Startups, New Tech and the Strategic CFO

In this episode of The Better Finance Podcast, EY’s Myles Corson and Deepak Krishnamurthy, Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President at SAP, discuss emerging technologies and the role that startup community plays in innovation today. Adapting and incorporating new technologies is leading the way for exponential change in companies.

Adapting and incorporating new technologies is leading the way for exponential change in companies. EY’s Myles Corson and Deepak Krishnamurthy, Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President at SAP, discuss emerging technologies and the role the startup community plays in innovation today.

Key takeaways

• The pace of change in the last five years has been exponentially faster than most anticipated, and experimentation with adapting and incorporating new technologies is leading the way in which companies can stay competitive.
• Machine learning and automation will drive enormous productivity in assuming responsibility for low value, high volume activities, freeing up human time for more engaging and innovative activities.
• In a sense, expectations for the short-term implementation may be disproportionately high, but the long-term effects of true incorporation of blockchain will transform the way that low trust, distributor, and multiple parties’ environments operate.
• Instead of viewing innovation through a traditional financial investment lens, financial teams should view new advancements as a sort of portfolio bed through which you can experiment with variations on each program without risk for dramatic loss.
• The modern CFO needs to consider the finance function through an operational and organizational lens, aggregating successes and failures through the purview of each business unit in order to fully understand their whole organization’s successes and failures.
• Future finance professionals need to be data driven in both mindset and skillset, with an ability to analyze, present, and act upon research driven business principles.