The Global Business Complexities Impacting Finance Centralisation

Do more with less: this is a common ask many senior business leaders are faced with these days. And finance leaders are no exception.

While the role of finance is expected to shift from governance to guidance, the expectation is that CFOs will generally fund any finance redesign programmes through efficiency gains and the resulting cost savings. In line with this, we at TMF Group have recently observed a general tendency towards greater finance centralisation among our global clients. And we estimate this trend will continue – as a lean and agile finance function is expected to better support growth, leveraging technology and consistent processes.

A key pillar of finance centralisation is having one system – bringing different parts of organisation onto one technological platform. But in our experience tax and wider statutory compliance often remain outliers (we will include tax within the statutory compliance function throughout this article).