Deloitte: Nine out of ten companies in Romania will invest in trainings for their financial departments, as they implement new technologies

Nine out of ten companies in Romania will invest in reskilling and trainings for their financial departments, as they implement and use new technologies in the daily activities, according to the latest edition of the Deloitte CFO Survey Romania, conducted among over 100 CFOs based in Romania.

The top three areas of the finance departments in which companies will invest in training are financial planning and analysis, accounting and controlling, the study also shows. The slow pace of employees reskilling is also one of the biggest obstacles in implementing digital transformation in companies, as mentioned by 30 percent of the survey participants, together with the level of required investment (49 percent) and the low degree of digitalization of the public institutions (42 percent).

“The role of the CFO has been changing fundamentally and it is now perceived as a source of business insights and as a strategic business partner. But in order for the finance function to be able to concentrate on core business, transformation is crucial. This may include enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of finance management processes, reducing staff hours spent on manual low-value tasks, improving analytics influencing decision-making, objectives which can be achieved by implementing technology solutions and by changing the way the entire department works internally and externally, with the rest of the organization,” said Zeno Caprariu, Audit Partner, Deloitte Romania, CFO Program Coordinator in Romania.

More than a third (34 percent) of the CFOs in Romania participating in the study see additional value-added tasks as the most important benefit of implementing digital transformation processes, followed by time reduction when working on different activities related to reporting, closing etc. (31 percent) and by improved reliability of data (18 percent).

In order to finance the digital transformation process, most of the companies consider internal funding (77 percent), followed by EU funds from both the National Plan for Recovery and Resilience and the usual multi-annual programming cycle (32 percent). The least considered sources of financing are bank loans (17 percent) and green bonds (9 percent).

The study also reveals that almost half of the companies (45 percent) see digital transformation as synonymous with automation, followed by enterprise resource planning – ERP – solutions (22 percent), aligning and integrating data (18 percent) and updating operating models (15 percent). When it comes to the reasons for implementing digital transformation in the financial departments, over 40 percent of the Romanian companies mention strategy, followed by decreasing error percentage (22 percent), managing remote work (14 percent) and saving money (13 percent).