Yvonne, an advocate for corporate governance, automation, analytics, and sustainability, has over 29 years of experience in finance, ERP systems, and business transformation. She held key positions at Enterprise Singapore and Maritime and Port Authority, earning multiple professional accolades and serving on various influential committees.

In a recent conversation with the Global Woman Leader Magazine, Yvonne discusses the CFO's evolving role to prioritize customer-centricity over internal operations. She advocates innovative strategies for CFOs to enhance collaboration with customer-facing departments like sales and marketing.

In today's rapidly evolving financial landscape, how do you perceive the role of the CFO evolving to ensure the Finance function becomes more customer-centric rather than solely focused on internal operations?

It is not intuitive for finance personnel to recognize that we serve many disparate stakeholders ranging from billing clients, vendors, internal customers, regulators and investors.  Each has their expectations of service excellence.  As our low value transactional work gets increasingly automated, it is imperative to upskill and pivot towards more customer centric service delivery including developing more user-friendly processes and digital services.  More and more so, CFO leading the team has to put customer centricity as a key KPI for goal setting and take effort to measure this.

What innovative strategies do you believe CFOs can employ to foster greater collaboration between Finance and other customer-facing departments such as sales, marketing, and customer service?

In order to ensure end to end excellence, CFO needs to understand processes leading into and out of finance.  Even if finance processes are improved but the front and back end are not enhanced, the overall experience may not be realized.  This is likened to a 2-lane traffic.  When a certain road portion is expanded to 4 lanes, the road will still be jammed because parts remained as 2.  Some tools could be using value stream mapping under lean office and will cut across multiple Departments such as marketing, sales, order fulfillment and finance.  Today, many organisations may not view that customer service may involve CFOs and that is an issue.

Could you share insights into how you've seen successful CFOs adapt their communication style and financial reporting frameworks to better resonate with diverse stakeholders, including customers and shareholders?

This depends on who the stakeholders are and which industry it is in.  Communication and reporting styles differ in matured MNC vs an SMC.  In an organization which is a start up or SME, there might be a need to be more autocratic using a driver top-down approach with stringent reports because there is a need for stronger structure and governance.  However, in a more matured set up where polices and processes are more established, CFO can adapt to be more democratic and even co-create solutions with the stakeholders.  Reports may tend towards unstructured data analytics to drill down into strategic business units, product lines or problem areas.  This is assuming better data warehouse/data Lake to do so.

By the increasing importance of sustainability and social responsibility in today's business landscape, how do you see the role of the CFO evolving to integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into financial decision-making, thus aligning with customer values?

With concepts like triple bottom line and double materiality in the world of sustainability, ESG alone is not enough. This calls for EESG to include Economic as the first E.  First and foremost, an organisation should be financially viable before taking care of the rest.  Sustainability concepts should be integrated into the strategic plans and culture. Most processes start with the customers and end with the customers.  Hence, more combined roles of CFSO (Chief Financial and Sustainability Office) evolved to recognise the impact of ESG on external customers and internal culture.  As supply chains green, there are fears of losing out and cost of capital will increase as organisations compete for the tight availableresources.

In industries where subscription-based models or recurring revenue streams are prevalent, what strategies do you believe CFOs can employ to ensure sustainable growth while maintaining a strong focus on customer satisfaction and retention?

Organisations are transitioning to be more assets light.  This will affect cashflow planning for product manufacturing companies to convert to service entities.  In service delivery, customers are more likely to switch loyalty if they don’t get what they expect.  This is prevalent in the IT world with Saas solutions which are having more seminars, customer days and account  managers to visit clients at their office, hear out at larger focus groups or create awareness of latest solutions to problem statements.

With the increasing importance of digital transformation, what steps do you recommend CFOs take to ensure that the finance function leverages digital tools and platforms to not only streamline processes but also enhance the overall customer experience?

When your competition improves their digital services, the game is up for the industry. All of a sudden what your company delivered in the past was no longer good enough. The velocity of change gets faster and faster. This puts pressure to ensure constant market awareness and sense making. As employees change jobs more often, they may come from organisations that provide better internal digital tools and platforms and they will demand for the same, if not better.  This further heightened the customer excellence demands. It is imperative for CFOs to do more benchmarking with other like-minded CFOs to brainstorm and share best practices to derive innovative options to deliberate on.Do bear in mind that as the younger generation enters the workforce, these are digital natives and are technologically scurvy ahead of ourselves and we need to constantly upgrade and upskill to adapt to this changing world.