CA Sri Lanka, IBM CFO Forum highlights growing challenges

Vishmi Wijeratne

The Institute of Chartered Accountants partnered with IBM in conducting the IBM CFO Forum 2013. Country Manager IBM, Sachin Seth said that this was their first forum in South East Asia. The role of the IBM forum is to give light to the role of value integrators in a Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

"We hope to create an analytical culture through our latest product IBM integrated Business. Through this CFOs we will be able to anticipate outcomes, adapting, evaluating business outcome, providing a coordinating strategy, anticipating risk and also visible insight," Seth said.

Seth said that to develop this product and their role here in Sri Lanka they have based a study on an eye to eye interview with 1900 CFOs throughout the world in 2010. According to him the reason they based it on a study in 2010 was because it was the year that many businesses decided to come out from the economic crash in 2008.

"Through that we acknowledged that the value integrators are experts in two fields, which is Finance efficiency and business insight. Through this study we came to the conclusion that only 23% of the 1900 CFOs interviewed were value integrators," he said

Later in year 2012, IBM continued the survey with 15 selected companies who have performed so much better than the other companies. IBM had been able to clarify the reason behind their eminent success was that all of these companies have gone through a difficult time and have survived.

"We realized that there a few reasons as to why they were much better than the other companies, some of the 15 companies have been struggling to survive and turn around the companies to become profit making companies and some companies have recruited CFOs with value integrating skills and were making changes in their companies and as a result their competency was high," Seth said.

According to Seth, IBM moving into making business products is a timely investment. IBM's role in Sri Lanka is to give the CFOs role in Sri Lanka a better standing and take them towards value integration.