This was contributed by Andy Watts, who is the Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer at Brown & Brown, an insurance brokerage firm. Mr. Watts is a member of the College of Business Advisory Council at Illinois State University and in this short article, he provides some career advice for students interested in careers in financial services.
Twenty years ago — about the time you were born — I paid each monthly bill via check. An accountant at the business received the check and manually entered our payments into a spreadsheet — hopefully without mistakes.
About ten years ago, we all realized we could save time by automating or standardizing monthly payments. This streamlined the writing and distributing of checks for the same amount each month. The business’ accountant saved a bit of time too.
Today, we’ve scheduled that distribution to be paid electronically — we don’t touch the money physically, and neither does the business’ accounting team. Our money is transferred directly into the proper account, both parties are notified that the payment was received, and the payment is electronically applied to our account.
Some would reduce this story to a tale of technology replacing people. I disagree. At its essence, digital transformation for individuals, businesses and commerce at the global level is about leveraging technology to empower people and teams to transition to higher-value work.
Removing repetitive or manual tasks from the daily schedule allows businesses to create new efficiencies and enable employees to focus on what really moves the needle. That’s why digital transformation has altered nearly every finance and accounting role in today’s world.
The evolution of the finance professional in the digital age
Since that accounting team doesn’t have to dedicate time to manually track and apply monthly payments or “lower value-adding effort,” the focus of their work suddenly shifts to higher value-adding effort. Business analysis, strategy, operations, engagement with business partners and vendors (both internally and externally) and customer service become core focus areas for finance teams — because they can be and need to be in order to have the most significant impact on the business.
The ability to operate consistently at this higher level has changed and will continue to change the personnel needs, hiring processes and talent that modern businesses seek to add to their team. More than just the technical requirements, finance professionals of the 2020s need to understand technology and how to leverage it because technology is now at the core of all we do.
As a result of this shift, we will see more technology and technologically-savvy team members impacting and benefiting the financial planning and analysis space. Organizations are looking to hire business analysts with a background in accounting or finance; technology majors with finance and accounting minors; a finance or accounting professionals with a business information systems or data and analytics background.
Businesses today know more about their customers, products and supply chains than ever before, enabling them to determine what’s working, what’s not and what will ultimately drive the business forward and add the most value.
The ability of future finance and accounting professionals to extract meaningful information from business processes will help today’s companies solve tomorrow’s problems.
Wanted: College grads that can adapt to a future focused on data and analytics
Finding a career path has always been about marrying what you want to do with the opportunities that exist in the current job market. A few things to think about that can help serve as a road map as you commence your journey:
- Gain as many experiences as possible to figure out what is a fit. Ideally, you’ll want to do this exploration during an internship or summer job at an organization where you can gain varied exposures to best determine what path to take.
- Build a foundation in technology and data and analysis. Anyone interested in finance should take multiple courses in technology, specifically business information, data analytics or data visualization courses. These should be a must for all future business/finance professionals.
- Interdisciplinary classes like public speaking can teach you how to present compelling ideas. Being able to easily explain a complex story about numbers, data and analytics in a visually compelling way will be critical to your future work and success, regardless of your exact role or function within the finance or accounting departments. For example, learning how to leverage the capabilities of PowerPoint with pictures, graphs, text and animation to create a compelling storyboard are all skills that will bring finance and accounting ideas to life – and most importantly, it will differentiate you from others.
These types of experiences, including all the critical twists and turns, will help you develop leadership qualities and characteristics that the workplace is desperately seeking.
In my conversations with students and organizations of all sizes, the quest for strong leaders continually emerges as a key theme. In good times and challenging times, such as periods of heavy disruption like today, having the right leaders and employees in the right seats allows organizations to drive innovation, remove friction, capture market share and ultimately fuel business growth.
The world’s most successful organizations do this at the busy intersection of technology, business processes and people. I look forward to meeting you there.