Over half of large firms to move their finance systems to the cloud: survey

Respondents also noted that CFOs should expand their roles beyond finance into risk management and cyber security.

Over half or 57% of large enterprises in Singapore intend to move their finance systems to the cloud, with one-third (33%) expecting to do so in the next 6-12 months, a report by cloud provider Workday revealed.

The report, which surveyed more than 300 senior finance executives from large enterprises in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, estimated that a majority of organisations in Singapore suffered around four cyber attacks in 2018.

In the past year, Singapore has been reeling from a spate of high-profile cyber incidents, including its worst ever cyber attack, the , which compromised the data and personal particulars of some 1.5 million patients.

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It also highlighted how a lack of data and insights is a core challenge for finance professionals, with 49.5% of respondents saying that a lack of up-to-date market knowledge and solutions was a significant barrier to providing more strategic advice. This was followed by a lack of industry benchmarking for comparisons (48.5%) and lack of time and resources (46.5%).

“Most finance professionals in Singapore also lack a single source of truth for data, with the majority (55.4%) saying they use at least two or more systems to collate their data,” the firm noted in a statement, adding that 18.8% of respondents say they use more than six sources for data collation, which is the highest regionally.

Only 37% of senior professionals in Singapore said that their current tools for providing real-time reporting and analytics were very satisfactory.

Less than half of the respondents are very satisfied with the current tools that are being used to perform functions, including core accounting (40.1%), real-time reporting (38.9%), budgeting and forecasting (40.4%), treasury management (43.3%), internal control deployment (42.7%), external audit (41.5%).

Almost one-third (31.7%) claim that their teams are not equipped to carry out real-time reporting and analytics.

The survey further revealed that more than 86% of Singapore respondents believe that CFOs should expand their roles beyond the finance function.

“This is happening in some areas such as digitalisation where 71% of finance professionals are involved in decision-making in their organisations, but they remain left out of other key areas – particularly human capital management (49%) and cyber-security (32%),” Workday noted.