If you know someone who is a visionary, a trailblazer, and a financial guru, now is the time to nominate them.
The strategic MENA CFO
Explore the expertise of MENA's top finance leaders, who offer insights, expertise, and guidance on thriving in the intricate landscape of MENA's financial sector.
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Interviewed by
Leen Shami
What is your background, your education, and how have you reached this stage in your career? Tell us about yourself.
I come from Bangalore, India. It is supposed to be the tech hub of the country.
Growing up, I didn't have anyone to look up to.
As I was growing up, I realized that I needed to do something extraordinary. I wanted to be a working woman, which is not normal in our culture and country. I wanted to create an impact.
While Chartered Accountancy was not exactly a childhood passion for me, it would give me a shot at achieving all this and more. I could also have gone for an MBA but for the expense. So I chose to pursue the former.
To become a CA in India, you have to crack one of the toughest exams in the country. There's a pass percentage of around 2%. That was a huge challenge, but I love challenges. I took it up along with my graduation and became a CA by the time I was 22.
I also got a lucky break with Coca-Cola in Bangalore where I got to work in the regional finance office as a financial analyst. I really started my career with understanding the numbers, right? As a financial analyst you create the numbers, try to interpret data, and then see the impact it has on the business. And that's how I just got onto this path.
From there I moved to a tech company where I supported the team with the functional improvements and enhancements in accounting software or ERP.
Thereafter, I moved to core FP&A.
I moved to Dubai and got into proper financial accounting, projections, budgeting and managing cash flows, typically what every finance manager does.
I also consulted independently for a while to support companies with implementations.
Finally, I landed at UDrive. I began my journey here as an accountant. I set up the department like a finance manager, accounts manager, and have pretty much done that in the last five years, where every year I did something completely different. This has helped me learn new things.
That has been my journey in a nutshell.
Can you tell us about the biggest challenge you have faced as a first-time CFO?
One thing that most of the corporate world suffers from and I guess I did too, is the lack of a mentor, coach, guide, or someone who has done it before you.
This has been my biggest struggle because while you can do everything that you know and you've learned, you do not get to learn new things. This means you have to experiment by yourself, make some mistakes, and use them to learn.
I’ve noticed that it’s easier to find peers who will guide you in professions and departments other than Finance. In tech, for example, there are many people in a department and each can handhold one other; they learn. But most companies have just one chartered accountant. The others are mostly junior accountants. So, the companies that I worked with didn't have many people that I could look up to.
As a first time CFO, my biggest challenge was getting my hands dirty to learn and improve everything by myself.
You spoke a lot about the chartered accountants' course. Can you tell us more about it and how it helped you in your current role as CFO?
CAs are certified accountants in India, similar to certified public accountants (CPAs) in the USA. The only difference in India is that they've made the standards pretty high now.
Throughout my four years of the course, there were at least 16 different aspects of the business commercial world that I was exposed to. From commercial law and cost accounting, to management accounting,reporting, and technology as well.
The thing about this course is that it gave me exposure to many areas. Now a few people from here may pick up auditing and they just work on the audit side of it. Few other people may just take accounting and they get into a FP&A role.
But most of all, chartered accountants become managers by default. You learn about taxes, indirect taxes, and direct taxes. And you then specialize in whichever area you want to.
Every business has these key functions, whether you talk about people management, accounting, taxation, compliance, or costing and management accounting. And of course, large corporates may have different people doing different things, but in a startup, it's very important that you are aware of more than one role, and I think that's where it has helped me a lot because I could really understand when I see some data or I see some statistics, I can strategically make a decision based on the numbers.
As a CFO, you are expected to handle more than just finance functions and financial matters. You also need to have a good understanding of other operational areas such as HR, legal, marketing, compliance, and sales. How do you balance and navigate these different areas effectively as a CFO?
You do not learn everything overnight, right?
I started with the accounting function, but over a period of time the need arose that I had to do more of a financial analyst role or a business analyst role. So, I gradually grew into that role. And thereafter my role required legal expertise so I took that up as well.
I may not be a lawyer, but I can read a legal document because that's what we learn in our business law, right?
Over a period of time, I think, a couple of years back, our HR function needed someone to have a strategic mindset. So, I took up that upon myself to oversee the HR function as well. And I think over a period of time you understand what are the key levers of the business; you understand operations is a key, if you tackle that well, then everything else just falls in place. I took that responsibility to understand the challenges that operations were facing. I never really managed operations directly, but I started learning about it. Later, I even learned marketing.
When I joined U Drive, there were hardly any senior people in the organization. In fact, almost all of the senior people just came on board in the previous year. At the time, we had no choice but to really be everywhere. That’s why I learned marketing, I learned business development, I learned tech.
Whatever I could, and needed to, I just started picking up. And it's very important for a CFO to have a complete understanding of each function. You cannot, basically be in your silo of financial information and not know what's happening in other departments, because ultimately all of these functions put together push the company ahead.
With UDrive being a car-sharing company, how do you manage the balance between strategic thinking and the challenges of running a complex business with many logistics involved?
This is one thing I'm proud to share: we do almost around 40,000 rentals in a month.
I would say it would be much better as we grow over 40,000 rentals in 1 month, but the truth is we may be just sitting in the office sipping coffee.
Just imagine any rental car company that has the physical delivery of vehicles, if they had to do 40,000 rentals a month, I think they may be just overstocked. I mean, they would have to have thousands of people doing that, right? But for us, it's all technology. This is what data automation and all the systems that you build can help you with.
The business is complex. Why is it complex? Because our product keeps moving all the time. It's not in one place, right? So which customers to target, where to target, we don't know, right?
But what we do in the course of our business is start a process. We set some basic guidelines and expectations. Then, over a period of time, we assess what the key challenges are, and we develop tools and systems to handle those challenges.
My CEO, Mr. Nick Watson, is someone who is a strong believer that you can never perfect anything. So you just start and by the time you implement, you accumulate enough learning to perfect it.
Most of our thinking time goes into finding the right tools or right methods to handle a challenge.
UDRIVE was one of Pluto’s Earliest Customers, and we have been partners since. You made a very strong strategic decision to adopt modern finance tools. What made you do this? How can finance teams be more open to automation?
Again, it comes from the culture that we set in the company, right from day one.
When I joined the company, we didn't even have an ERP. The books of accounts were maintained in Excel. We didn't have automated invoicing, nor automation for card payments.
Of course, it was just the first year of the company’s business, so there were too many things happening. Of course, one is that the volume of transactions we handle is so high that you don't have a choice but to go for automation in whatever form.
The second thing is that adopting technology has helped us focus on the right things in the business. Now, we don’t have to chase 20 people asking them to submit bills and cash transactions every time.
Pluto drastically reduced our issues overnight. We knew that people would find it very convenient to always have money on their cards. They could just go spend,without requesting approvals and permissions repeatedly. Convenience makes a big difference.
Plus the future of payments is digital and paperless. We cannot sustain if we don't go for modern solutions.
I do understand that a lot of accountants still come from that traditional thinking where they want control in their hand and they don't want to give it away . But, we have to think about the cost associated with it. Is it simply keeping three people occupied doing this tedious, repetitive, grunt work? Or is your objective actually to accelerate your work? I think that is the reason when Pluto came in… I didn't have to even think for a second.
For us it was a no brainer. I mean, why should my accountant waste hours just collating information and dumping that into the system when there is already a tool that can do it for you?
What are some of the key tactics you have planned to implement for cost containment in the upcoming years?
Well, we are already a very frugal company. We always operate like a bootstrapped company, although we are funded.
We believe that every penny that you put in has to have a ROI attached to it. I wouldn't call it cost containment, but cost optimization is something that we should all work on all the time. So, every single cost that we incur, we keep.
And I think, again, we take major help from technology here. We are a tech driven company in every way.
I'll give you a simple example.
Let's say we are spending some amount on rebalancing the vehicles, right? The vehicles are not where they should be, and we are just moving them. Over a period of time we have data collected. We review and analyze this data, then we find out what is the best way that we could build our own predictive way of ensuring that the vehicle is where the customer is.
We work on those kinds of data driven decisions which help reduce our costs.
How critical is data analysis for decision-making processes within the organization, and what types of data do you focus on as a CFO? How do you go about identifying and prioritizing the different types of data that are relevant to the car-sharing industry?
Most of our work is all about data, and it is not limited to financial data alone. We also work with operational data and marketing data such as customer acquisition, the cost of customer acquisition, retention, churn rate etc.
We use the data for operational decision making, devising strategies on the basis of it.
That's one of the key things that CFOs have to understand; their role is to help the business navigate using the data that they have.
CFOs basically have that understanding of building a story out of the data, right?
So, we get the data, we learn what it means, we get the insights, and we see how it'll influence decision making.
Over the years, the role of the CFO has undergone a significant transformation, becoming increasingly strategic and less focused on traditional finance functions. Could you share some insights into how you have personally witnessed this evolution of the CFO role? How has your own approach to the CFO role changed over time to adapt to these changes?
The CFO role is always strategic in nature because one of the key things that a CFO has to ensure is to focus on how they can increase the return on shareholders’ equity.
I would say that part of traditional finance will always remain with the CFO, but the evolving role of a CFO is now majorly as a finance business partner. Be the eye on the operations side and focus on how to increase the value of the business and how to ensure that you are able to evolve the business over a period of time. Whether it is about diversification, whether it is about going deeper into operations or adding more verticals to the business. Whatever it is, I think, the CFO's role is always strategic in nature.
In our case, I was handling everything. When I became a CFO, my focus had to be much more on the business level, which is why we hired a finance manager and he takes care of the compliance, the finance, and the audit. He turns out the numbers, and then I read the numbers and see how we can help influence the decision making.
In your opinion, what are the most important skills for a CFO to possess in order to excel in a strategic role?
I think the first and foremost skill would be to understand the key lever of the business in and out.
If a CFO doesn't understand what the key impact areas of the business are, then it's very difficult to support decision making. So, understand the business, what impacts the business, what impacts the revenue, what impacts your cost, what impacts your growth, your scale trajectory, everything.
The second one is about learning how to manage resources. Again, one of the biggest assets every company has is human capital, right?
It's very important for CFOs to understand how to maximize the return from this capital. Every penny that you invest in human resources should generate multiples of it for the company. That's how you drive efficiency. If the business was all about tools and systems, it would've been easier, but I think business is all about how human capital is deployed to get the results.
And thirdly, is to be open to new tools, technologies, new ideas, new thought processes. If you don't learn technologies, if you are still dependent on old formats like Excel, and you are dependent on the old way of doing things, then I think you'll be wasting away your time doing the same work instead of adding value.
You have worked in several industries so far, including F&B and consulting. What role do you think subject matter expertise plays in the role of a CFO for the industry? And how have you acquired industry-specific SME knowledge quickly?
We are not number crunchers anymore. That's how it was in the past, but today's systems can do that for you. You don't have to crunch numbers and tally balance sheets. That's not your job anymore.
The role of a CFO today is to interpret the numbers and be able to give insights, valuable insights, to the business. That is not possible if you are not a subject matter expert.
Of course, there are other things like compliance, where compliance requires your subject matter expertise. Not everyone can do that.
Similarly, auditing. These are the things where you definitely need to have subject matter expertise.
But most importantly, I would say it’s about data, it’s about your numbers, what they talk about, and how you can disintegrate that number to a level where people can understand what it relates to.
As far as your second question is concerned: If you understand from a business point of view, then the industry may keep changing, but the key levers don't change. Or even if they change, it's easy to pick them up because you know this is what impacts the business.
If it's a current rental business, then these are the key drivers of this business. If it's FMCG, then these are the key drivers of the business. So it's not difficult to understand if you understand the business well.
The first few months in U Drive, I could understand what the key things were that we needed to play around with to ensure that our revenue per car increases. Or what the key things were that we needed to do to see that our gross margins start improving. These are the things that you begin to understand when you understand the business.
One thing I want to circle back to is our topic about technology. With the rapid development of technologies like AI and the increasing digitization of businesses, CFOs must ensure their companies are adaptable to change. Success will be achieved by organizations that use technology effectively and promote internal alignment by breaking down silos. Have you introduced any new technologies that have helped UDrive’s finance team increase efficiency?
Automation was the first thing that I implemented.
Of course, I do not understand coding, so I cannot do it myself, but having the right people around you who can do it for you, and you being the key driver, helps.
I started with automating invoices and charging the cards. Data analytics is another thing.
So, we onboarded data scientists who can really put things together in a manner that you can make decisions.
And we already use AI for our data-driven decisions on operations.
There are several technologies, not necessarily that I have spearheaded everything, but at least I have been one of the first users of it for sure, if I'm not driving it myself.
And you mentioned earlier that when you joined there was no ERP system.
I had to put that in place.
We could not do 40,000 rentals if we were still manually generating invoices.
You have to do it because you cannot ever let business get restricted. The growth cannot get restricted because you are not up to speed with technology. You always need to prepare well in advance.
UDrive is now live in Saudi Arabia. Congratulations! A lot of CFOs in MENA need to handle multi-jurisdiction finances. This is very different from the USA. How have your skills evolved to handle such tough challenges?
You may not be fully knowledgeable about a lot of things you doYou mess up, you make some mistakes, you learn from it, and you correct it.
I think this is what my experience is about, even when it comes to finances for Saudi, so far we are managing most of it from the UAE.
Of course, as we grow, we will have them based in Saudi. We just concluded the first audit of Saudi, so we can say that we are good to go. The compliances are very different. And the sad part is not everything is documented easily.
One of the things that I learned from this entire exercise is that it's always good to have a consultant in that market who's a subject matter expert.
What are some of the biggest pain points that you face today as a CFO, and how are you currently solving them?
One of the biggest pain points is having all functions working in silos.
There is no common source of truth.
We keep facing this challenge every now and then. It's not just us. I think every company faces this issue because most of the time, finance teams go with their thought process, their mindset, their logic, their numbers, and that's completely different from how the business works.
Aligning both of these and ensuring that they work as complements to each other is one of the biggest challenges or hurdles to cross, and when you start working together, it all starts making sense. But I think having a single source of truth and having the compiled data was my biggest challenge.
Another challenge would be adopting the technology without having a hundred percent understanding of it. You want to do a lot of things, but it takes a lot of time and it costs you a lot. Without understanding the benefits and how you're going to maximize your value on this, you are not able to motivate or engage resources to deliver it to you.This is where I think you suffer a lot because you don't know how to encapsulate what you want in technological language. Functionally, you know, this is what you want and you know it's going to have a lot of advantages, but you don't know how to communicate with the stakeholders for them to understand how important it is.
What advice would you give finance professionals in today’s modern age?
First, I think all finance professionals have to wear the hat of a business partner.
As I said, we are not number crunchers alone. We are not here only to just compile data and share it with people.
That's not the role of a finance person anymore.
They have to be in a position to understand the business and see how they can correlate the numbers with business performance and influence decision-making.
This is something that you need to do with each function head, because until they don't understand what they are doing, and how it is impacting in the p&l.
The second thing I would say is, be ready to learn and adapt to changes.
I still see a lot of people who are comfortable with the old ways of doing things and don't want to try doing something new or different. Make an attempt, take that risk. You'll fail. That's fine. We'll make a mistake, we'll learn from it and we'll correct it.
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Interviewed by
Leen Shami
I majored in accounting and finance. I got into the healthcare industry very early in my career, and I was fortunate to join Hikma Pharmaceuticals, where I worked firsthand with the CFO and the executive chairman.
At Hikma, I got to work on some very exciting projects at a very early stage in my career, including the rollout of the budgeting and planning functions, their IPO, and M&A projects.
After I spent about six years over there, I naturally picked up the healthcare label and stayed within that space. I ended up working at a private equity fund in Dubai that was focusing on healthcare, among other things.
I also worked at Sandoz, which is the generic arm of Novartis.
After that, I joined Smith and Nephew, which is one of the world's largest medical device companies.
I had a small entrepreneurial stint, which unfortunately didn't go too well. It was a new concept that I launched right before the onset of Covid, which wasn't very helpful.
But then that's really how I found myself joining Eon. In March 2021, I came to know about a medical device company that's based out of Jordan that's searching for a CFO- - and I joined in April 2021.
What happens in the other departments eventually finds its way into the finance function.
The entrepreneurial journey was obviously very difficult but equally exciting. I tried to introduce a new concept to the market; similar to GPOs which are group purchasing organizations, they're quite prevalent in the US in the healthcare space. But we also have some of them over here (MENA) in public hospitals.
So with GPOs, even though hospitals may be competing on the front-end for patients and doctors, there's a lot of room to collaborate on the back-end, generally in terms of bulk buying, and particularly for commoditized products.
So I tried to set up something similar to that over here in the UAE. I got some large hospital groups signed up, which was very good. But I think the market wasn’t ready for a new business model, and when Covid came into play, the task became more difficult.
At that point, I decided to take a pause, especially when a more exciting opportunity came.
I'd start off with Hikma.
One, looking back, no company gave me the same kind of experience where I was working alongside the CFO and the executive chairman.
Two, the nature of the projects themselves. When you're based out of Jordan, only a handful of companies give you that kind of exposure, especially on that scale and that kind of global remit.
With no formal handover process, the biggest challenge was taking a look under the hood to understand the company's status quo
Later on, the opportunity that I got at Smith and Nephew was also quite exciting. It was a good turning point, and it was transformational because I got immediate C-suite exposure at a FTSE 100 company, and I also got the benefit of assembling and managing large teams and projects in complex projects across multiple jurisdictions.
My experience at Smith and Nephew was also pivotal because they gave me the opportunity to take on a senior commercial role. I was looking after the P&L for the region over here (GCC, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan) and got out of the traditional comfort zone that I had in financial and investment management - getting into the commercial part of the business by going into the field, and engaging more with the doctors, customers, regulators, and sales reps, giving me better insights into how the data and transactions that I previously used to manage actually comes into being.
I think these two stand out most in terms of my career.
With no formal handover process, the biggest challenge was taking a look under the hood to understand the company's status quo. Eon had rapidly outgrown its infrastructure - the physical infrastructure and the soft infrastructure like its processes and accounting systems.
A lot of the physical and operational matters needed to catch up with Eon's growth. The challenges that we had with that were further compounded with the onset of Covid.
It was also difficult for me to understand the status quo of the company, which was probably one of the most important things to get your head around when you first join that kind of position.
I spent a lot of time doing operational deep dives, not just within the finance function but across many other departments, because what happens in the other departments eventually finds its way into the finance function.
So these were the biggest challenges so far.
It's probably too early in the journey to look back and talk about the greatest accomplishment per se.
But I can definitely say we've had some very pleasant wins.
I need to enable them by ensuring they have the financial resources to do their work and to have effective controls in place to protect the company.
In terms of the planning, transactional, and strategic kind of work I currently do at Eon, it's pretty much the same. The only difference is there's less red tape and more freedom to operate.
With Smith and Nephew or Hikma or even at Sandoz, we were bigger organizations, and the process would run through different layers, whether cascading upwards or downwards.
At Eon, because we are a relatively smaller company and have smaller teams, we can definitely be a lot more agile and nimble in terms of executing that kind of work.
That's on the overlap with the kind of work that I used to do in the past.
Besides the planning/strategic and transactional work that I just described, I also now need to manage that with a lot of the operational work that still needs to happen.
In the past, I had the luxury of just focusing on the strategic and the planning work, but now I need to oversee a lot of the operational work that happens on a day-to-day basis. I also need to oversee the production of all the data that are associated with, or that's a precursor to, all the planning and transactional work.
So, the kind of work is very similar, but how it happens is definitely a lot more complex.
My role is primarily to enable these functions. I need to enable them by ensuring they have the financial resources to do their work and to have effective controls in place to protect the company.
These are the two major things in terms of how I need to support these functions.
I see it more in terms of enabling these teams.
At the end of the day, I'm very lucky to be working with some of the most talented and motivated individuals in the industry. The team really comes together like a family. Our CEO and our People and Culture team have done a very good job in not only recruiting the right kind of employees but stakeholders as well. Everyone is fully motivated, everyone takes full ownership, and everyone at the office works like friends coming together with common interests to work on a project. So I feel it's more like working with family and friends as opposed to a formal kind of office environment.
It makes such a big difference because it becomes less about following up and ensuring people are doing what they're supposed to be doing and just giving people the space to do their work.
So, getting the right people, I think, is key, and I'm very lucky to be working with that kind of setup, where my role is more as an enabler.
We have different brainstorming sessions, different ideas, and we always come up with points where a decision needs to be made, whether it’s for operational matters or strategic matters, and they vary in terms of their importance and their scope.
Sometimes it could be giving solicited feedback about a specific issue, whether negotiating with a major supplier or a customer. Or sometimes, it can be sharing my vision or how I feel about where the business is going to be or where it needs to be in the coming few years to help maximize shareholder value.
So, it's not about introducing a specific strategy, and all of us are running towards it; it's more about thinking out loud on general or more specific issues on hand.
Expense management is a big issue, especially when you are in a high growth kind of setup, like Eon; high growth, high investment.
We definitely have a strong relationship in terms of how we operate - both formally and informally.
We have formally scheduled executive leadership meetings; it's myself, the COO, and Qais, the CEO. We have scheduled meet-ups where we meet once a week, and we discuss operational matters, strategic matters, and general issues on hand. So we have a placeholder for that.
We also engage many times throughout the day, and the week, through phone calls, face-to-face meetings, and WhatsApp.
Again, I'll go back to the kind of relationship that we have; it's less about a formal kind of relationship and more about like-minded individuals coming together and working for a shared belief. This is how I see it.
More specifically, at Eon, yes, of course, it is a challenge.
Expense management is a big issue, especially when you are in a high growth kind of setup, like Eon; high growth, high investment. How we deal with this is really just a combination of instilling a sense of ownership within the team and having a collective sense of responsibility to make sure that every dollar we spend matters, every dollar we spend counts. And then, we couple that with well-designed controls, policies, procedures, tools, and robust and proactive expense management functions.
We are big on that at Eon. We just need to ensure that we are deploying our resources in the right places at the right times.
The purpose over here is to try to streamline our workflows as much as possible.
Yes, of course.
Being a med-tech company, we have the luxury of having tech and product teams that help us automate a lot of the processes that we have. Whether it's invoicing, bookkeeping, data entry, or data management.
So yes, we are big proponents in trying to automate as much as we can, but at the same time, we also recognize that some issues we are not able to automate, and we still need to rely on manual processes.
But again, to the extent possible, we do try to automate as much as possible, whether it's relying on our in-house teams or utilizing third-party tools.
The purpose over here is to try to streamline our workflows as much as possible.
Despite the challenges that come with it, I'm a big proponent of automation, artificial intelligence, and utilizing data to the fullest extent possible. The important part is having the intent of working towards that and having the right systems and the right setups in place to protect that data so that you're able to sprint then towards the automation, the AI, and the different work streams that we're talking about.
For Eon, that challenge is compounded because not only do we have our own data that we need to protect, but we also deal with sensitive patient data. So, we need to be extra careful with our own data and patient data.
A lot of our customers are global, so they have very high expectations in terms of how we manage data privacy. Even within the regional markets, the bar is continuously raised. Saudi and the UAE are introducing laws that are specific to data privacy, and we always need to comply with those.
Not only is it a challenge for us to protect our own data, but also to ensure that our customer's data and patient data is also adequately protected.
So definitely, it comes with its challenges, but I think, net-net, it is something that streamlines our operations.
A CFO shouldn't be focusing on just bookkeeping, journal entry, and keeping track of data. It's looking at the data, coming up with meaningful insights, and using that to give advice, whether it's to the CEO, the COO, or the different units of the business.
I think there will always be a necessity for a human element to it, but to the extent possible, I'm all for automation. Especially when we talk about repetitive tasks that, in a sense, have less value add compared to analyzing the data. I'd much rather put the energy and resources towards analyzing and managing the data as opposed to entering the data.
I don't see us getting to a stage where everything is completely automated. We deal with multiple parties and multiple systems, so there's always going to be a requirement for human intervention in terms of data, but I think the idea is to try to minimize that to the fullest extent possible and try to put the resources behind analyzing the data and coming out with meaningful insights on what the data is telling us to come up with proper recommendations.
One is a precursor to the other.
I don't think you can be an effective advisor/CFO without having a proper and robust data set, whether it's from within the company or from outside the company. So the first thing is to get that part right, get it in place, and make it as efficient as possible.
But beyond that, a CFO shouldn't be focusing on just bookkeeping, journal entry, and keeping track of data. It's looking at the data, coming up with meaningful insights, and using that to give advice, whether it's to the CEO, the COO, or the different units of the business. It's trying to maximize the value of the company using the data that is generated from the traditional finance function.
If I were to give one piece of advice, it would be to embrace technology to the fullest extent possible.
I can share from the perspective of someone within a high-growth startup.
My advice would be to make every dollar that you spend count.
Funding or access to funding is becoming more scarce, and it's becoming a lot more expensive.
So just make sure that every dollar that you spend counts, plan conservatively, and try to execute aggressively. Especially in this climate where funding is becoming more difficult, try to be as conservative as possible, but obviously, you still need to execute your plans.
Having said that, for us, I think 2023 will be a little bit of a pivotal year. We have some exciting projects in our pipeline, and hopefully, they will materialize towards the end of this year.
I would say it's probably going to be a reiteration of most of the things we discussed, particularly around automation.
I think my advice to them would be to embrace it. Some people might be a little bit averse to it, but I think that people should embrace it; it adds a lot of value, it streamlines a lot of the workflows and enables those finance professionals to allocate more of their time towards more value-add kind of work streams that will definitely benefit the company.
If I were to give one piece of advice, it would be to embrace technology to the fullest extent possible.
Finance is like the central nervous system. Everything that happens within a company always comes back to the finance team; the good and the bad. Having these kinds of tools will enable the finance team to become a lot more effective in servicing the different elements of the organization or the different departments of the organization.
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