Financial Officer's role changing, says survey

The economic slowdown and high profile corporate failures, are changing the role of the chief financial officer, says a Deloitte & Touche Management Consultants survey.

Recently surveyed CFOs face far different challenges to those identified in the 2000 survey according to Shane Mohan, partner at Deloitte & Touche.

"We attempted to identify the major challenges facing CFOs and capture the way in which they see their role evolving. What we found was that CFOs are being forced to look internally now, getting people to manage on lower budgets.

"In 2000, when we visited this group the focus was on increased process efficiency, and recruiting and retaining quality staff. Recruiting and retaining staff in particular is now a less significant issue for

CFOs."

The survey found that CFOs are returning to a more traditional role - 20% say they have reverted to the role of corporate scorekeeper.

"It's never a bad thing to be concerned with corporate governance and risk management, in

addition to providing a proactive financial management service," says Mohan.

Over 150 CFOs from a broad range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, technology, media and telecoms, retail and distribution, responded to the survey.

One third of the companies who participated were PLCs and participating CFOs were evenly split across turnover bands ranging from less than €10m to greater than €100m.