The Future CFO

Ambition recently hosted the first event of our ‘The Future of Finance’ event series on ‘The Future CFO’ in partnership with Darrell Burberry at Arcadia Consulting. The event was attended by a select group of finance leaders within professional services firms.

In my 10 years’ experience recruiting CFOs and Financial Directors in professional services, both in the UK and internationally, I don’t recall there ever being a time when finance leaders had so many internal and external factors and considerations to manage and balance as part of their role as a successful leader.

I’ve had many a conversation with CFOs and FDs on topics ranging from AI, automation, technology and systems, lock-up, productisation, Brexit and regulation to name just a few!

Today, legal and professional services firms are more reliant than ever on their finance leaders to help them navigate through this change and achieve their firm’s financial and business objectives.

In light of this, Ambition decided to partner up with Arcadia Consulting to put on a series of events for our network of finance leaders within professional services on ‘The Future of Finance’.

The aim of these events is to provide a platform from which these senior finance leaders can share their challenges and learn some practical tools and ideas which will help them be as successful as possible in their roles.

Some key takeaways from our last event were:

The four personas

A CFO needs to play various roles. We asked attendees to identify which of the four ‘CFO personas’ they currently identify with and what role they might want to play in the next 12 – 18 months to be most effective.

Visualization

Data and storytelling were key themes of the event. Many senior finance leaders tend to focus on simply presenting the facts and figures to stakeholders which doesn’t always fully engage them.

Darrell stressed the importance of presenting information in a visually engaging way and using storytelling to take the audience on a journey and explain the relevance and meaning behind the figures.

What? So what? Now what?

Following this structure when presenting data will help finance leaders to portray the meaning behind the data as well as any action that needs to be taken. This will help you to become more impactful and influential as a finance leader when presenting to the board.

​Thank you to everyone who attended and especially to Darrell and Arcadia. We’ll be hosting the next event in our ‘The Future of Finance’ series early in 2020 so please get in touch if you’d be interested in participating in future sessions.

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