Financial Executive Magazine
By Jeffrey Marshall and Ellen M. Heffes

The editors reached out to a wide range of experts — CFOs and former CFOs, consultants, academics, accountants and technology vendors — to get their thoughts about what the coming years could bring for financial executives.

If you’re old enough to remember the 1960s’ cartoon, The Jetsons, you’ll recall a very different vision of the “future” than the one we’re living in now. The Jetsons had a robot to do housework, and traveled in a kind of mini-pod vehicle that was attached to something like a monorail. Appliances made their everyday lives largely work-free.

The point here is that speculation about the future, however well-informed, can’t accurately predict how quickly we;ll get there. As much as the world of business and finance has changed in the past 75 years, it probably hasn’t altered as much as some might have forecast. And some of the eternal truths about finance keep getting repeated, implying that change is more gradual than it might appear.

Consider some of the thoughts from people in the field years ago. In “The Future and the Financial Executive,” in the February 1973 issue of Financial Executive, management consultant Alfredo Amescua R. wrote: “As a top-level professional, the financial executive must have an overall view of the corporation. He has to be more and more sensitive to humanistic values and he must not restrict himself to acting only on the basis of a purely technical analysis of problems.”

In the October 1981 issue — celebrating FEI’s 50th Anniversary — Edward W. Golden, chairman of Skott/Edwards Consultants Inc., wrote on “The Changing Role of the Financial Executive: The continuing challenge in our field is developing people who are by nature somewhat reserved and introverted into positions that call for dynamic human relations skills.”

On the growing role of technology, another financial officer said, “The world is swimming a little faster; if the financial executive ever had a green eyeshade, he doesn’t have time to put it on anymore.”

Indeed, 25 years ago, the top finance job was summed up: “The dynamically changing function of the financial executive has created a demand for a new type of individual to fill what has become the exciting focal point of the American business community. And, men and women (included, finally) will find a job filled with: more pressure, increased visibility, more mobility, better compensation and more opportunity.” The article ends: “In short, it’s a bull market today for the qualified financial executive. Those who can accommodate the changing demands and meet the challenges of today are assured a bright tomorrow.”

What about today’s take on tomorrow? Without asking them to get too cosmic, the editors reached out to a host of different people in different realms of finance to get their views on what the future will bring to CFOs and finance departments. Those responses can be broken down into a number of subject areas. Here are their replies:

FRAUD:
Tracy L. Coenen, a principal in Sequence Inc. in Milwaukee, has spent the 10 past years in forensic accounting. A CPA and certified fraud examiner, she has a somewhat jaundiced view of companies’ current and prospective anti-fraud efforts. “Until companies admit that fraud may have an impact on them, that won’t change,” she says. “A common estimate is that fraud represents 5 percent of revenues each year — and a lot of companies don’t think that’s material to them.”

Coenen agrees that “some of the better companies” have used Sarbanes-Oxley compliance to fix some of their internal controls. But, in an ominous thought for the future, she adds, “Some simply did the documentation they were required to do; they didn’t use to effort to improve the [financial reporting] process.”

But Coenen doesn’t think the answer is future regulation, and doesn’t favor “a lot of legislation; I’d rather see companies be proactive about it.” She believes that companies “could do a lot more to act on risk; they are not taking preventive measures. They don’t make it a top priority. Companies think their controls are better than they really are.”