Chief financial officers (CFOs) have become trusted business advisers and play a critical role in the success and strategy formation and execution for any company, said experts at a major seminar in Bahrain.

Themed 'The Next Generation CFO', the seminar was held yesterday (April 17) at the Crowne Plaza Hotel and organised by the Bahrain Chapter of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (BCICAI) in association with Boston Analytics (BA), a global strategy and business analytics firm, according to a report in the Gulf Daily News, our sister publication.

BA chief executive Inder Thukral and the company's managing director and CFO Devesh Bahl were the main speakers at the seminar.

The experts said the key priorities of CFOs today are delivering business insights based on analytics, information management strategy, strategic revenue and cost planning pricing and distribution and risk management.

"CFOs are expected to become more competent in the future as they have great insight into the entire business," said Thukral. "They will become partners and advisers of the executive board.”

CFOs have a vantage position overseeing the whole company, Bahl said. "They are now the integrators of information at the enterprise level."

He added that CFOs have moved from being traditional number crunchers into efficient organisational drivers. – TradeArabia News Service