WORLD ACADEMY OF INFORMATICS AND MANAGEMENT SCIENCES
ISSN : 2278-1315
Most are likely to be obsolete within a couple of years – to
leadership at all levels. To do this, they need accounting and
be replaced by ones that we currently do not see or that
finance skills, business acumen, people skills and leadership
simply don’t exist yet. This has implications for how the
skills.
finance professional learns and develops new skills. We will
The framework is underpinned by the need for objectivity,
need to become adaptive learners, requiring more frequent
integrity and ethical behavior, and includes a commitment to
skills and knowledge upgrades. Our organizational value
continually acquire new skills and knowledge.
moves from ‘expertise’ to one of ‘agility’ and continuous
reinvention.
Figure 2: The 2015 CGMA Competency Framework
The constant need to fail fast and relearn in a complex
world, and the frequent upgrade of our skills, plays to the
strength of the lifelong learning philosophy of the finance
professional. It highlights the ever-growing importance of
continuing professional development and education on the
quest to finding out what we don’t know.
The need for growth mindsets and continued learning was
strongly articulated in our interviews. An interviewee from
an international bank told us: “Finance people need a
mindset that enables them to adapt through continuous
learning. They need to learn, unlearn and relearn in a
continuous loop”. Another individual in the aerospace and
automotive sector talked about the finance function having
“a business enablement mindset”. Here, their primary role is
a solutions focus, while ensuring compliance is not
compromised. Finally, in a conversation with a banking
representative, the finance function mindset was labeled,
“techno-functional and techno-commercial”.
Here, they used a creative and questioning style to
understand disruption, in order to help the organization
continually adapt. Some of the multinational organizations
we spoke with have implemented rotation programmes for
finance staff. This allows the finance professional to learn
and gain skills in different areas of the organization or on
projects that sit outside their accounting roles. It widens
their end-to-end business knowledge and gives them the
flexibility to work across the organization, embedding
specialist wisdom. One participant described the finance
professional’s role as “a transformation agent, to steer the
organization through the risks of a digital revolution”. In
this organization, the role has become focused on improving
shareholder value by building organizational resilience and
agility.
CGMA ® Competency Framework
Technical
Skill
Business
Skill
Leadership
Skill
People Skill
Ethics, integrity and professionalism
1. Technical skills: guardians of the automated finance
process and accounting algorithm
The movement from ‘knowledge’ to ‘meaning’ makes the
competencies within the technical skills area highly
susceptible to automation. A 2017 McKinsey report into
where machines could replace humans demonstrates the shift.
Their research examined groups of occupational activities and
ranked them according to their susceptibility to automation.
Work activities at risk of automation include data collection,
data processing and predictable physical work. Less
automatable activities include managing others, applying
expertise, stakeholder interactions and unpredictable physical
work. McKinsey’s forecast is: ‘while few occupations are
fully automatable, 60 per cent of all occupations have at least
30 per cent technically automatable activities’.
Figure 3: McKinsey’s report into the technical potential
for automation in the US
In one interview, an employee at a US multinational
technology company described the finance function as “the
playground of problems”. They explained that it was best to
spend time playing with an issue or problem, so as to better
understand it. Here the openness to experiment through the
curious eyes of a child challenges our pre-learned
assumptions and skills to find the most innovative solutions.
Changing competencies and automation
The CGMA (Chartered Global Management Accountants)
competency framework (Figure 2) is based on what
organizations expect finance professionals to do. Finance
professionals are expected to perform accounting and
finance activities within the context of the organizations in
which they operate. They are expected to influence the
decisions, actions and behaviors of their colleagues within
their organizations and outside it, and to provide
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Estimates of extent to which different types of roles could be
automated; Source: McKinsey
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