Navigating the future of finance: building financial resilience

Video

Article

In the rapidly evolving business landscape, CFOs and FDs tell us their biggest challenges (from enhanced data analytics to financial planning and analysis and cloud-based applications). But how do you align people, processes, and technology?

On 14 September, clients in the finance and accounting industry joined a new series of webinars organised by Protiviti and Robert Half - global leaders in talent and consulting solutions.

The first session led by Michael Melrose, a Protiviti specialist in finance transformation, looked at what running a resilient, sustainable function means and how organisations can manage and drive change effectively.

What is financial resilience?

Financial resilience is the ability of an individual/business to carry on or roll with the punches irrespective of the impact on operational workings or assets. Many businesses report that the biggest risks related to resiliency are business growth and the ability to scale it.

Protiviti’s 2023 Top Risks Survey found that the risks faced by CFOs include:

Organisations' succession challenges and ability to attract and retain top talent

Economic conditions in markets currently served may significantly restrict growth opportunities

Anticipated increases in labour costs may affect ability to meet profitability targets

Resistance to change operations and the business model

Uncertainty surrounding core supply chain ecosystems

Changes in the overall work environment may lead to challenges in sustaining culture

Organisations' culture may not be enough to identify and address risk issues

Organisations may not be sufficiently resilient and/or agile to manage an unexpected crisis

How to build financial resilience

Many companies state that one of the biggest factors in not being able to drive change and build resilience is a lack of resources, both in terms of people and technology. To combat this, it’s important that businesses implement the right building blocks and promote a vision to build financial resilience.

First, it starts with setting the right foundation by creating the time and headspace for change and transformation. Companies should then create a prioritised list as this allows them to focus on the right achievable targets going forward. Finally, they should then work either in-house or externally to select the correct delivery approach.

Taking all the above into account, building financial resilience also requires focusing on incremental, small bits of change to quickly drive value as well as being open to newer ideologies that can help to fuel innovation. There’s now an increased requirement to be more agile in the design and thought process. Many businesses have praised newer methods like journey mapping and hackathons that have helped to fuel innovation and push them on in achieving the required results.

Responding to change with speed requires a slightly higher allowance for error but can be benefitted by an informed roadmap of options to guide decision making alongside a heightened focus on assessment and feedback. Prioritise a regular feedback loop of both quantified results and qualitative input from operating teams and stakeholders in order to fine-tune responses and make appropriate adjustments to maximise the impact of changes.

Embracing technology and data is another avenue. Finance RPA can drive greater efficiency, compliance and productivity. Robotics Process Automation technology usually costs one third the amount of an offshore employee and one fifth of an onshore employee. According to Gartner, around 80% of finance leaders have implemented or are planning to implement RPA. Still, adoption of new digital technologies and cloud remains a challenging feat.

Why is resilience important to financial institutions?

Businesses that not only survive but thrive in this unpredictable economic environment are aware of why it’s important to build financial resilience. And none categorise this more than the importance of people.

According to Protiviti’s global finance survey, the biggest concerns for 2022 were:

Rising cost of wages (37%)

Ability to retain people (36%)

Ability to recruit qualified candidates (33%)

Building and maintaining culture amid hybrid or remote working model (33%)

Resources for recruiting - internal and external (33%)

Among the strategies CFOs and finance leaders are employing to obtain needed talent and skills are the increasing use of technologies and automation, upskilling and reskilling staff, implementing flexible work arrangements, and increasing use of managed services providers.

Financial resilience is essential to building a viable business model sturdy enough to navigate this period of great uncertainty. Leaders need to adopt an agile approach to change management by responding to unfolding challenges at speed, prioritising relationship management and future-proofing their decisions. Resilience and perseverance – especially after setbacks – are among the most important qualities of a good business. This is the only way they can cope with and overcome the unavoidable challenges and setbacks that are seen in day-to-day business.

Watch webinar: Navigating the Future of Finance: Running a resilient function with Michael Melrose

Record when when Scott starts recording has started and if we could just start letting people in from the lobby, then I can just ask people to bear with us while we wait to start over to you. Scott. Thanks everyone. For those for those who join us early, obviously you you're joining the Navigating the Future of Finance webinar series will get going on the hour at 1:00. So you still have time to grab that lunchtime cup of coffee or cup of tea as you need. So we'll get going on the hour, people continuing to join, which is great. We'll aim in for a 1:00 start two days away. Hopefully everybody should be on mute, but if you if you do see you're unmuted, please do go on mute and we can make sure that everybody can hear us loud and clear. Camera has been disabled. Give it a couple more minutes. They last 30 seconds for everybody. If you need to grab that final sandwich or boil that settle, we'll get going in about 3630 to 40 seconds. OK, good afternoon everyone. We we have to start at the top of the hour because we we have a a packed agenda. So welcome to the Robert Harper activity series of navigating the future of finance. A Series 3. A three stage series for for for this for this edition. It's a joint series hosted by Proximity and Robert Half Creativity and Robert Half sister companies or one company. Robert Half is the global recruitment organisation but works very closely with the management consulting arm that is positivity and and together we provide a broad range of of services across industries uh in particular with a deep expertise and a long tenured experience in the in the accounting and finance area of of our clients. So together you know creativity can provide very mature and sophisticated management consulting solutions, propositions and methodologies and then can tap into the Robert Half network of expertise and talent. And on the flip side our our Robert Off services can not only provide talent solutions but also draw down on the creativity methodologies and approaches and solutions. So together we we form a pretty powerful global proposition for our clients focus on on this series and the reason why we felt this series was was very relevant today is, is the environment that all of our clients and ourselves are operating in. So very much this is about looking forward and and and navigating that change in future. You know listening to our clients at the moment the theme we're hearing very much in the finance space is doing more with less. I don't think anybody would suggest that's that's particularly new, but I think it's particularly relevant with the current economic and global conditions that we're we're all adapting to. But also frankly as finance leaders we're having to continue to deal with you know that change in regulation. We're having to deal with the continuing stakeholder expectations particularly around analysis and insights and forward thinking that we're all expected to deliver. But also at the same time you know retain top talent and and and bring in top talent to to enhance that capability. So, so a moving target and an environment that we're continuing to operate in. So this series really is about providing you with perspectives and insights into all of those challenges and we're going to start today with with with building a resilient or running a resilient function that will come on to the second. But more importantly as I said the series runs throughout the coming months and Clive Davies will have a focus around people as a as the most valuable asset and then in December. So in November we'll look a little bit on the on the automation side of running an effective finance operation. But today very much the focus is on building that resilient function. I'm really pleased to have Michael Melrose joined me from creativity, one of our directors and Michael Melrose leads our finance transformation practise here in in the UK market and I'll I'll hand over to Michael at this stage. What I what I will say though is before we we get into it, we are going to use technologies today. So we're going to use the mentee platform to both, you know, poll you and get your input into this session. And there'll be an opportunity right at the end to to ask questions if we have time and if not we'll try and capture written questions and respond to you separately and individually. So it's a really well from your input through that mental pat platform. So, so I'm like all over to you. Alright, thanks Scott and good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for for joining us. As as Scott mentioned today we're going to talk about resiliency for finance teams. And So what does resiliency mean for my team? How do I identify and prioritise activities that that I need to create change with to build that more resilient team? And then what are the levers that I can pull to mature and move my team forward. And as Scott mentioned, we wanted to start with a mentee poll just to get a read of the room. So if you have not used mentee in the past it's it's pretty straightforward. If you use your mobile or a web browser, navigate to www.mentimenti.com. There's a code on your screen. If you enter that code you will see our first polling question so we'll give folks a couple seconds to do that. Again, you can do it from your mobile or or your computer log on to mentee and then enter that that code, that 8 digit code that you see on your on your screen. And once you enter that code, you'll see our first polling question which is what is your biggest risk related to resiliency. And so you'll you'll see a few choices there and and so while you're answering that poll question, let me talk about what we're seeing at productivity. And again, if you've missed the details on how to log into mentee, it's at the bottom of the next slide. So the last few years have certainly tested the resiliency of finance teams. Finance leaders have been challenged to respond to many, many challenges. Widespread labour shortages, outdated and inefficient supply chain models, Russia's war on Ukraine, interest rate volatility, rising inflation and the results of Creativity's top 2023 risk survey highlight that that finance leaders have also identified several top risks that relate to resiliency. Things like the ability to attract and retain top talent, economic conditions, increases in the labour market costs, uncertainty around the supply chain ecosystem, the ability to respond to an unexpected crisis, all of those things are top of mind for finance leaders. So with with that in the the kind of greater context of of productivity survey, let's take a pause and jump back to our results from our first poll. So I'll toss it over to you, Scott, to see what we're seeing in the room. Yeah, it's really interesting. We actually expected quite a balanced perspective across these these challenge areas because all of them in some way relate to a challenge that was reflected in the survey that that Michael just took that talked you through. But actually really encouragingly for me, we, we are still seeing finance operations and functions having to both not only maintain their resilience and create resilience, but also be able to grow and scale with the ambitions of the business. So that's both positive but also a huge challenge and in terms of adopting new ways of working, building capability, adapting new technologies and and innovative approaches that those are really some of the levers you can pull in building that scale and that growth. So, so really fascinating, really interesting and we'll touch on some of those challenges I think coming up Michael, won't we? So, so thank you for the input on that. Really, really fascinating, but also quite positive certainly. And and when we talk with finance teams about resiliency, our clients want to know a few things. So how can they continue to serve the business in the event of some sort of significant business disruption or in the event of unexpected turnover in the team. And then how do we scale our team without adding additional full time employees which is is you know clearly reflected in in the results here of the ability to scale and grow the business. And we'll share some insights on on both those topics today. And you know the pandemic has really taught us a lot of lessons. You know we really need to be prepared for unprecedented challenges and and change. I recently read an interesting quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook who called out resiliency on an earnings call related to the pandemic and and he said that he identified resilient, high functioning teams as the key element that fortified the company's success during the global pandemics. You know significant change will always be present and and those resilient prepared teams are the ones that are going to be able to thrive in those times of change. So with that let's jump back to another poll question. So if you navigate back to mentee you'll see our next polling question and and that is what's the biggest challenge to driving change. So certainly I think most of us are, if not all of us can agree that that change is good and and that we need to mature our organisations. But it's hard and so curious to see what the biggest challenge is for your organisations when it comes to driving change. And when we start to think about building that resilient team and and creating A-Team that's open to change, you know it's really just a matter of of getting started. But but that of course can be one of the biggest challenges for teams and and when we speak with our clients they often don't know where to start. You know, there's often a strong desire to change. Teams are so busy with their business as usual operations, you know just struggling to keep up with daily operations that they can't find time to make change and we also see multiple change initiatives that will get started, get some momentum but then they're never finished. Um, we also often see clients that are implementing new tools or new technology, but they're not optimising those tools or transforming the processes around those tools and and and so they're not really seeing the change that they would like. So for example, you know we'll we'll see clients that implement a new automation reconciliation tool, some really strong tools out there like Cadence and Black Line that that can really increase ambition and and create a lot of value. But we often see clients after they implement those tools still doing Rex in Excel and so they're not optimising those tools and and really getting the value out of them. So with that I'll pause and and Scott, let's see the results from our second poll help. Looks like we're having some technical challenges on, on the poll results. That's right. Well we're waiting for those to load. Ohh, we got a few answers here. A few an interesting, I think Michael already a a strong theme towards that lack of resources and for me lack of resources you know implies A and volume challenge. I I think it's actually about capability and I think that's probably what people mean here. It's about having the right capabilities both within the BU team but also to draw down on from third parties or or or from external hires. And I think given that though that bringing that right capability at the right time to drive effective change and drive value is is hugely important and a big challenge. And I think the two, the two peaks if you like sit together, right, it's that lack of time and that lack of focus to be able to get organised around those, those additional resources and those additional people. And again I'm not surprised by those challenges and those are certainly reflective of the client conversations that we're having as well. But certainly getting organised and having some time. I think you're gonna, you're gonna address some of those those challenges in the next slide. Yeah certainly. And and what we see with our clients who are successful at creating change, it really starts with that tone at the top And and they're really intentional about setting the foundation for change. And that starts with getting the right people involved, you know those with knowledge of how the business works today, those with knowledge of of best practises and how the business needs to work in the future. And then maybe most importantly those who have strong influence within the organisation. You know, clients who are successful at creating change are very deliberate about creating time and the head space for change. And again, this can be very challenging for teams that are running at capacity with their normal BU operations and and constant requests from other areas of the business. You know the next thing that we see from successful teams is documenting A prioritised list of of what they want to accomplish. And those priorities that are most viable are the ones that are aligned the closest with the greater business goals. So thinking through what goals do you want, do you want to accomplish with the change? And conversely, if you don't change, what goals won't you be able to accomplish? And and we see clients often struggling to create that prioritised list and it's often helpful to consider an approach like design thinking to help generate those ideas on on which priorities we should focus on that that that Michael is it's particularly around the prioritisation and and hand apologies we're gonna take questions right at the very end But in terms of that prioritised list it's very important to use techniques and methods to generate consensus around around the organisation both internally within finance and more broadly around the organisation. Because it's important that everybody's on the same page it's not finances prioritised list it's gotta be the businesses prioritise this I think that's fair to say Michael right? Absolutely, absolutely. And and that also goes back to that influence and and having somebody that can help drive that consensus across the organisation. You know it's often very helpful to focus on achievable targets that add incremental value. So for example, we see many clients who may want a new ERP system that's you know, they think is gonna solve all of their problems, but that's not realistic for many of our clients. So we advise them to focus on smaller bits of automation that are you know, fast to implement and deliver quick value right away and and that not only helps the business move forward quickly, but it also builds that positive tone and momentum around transformation within the organisation. And then the the final step in kind of promoting this vision of change is looking at what delivery approach is gonna help the organisation and the team succeed. So umm, if we flip to the next slide, um, you know resilient organisations are are using a lot of different approaches to help Dr Innovation and and get those desired results. And so you can see the results of productivities Recent global technology survey, we asked respondents where we asked them about their top approaches to help Dr Innovation and you can see that two 2/3 of our respondents are turning to Agile. Again we talked about that small bits of value that's realised right away to help get others around the change initiative. You know similar to our previous ERP example, stakeholders may struggle to find value and support for multi year ERP implementation where they can get around small pieces of automation and the value that that that can generate. We also see that resilient teams are are able to quickly change and embrace an agile approach that's going to help you quickly transform or excuse me quickly pivot your transformation efforts you know to align with the changing environment. So for example your entire team now needs to work remotely for several months or several years. As we saw in the Pandemic, things can change quickly and so not getting too far ahead of yourself in adopting that more agile approach can really help drive the momentum forward and and make sure that your transformation and and change initiatives, initiatives are aligned with where the business is going. Uh, the survey also highlights that more than half of the respondents are employing design thinking and we previously talked about that, you know it's a great tool to help identify and prioritise where teams want to change. So you know we've taken a quick look at the foundation of change and and how to prioritise. So let's look at another lever that we can pull when we're thinking about resiliency within our teams and and that's technology. So navigate back to mentee. We've got another poll that we're interested in your thoughts on and that poll is which of the following technologies does your team use so you can see the choices there. Again, navigate back to mentee. We'll give you a minute to respond to the question, which of the following technique technologies does your team use? Or on our own? I'll add is we just go back to the slider second, but is with that, I'm very conscious that if we put a slide like this up, uh, in a group of finance leaders such as yourselves, then I suspect the very strong focus that we wouldn't have put a slide up like this. But I think the technologies and the awareness of the use of technology and the opportunity around technology, particularly the finance function is much more mature nowadays. So we're genuinely interested to see the results here. That's right Scott. And you know we generally see an under investment in technology among our clients, um, you know legacy ERP's or no ERP at all. Um, a lot of internally developed applications heavily reliance on on Excel. You know individuals who have been with the business for 20 plus years who have this legacy knowledge that's not documented anywhere And those situations can propose some serious resiliency risks to finance teams. You know it. It forces teams to execute a lot of manual tasks versus strategic tasks. So they're moving data, formatting data, cleansing data rather than focusing more on that analysis and forward-looking activities. You know these manual Excel based activities are prone to error due to the manual nature more likely to crash. I think we've all had that experience of the huge spreadsheet that we've been working on for hours and it suddenly crashes and and we lose all this work that we've done it. You know, it's often difficult for new employees to learn how to execute their role if there's all this legacy knowledge that. That is not documented, umm and also just plainly more difficult to scale. So we see a lot of our small and mid size clients that have really large AP or AR teams and and that's because as the business is growing rather than investing in technology, they're adding more people. So it makes it a little bit more challenging to to scale. Yeah and I'd add to that as well. I think there's an underlying theme there that technology is one of the levers as you said, Michael. But I think something to think about is you know that talent retention point, yes, it's about adding more people and and being able to support the scalability through people. That is an option, right. But retaining those individuals, retaining that knowledge within the business that talent retention I referenced at the very start, that's very hard in an environment where the activities are very manual in nature, very repetitive in nature. That isn't an inspiring workplace to be in. I think a lot of our clients, particularly those high growth clients have clearly organisations on the call today that have ambitions around scale and growth. Then that talent, attention, being able to give individuals you know challenging and valuable roles is, is, is, is really key and it's really hard to do that in a very manually driven environment. So it's not only a resiliency challenge, but it's also a people challenge though as well. Yeah, Scott, with that let's take a look at our, our last, our our latest poll question. Yeah, so, so again really interesting, uh cloud. I think we've seen the growth of or the adoption of cloud technology and the leveraging of cloud solutions in a lot of our clients over the last, you know, five to six years. Again, cloud was a solution that there was a trust element to it at the very start. But now clearly it's, it seems an accelerator, it's seen as a a core part of most business practises to leverage that as as a solution. So that doesn't surprise me particularly as a lot of the ERP platform solutions out there are forcibly transitioning into cloud products as we're all very aware of um but but but I I guess really quite interested in the low adoption around some particularly robotics. Again it's not a new concept automation and again it's it's a technology that's much more accessible nowadays and one we're seeing adopted particularly in those more transactional parts of finances a PAR as as Michael reference so. So a little bit surprised to see that so low down the league table, really fascinating to see the adoption of a I and machine learning. I think that's a growing area and a really fascinating area and having that applied in finance and and helping finance organisations to be much more forward-looking and insightful for their internal stakeholders. There is a real area of interest for us as well. So really encouraged to see that and I think none of the above is a really interesting challenge that's about education and about understanding the constraints and where the business is going because I think at the moment finance for many different reasons. Technology is certainly needs to be one of those levers that everybody's pulling. So, so some surprises there but also cloud certainly not surprised Michael from my perspective that that would that would align with both what we see and but also what our technology partners are are offering to the marketplace frankly, yeah. And those results align with productivities. Global technology survey cloud was listed as the most popular technology among respondents and you can see the results in the next slide of of that survey. And you know, cloud technology is really driving resiliency because of its distributed nature. So rather than running all of your applications on a single platform, those cloud applications are quicker to detect and mitigate any sort of infrastructure issues. Another technology that we see frequently is no code, low code, and that's used by a third of the respondents from the survey and it's also on the radar for for many people. If you're not familiar with that technology, it's a development platform similar to or for example, Microsoft Power Platform and it's used to quickly automate processes or create apps. And it's rather than using you know complex traditional programming language, it has more of a graphic interface and so it's a little bit easier for users to to to use and and quicker to develop and and deploy new technology. Our survey also shows that half of the respondents are currently using AI and machine learning and the primary use case that we see there within finances is FP and A and and specifically around forecasting. You know our clients who are a little bit more mature in their technology journeys focus on a few key things on one technology that's fast to deploy And so we talked a little bit about that before. You know, So what do we mean by technology fast to deploy. So an example would be you know there's accounts payable applications out there that can scan invoices via OCR, execute the three-way match route for approval and some of those technologies and tools can be deployed in a matter of days versus months. Another low code no code example that we often hear about is that you know people wanna wait until a new ERP system is gonna be implemented if they have a pending ERP and and you know those new ERP's can often take several years or you know often delayed and and so using this low code no code is a is a quick way to take an interim step to quickly solve a problem while you're waiting for that longer term fix. We we had an example of a of a client where they had a highly manual purchase order process and their purchase orders were issued manually routed manually tracked in excel. They had a pending ERP upgrade and that included the purchase of a new AP module. But rather than waiting several months for that new AP module, we worked with them to build some automation within Microsoft Power Platform to automate that PO process and eliminate the reliance on on Excel. We were able to design and deploy that within two weeks. And again, that focus on quick incremental value, another bit of technology that continues to be top of mind robotics. So Scott talked a little bit about that before. You can see a 1/4 of our respondents are currently using robotics. On the the next slide, we've got some great insights from Gartner where they looked at some of the statistics around automation. You know, almost 90% of general accounting operations can be automated. And if we look at that cost of automation, it's usually around 1/3 of the cost of an offshore resource or a fifth of the cost of an onshore resource. And and what we're seeing if we step back from a Finance Automation perspective is we're we're seeing technology that's evolving from you know working on the simple individual tasks to more full end to end process automation. And as Scott mentioned when we kicked off today our colleague Harrison Jardine who leads our intelligent automation solution here in the UK, he's gonna be presenting in this series, UH further diving into how to maximise the use of data and automation to to drive transformation. So again if we step back and think about building resiliency, technology is is one of those key levers that we can pull. You know it, it allows the business to scale without adding additional headcount and frees up teams again to focus on more strategic value added forward-looking tasks. Alright, Um, it looks like we're running a little bit short on time. So Scott, do we wanna move on to Q&A from here? No, I think I think let's let's try and cover off the final topic, Mike. OK. Then we can take Q&A offline. And obviously we've got the next two episodes in the series where we could continue to canvas questions. So it would be great if we could just move through the last subject. Yeah, that sounds great. So we've got one final mentee poll. The final resiliency lever that we wanted to discuss today is people and so please navigate back to mentee. And we've got one final question for this afternoon. Which of the following people related issues has the biggest impact on your team? Again those issues around UM continuity of team members you know UM unexpected turnover All of those posts you know really big risks to to an organisation. I think I think we'll all recognise we see a change in market out there. You know working closely with our Robert Half colleagues who are very much in in in the recruitment market. We're all very aware that you know it was a a candidates market last year both on a permanent and an interim basis. You know there was it was sourcing the right talent was incredibly difficult and now suddenly in a very short period of time we're actually in a in a market where there's there's a there's a shortness of roles and therefore there's the opportunity to there's people are back in the marketplace and it because you know having people reflect on that point. So it's been a time of rapid change in in a in a really changing world. So that's that's really interesting for us to observe and experience. Yeah, it's got as we're waiting for those poll results to come in, let's take a look at parties, global finance trends survey. Again, we can see the top risks related to people that there are areas of concern for the finance organisation. So things like rising costs of wages, ability to retain people, recruiting qualified candidates, you know, what impact does a hybrid or remote model have on the culture of an organisation? Can all of these things pose a risk to the resiliency? You know, as turnover can can create a huge disruption for a team. And then let's take a final look at the results from the last mentee question. So as we're waiting for those to come in, I just wanted to highlight a few things that we're seeing in the market about how teams are responding to some of these people related issues. So you know things like reviewing overall benefits, you know, creating flexible work arrangements, trying to tailor individual career growth and career plans to to team members, things like upscale, upskilling, looking at compensation. You know all of those things are are really trying to address some of the people related issues again trying to mitigate the risk of turnover and making sure that our team members have the right skills at the right time. That is a really interesting and and no surprises on the on on the survey results so far the the ability to recruit qualified candidates is is coming out strong and I think uh you know those are challenges posed by geography the work environment. We're seeing a much more sophisticated candidate and individuals at very early stages of their career you know post qualification that that they're looking for culture they're looking for organisations that have a role in society in the community. So being very attractive as an employer is, is hugely important and clearly they're looking for ongoing professional support development. But just to build on some of the other points we we we've alluded to today, they're looking for that ability to grow their skills and capabilities. And so in the finance community in particular, the finance professionals are looking to build on those analytical skills, they're looking to build on automation skills. These are very technology savvy individuals in the marketplace and they want to build on that technology experience and those technology skills. So it's something we have to be very aware of as employers. You know frankly and selfishly I have the same challenge within the consultant industry. So it's it's the ability to attract the right people. So, so not surprising results but good to good to see as well. So thank you. So that's all that that we had Scott in the presentation. So if you wanna wrap it up for us, please very happy to. So, so bang on time Michael. So thank you very much for that. Look, thank you so much. I wanted to get all the content in rather than open up for questions. I think I'd like some feedback on that as well if you can and you're happy to do. We do a few more Q&A questions at the next session. So looking for feedback on that, but the content was super important. I felt today we'll share the content and and obviously the the results of the the surveys. I think we can do that. Uh, before you all go, I will signpost the next session which is on Thursday, the 12th of October at 1:00 PM with Clive Davis, an executive from the Robert Half side of our business who's also been on the call today. And he'll be sharing some thoughts and insights into people being as I think we've alluded to to today, the most valuable asset we have and and what are some of the challenges and the opportunities to to to look after that asset that we have. So really appreciate everybody's time. Hopefully this short, sharp insight over lunch works for everybody's Diaries. Uh, really enjoyed it. Look forward to the 12th of October where I'll I'll be hosting with you again and with Clive and have a great afternoon everyone and see you at the next session.

Looking to improve your finance functions?

Tell us your finance business challenge

Leverage the powerful combination of consulting from our subsidiary, Protiviti, with one of the largest networks of contract finance talent from Robert Half.

Future of finance: how to excel in talent management

Five misconceptions about using Interim or Project Resources

Experts share upcoming finance trends and what they mean for leadership