The expanded engagement allows the two companies to continue to co-innovate and drive faster, smarter insights from finance data. Genpact supports Mondelēz International’s global finance operations in 75 countries, delivering simplified and standardised operations across more than 150 finance and accounting processes. Over the last three years, Genpact has helped Mondelēz International centralise its finance and accounting delivery model from a dispersed, country-based structure into six efficient, productive global centres. Robotic process automation, dynamic workflow, mobility, and other digital technologies have automated and streamlined operations to drive more strategic business decisions and speed time-to-market.

“This new agreement underscores Genpact’s success in helping us fast-track our finance transformation, harnessing the power of digital technology and deep process expertise to reimagine our operations and drive competitive growth,” said Brian Gladden, executive vice president and chief financial officer, Mondelēz International. “Genpact’s global reach, and deep understanding of both finance operations and our industry, makes it the strategic partner we need as we build the best snacking company in the world.”

Mondelēz International can achieve value-added insights faster than ever before through easy access to accurate, actionable data. The finance organisation has significantly improved the time-to-close cycle; every month and quarter close has trended better than the previous one. Mondelēz International is investing the savings unlocked through simplified, more efficient operations into innovation and special projects to drive revenue. The new contract with Genpact will extend transformation benefits across other parts of Mondelēz International’s shared services organisation.

“Driving agility and improving margins are table stakes in the competitive snacking industry to meet evolving consumer trends. To succeed, companies need to reimagine how to unlock areas for growth,” said Balkrishan ‘BK’ Kalra, business leader, Consumer Packaged Goods, Genpact. “Our co-innovation with Mondelēz International will continue to create new ways to drive profitability, including leveraging advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. Our deep domain expertise, combined with products and services powered by our Genpact Cora platform, deliver significant value to support Mondelēz International’s growth strategy.”

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In most industries, approximately 70 percent of invoice disputes occur due to inaccurate information and missing or late invoices, which frustrates customers, and also ties up cash in accounts receivable, delays payments, and increases costs. Genpact’s solution – which it is co-creating with clients and optimising its deep expertise running F&A operations for hundreds of large multinational enterprises – uses distributed ledger blockchain technology, allowing various internal and external stakeholders to easily and transparently share data among multiple computer systems. This eliminates the potential for data mismatches among multiple parties involved in F&A functions – such as accepting and processing orders, managing fulfilment, and generating invoices – and as a result, reduces time spent managing disputes.

The solution drives smart contracts that deliver seamless, automated execution of transactional data, including invoice and contract information. This disruptive approach has the potential to dramatically reduce the amount of past due invoices to less than 3 percent in most companies, which enhances cash flow performance, reduces revenue leakage from disputes, and lowers costs.

Genpact’s blockchain F&A solution also integrates with customer and supplier banks, allowing visibility to transaction status across end-to-end operations. By automating the payment process once the transaction has been validated and approved, the solution eliminates the potential for errors, which speeds payments processing and delivers a more seamless customer experience.

“Industry disruption is making cycle times irrelevant in finance. Leading companies will be those that harness the power of digital technologies to transform processes, improve billing quality and timeliness, and drive greater accuracy and visibility,” says Shantanu Ghosh, senior vice-president, CFO Services and Consulting at Genpact. “Our solution delivers an entirely new digital way to run F&A operations. Genpact’s industry-leading domain expertise managing one of the world’s largest learning data sets for F&A processes – combined with our proven capabilities developing digital solutions for finance organizations – gives us valuable insights that help CFOs and their teams improve cash flow, operating profits, and customer experiences at an accelerated pace and in a predictable manner.”

While initially conceptualised to support order-to-cash operations, Genpact also plans to extend the blockchain solution’s scalable platform to bring transformational value across the finance and supply chain organisations. As part of its strategy to drive both digital-led innovation and digital-enabled intelligent operations for its clients, Genpact leverages its Lean DigitalSM approach, which combines design thinking methodologies, leading digital technology and analytics, Lean principles, and deep domain expertise to develop solutions that generate significant business impact to create sustainable competitive advantage.

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Suparna Goswami Bhattacharya

October 17, 2014: When someone mentions “CFO”, the first thing to hit the mind is – a guy managing finance in a company.

However, with time, the role of the CFO has evolved. Today if you mention about the ‘managing finance’ bit to any CFO worth his salt, he will probably laugh out loud.

Once focused on cost containment, accounting and compliance, the position has evolved into that of a true business partner – someone who delivers insights and provides decision-making support.

Today, companies expect CFOs to have the ability to manage volatility, navigate complexity among other things. In fact, a recent Accenture report* — The CFO as Architect of Business Value: Delivering Growth and Managing Complexity — states that the expanded role has resulted in their growing influence, especially as a result of their involvement in growth-related and business transformation activities.

“The role has evolved over time internally because of the increasing importance of financial data and insights and externally as a voice of the company to various stakeholders,” said Christian Campagna, lead managing director, Accenture Finance & Enterprise Strategy Group.

And the biggest drivers of this change in the scope of the role of the CFO are the global financial crisis of 2008, wherein the CFO emerged as a trusted partner to the CEO and other member of the C-Suite.

The role of the CFO at present has clearly expanded. The Accenture study calls it ‘Value Architect’. Here the CFO acts as the guardian of the economic value agenda for the company and provides guidance for key decisions made across the enterprise. “Now the CFO has the responsibility to drive profitability and growth while managing constant volatility, complexity, globalisation and emerging technology. The CFO is arguably one of the most powerful executives after the CEO,” says Campagna.

“This view that the CFO is the owner of cost control, and someone else in the business is the owner of revenue growth, is not the case,” says Margherita Della Valle of Vodafone. “The CFO has a role to play across the whole of the P&L and the balance sheet. It is essential that the CFO convinces the CEO that finance has a role to play on more than just costs.”

Thanks to the expanded role, the CFO now often finds himself in middle of a wide range of internal and external stakeholders, including other members of the C-suite, the rest of the management team, the board of directors, investors, regulators and analysts. Each has their own demands, and the number of stakeholders continues to expand.

Mike McClellan, CFO, North America at Sanofi, believes that bureaucracy should not mushroom in a company in order for things to run smoothly. “The CFO’s role is to really make sure that we’re not allowing processes to become too complex. We’re really trying to keep things effective and efficient, not only from a cost perspective but also from a way of doing business,” remarks McClellan.

Industries embracing change in role of CFOs

Research by various firms shows that the role of CFO is expanding. “The role is expanding but the focus may vary from industry to industry in order to address industry-specific challenges,” says Campagna. For instance, a CFO in financial services must focus more on regulations and cost control while a CFO at a consumer goods company may be more concerned with managing complexity.

In fact, in most industries CFOs are putting a special emphasis on digital. Hugh Morris, finance expert and vice-president of business development banking at GENPACT LLC in his statement earlier, had said that technology continues to change the way business gets done.

“CFOs need an understanding of emerging technology, but also where things are headed. They must remain agile enough to change course as technology changes and be committed to governance as a way of ensuring that the organisation uses the technology as efficiently as possible,” he said

David Rowland, CFO, Accenture believes that technology is central to finance strategy and agenda. “Organisations can’t have optimal efficiency and effectiveness without focusing on enabling technologies. In today’s world, where there’s an abundance of data, it’s particularly important that organisations raise their game in managing, analysing and presenting data in a way that yields the greatest value for the business.”

*The Accenture 2014 High Performance Finance Study was based primarily on an online quantitative survey conducted between January and April 2014 among 617 finance executives.

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