Towards world-class finance organisations: Why, what, and how?

Recently the CFOs from some 30 large Finnish companies met to explore what collaborating on finance competence development could look like. The outcome was clear: there is both a need and an appetite to act. The result is a Finance Development Consortium — a joint effort to reach, and sustain, world-class performance in finance organisations.

This article examines that ambition from three angles: Why aim for world-class now in these volatile times? What does world-class actually mean? And how can we realistically get there?

Why aim for world-class now?

Beneath all the tiresome volatility we currently have several big shifts ongoing. Prompted by wars and crises, uncertainty, sanctions and tariffs, a major realignment of supply chains is taking place. Regional resilience is being emphasised at the expense of global cost efficiency. At the same time the rise of, in effect, a totally new class of technology, powerful AI, is impacting business.

The potential impact of powerful AI in the medium and long term is to some extent obscured by the volatility surrounding it. We have AI accelerationists and AI doomers, whose sometimes very shrill pronouncements seem totally unrelated to the mundane and not very productive world of Copilot and free ChatGPT versions.

At the same time, we indeed have an ongoing very rapid change in the practice and economics of developing and deploying software. Because AI models and their harnesses are at heart software, we are seeing a rapidly increasing pace of improvement in their capabilities.

What finance functions are, and how they do it, are right in the middle of the impact zone. There are many models. All the big consultancies have their own variants, but what finance functions do boils down to three things:

They run processes effectively and efficiently, from high-volume transaction processes to more specialised ones like tax.
They process information and provide it in refined form to the rest of the organisation as reports, analyses, and models.
And they help keep control and manage risk in different ways.

They are knowledge organisations, which means that they do their job with exactly two classes of resources: people and information systems.

Powerful AI changes the economics of software development, making it much easier and less costly to automate and build new tools. It leverages competence. If you know what's needed, it's easier to get it done, and create more value.

Powerful AI changes the economics of software development, making it much easier and less costly to automate and build new tools. It leverages competence. If you know what's needed, it's easier to get it done, and create more value.

On the other hand, more and more things are no longer worth doing manually. So, while turbulence and fundamental changes in the business environment demand support from finance in all the three dimensions of what finance does, there is an opportunity for finance to step up and generate significantly more value with existing resources. But leveraging competence rests on the ability to build and maintain competence to leverage. The alternative is inefficiency and obsolescence.

Recently the CFOs from some 30 large Finnish companies met to explore what collaborating on finance competence development could look like. The outcome was clear: there is both a need and an appetite to act. The result is a Finance Development Consortium — a joint effort to reach, and sustain, world-class performance in finance organisations.

This article examines that ambition from three angles: Why aim for world-class now in these volatile times? What does world-class actually mean? And how can we realistically get there?

Why aim for world-class now?

Beneath all the tiresome volatility we currently have several big shifts ongoing. Prompted by wars and crises, uncertainty, sanctions and tariffs, a major realignment of supply chains is taking place. Regional resilience is being emphasised at the expense of global cost efficiency. At the same time the rise of, in effect, a totally new class of technology, powerful AI, is impacting business.

The potential impact of powerful AI in the medium and long term is to some extent obscured by the volatility surrounding it. We have AI accelerationists and AI doomers, whose sometimes very shrill pronouncements seem totally unrelated to the mundane and not very productive world of Copilot and free ChatGPT versions.

At the same time, we indeed have an ongoing very rapid change in the practice and economics of developing and deploying software. Because AI models and their harnesses are at heart software, we are seeing a rapidly increasing pace of improvement in their capabilities.

What finance functions are, and how they do it, are right in the middle of the impact zone. There are many models. All the big consultancies have their own variants, but what finance functions do boils down to three things:

They run processes effectively and efficiently, from high-volume transaction processes to more specialised ones like tax.
They process information and provide it in refined form to the rest of the organisation as reports, analyses, and models.
And they help keep control and manage risk in different ways.

They are knowledge organisations, which means that they do their job with exactly two classes of resources: people and information systems.

Powerful AI changes the economics of software development, making it much easier and less costly to automate and build new tools. It leverages competence. If you know what's needed, it's easier to get it done, and create more value.

Powerful AI changes the economics of software development, making it much easier and less costly to automate and build new tools. It leverages competence. If you know what's needed, it's easier to get it done, and create more value.

On the other hand, more and more things are no longer worth doing manually. So, while turbulence and fundamental changes in the business environment demand support from finance in all the three dimensions of what finance does, there is an opportunity for finance to step up and generate significantly more value with existing resources. But leveraging competence rests on the ability to build and maintain competence to leverage. The alternative is inefficiency and obsolescence.

Recently the CFOs from some 30 large Finnish companies met to explore what collaborating on finance competence development could look like. The outcome was clear: there is both a need and an appetite to act. The result is a Finance Development Consortium — a joint effort to reach, and sustain, world-class performance in finance organisations.

This article examines that ambition from three angles: Why aim for world-class now in these volatile times? What does world-class actually mean? And how can we realistically get there?

Why aim for world-class now?

Beneath all the tiresome volatility we currently have several big shifts ongoing. Prompted by wars and crises, uncertainty, sanctions and tariffs, a major realignment of supply chains is taking place. Regional resilience is being emphasised at the expense of global cost efficiency. At the same time the rise of, in effect, a totally new class of technology, powerful AI, is impacting business.

The potential impact of powerful AI in the medium and long term is to some extent obscured by the volatility surrounding it. We have AI accelerationists and AI doomers, whose sometimes very shrill pronouncements seem totally unrelated to the mundane and not very productive world of Copilot and free ChatGPT versions.

At the same time, we indeed have an ongoing very rapid change in the practice and economics of developing and deploying software. Because AI models and their harnesses are at heart software, we are seeing a rapidly increasing pace of improvement in their capabilities.

What finance functions are, and how they do it, are right in the middle of the impact zone. There are many models. All the big consultancies have their own variants, but what finance functions do boils down to three things:

They run processes effectively and efficiently, from high-volume transaction processes to more specialised ones like tax.
They process information and provide it in refined form to the rest of the organisation as reports, analyses, and models.
And they help keep control and manage risk in different ways.

They are knowledge organisations, which means that they do their job with exactly two classes of resources: people and information systems.

Powerful AI changes the economics of software development, making it much easier and less costly to automate and build new tools. It leverages competence. If you know what's needed, it's easier to get it done, and create more value.

Powerful AI changes the economics of software development, making it much easier and less costly to automate and build new tools. It leverages competence. If you know what's needed, it's easier to get it done, and create more value.

On the other hand, more and more things are no longer worth doing manually. So, while turbulence and fundamental changes in the business environment demand support from finance in all the three dimensions of what finance does, there is an opportunity for finance to step up and generate significantly more value with existing resources. But leveraging competence rests on the ability to build and maintain competence to leverage. The alternative is inefficiency and obsolescence.