation, leading to new business models, new mindsets, and new ways of working. The profession is transforming, and technology is paving the way for its future. Today, more than ever, organisations are looking for ways to strengthen their digital capabilities by implementing new infrastructures, leveraging new technical tools, looking for innovative ideas, and capitalising on the vast amount of available (but often fragmented, uncontrolled, and poorly governed) data.
Organisational sustainability and ESG
Organisational performance is no longer being judged purely on short-term financial returns to shareholders. Now, an organisation’s customers, workforce, and investors — as well as governments and society at large — all demand greater transparency beyond the traditional financial metrics. Finance functions are stepping up to meet the challenges that a sustainability focus presents. They realise it is no longer possible to continue with the unsustainable model of business as usual. Sustainability is fast becoming the lifeblood of resilient organisations. Management accountants must be able to participate not just in reporting how the organisation has created value, but also in co-creation of long-term value.
The reverberations of ongoing technological, environmental, and social transformations, not least the COVID-19 pandemic, have had significant impact on the places in which we work. Although we now understand better how to seek and achieve a more balanced way of living and working, hybrid and remote work has also led to and illuminated inconsistencies in collaboration, inclusion, acculturating, and belonging. Our research found that communication is the greatest challenge of the new work environment and that the finance business partnering mindset can help address this.
A key finding to end the year
Don’t have time to trawl through all the links we’ve shared? We understand — management accountants around the world have told us how busy they are. So, here’s one key finding for you. In the post-pandemic environment, we find that, far from the ‘robots will steal your jobs’ headlines, the focus of the profession has returned to human factors: people, relationships, skills, and knowledge. A very positive note on which to end the old year and ring in the new.
Wishing you all a happy and prosperous New Year. Keep an eye out for our flagship report ‘Re-defining Finance for a Sustainable World’, which will be published in early 2024.