Top Initiatives for Mid-Sized CFO’s

In a recent report published by Gartner, Inc regarding the top Initiatives in 2020 for finance executives of Mid-Sized organizations, cost-cutting remains a top priority.  In a key finding, the report claims seventy-seven percent of CFOs cite the business’ lack of interest in right sizing cost structure as a top challenge, but only 18% are confident in their ability to solve this cost Structure Challenge.

Not surprisingly, 43% of CFOs report inefficient or ineffective long-range planning as a top problem with only 14% reporting a high level of confidence in solving this challenge.

The other top priorities include:

• Metrics and management reporting
• Finance and technology optimization
• Finance organization strategy and structure.*

Interestingly, payment fraud and security did not make the top five initiatives in the above report, but there is some interesting data that indicates it should be a concern.  The AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report showed that 82% of companies were targets of payment fraud last year.  This figure is climbed dramatically to the tune of 20 percentage points higher than reported in 2014.

A couple of other key stats around payment fraud as cited by the report:

• 80% of organizations experienced Business Email Compromise
  • 54% reported financial loss as a result of the compromise
  • 70% of scams targets checks
• 70% of organizations experienced check fraud
• 64% of attempted or actual payment fraud resulted from actions of those outside the organization**

Both reports mentioned above include additional detail around the statistics and are both good reads. 

*Information cited from Gartner, Inc  Finance Top Initiatives in 2020.  The full report is available at Gartner.com
**Information cited from 2019 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey.  The survey is available at AFPonline.org.