Ahead of the marcus evans CFO Summit 2024, Erik Saito discusses what technology CFOs can utilise to improve financial reporting accuracy, make more strategic decisions and mitigate risks.

1. Interview with: Erik Saito, SVP &
GM - EMEA & APAC, Workiva
“CFOs can certainly do more to
minimise the risk of human error in
financial reporting to be more strategic,”
says Erik Saito, SVP & GM - EMEA &
APAC, Workiva.
Workiva is a sponsor company at the
marcus evans CFO Summit 2024.
How can companies streamline their
financial processes to improve
financial reporting accuracy and
timeliness? What do traditional
solutions lack?
Traditional desktop solutions for
financial reporting can leave organisa-
tions too siloed, dependent upon too
many manual tasks and full of uncon-
trollable, unscalable, insecure and
fragile processes not intended for
today’s complicated world of risk and
regulation. With automated cloud
solutions, data quality and accessibility
are enhanced through centralised data
collection, organisation and manage-
ment. When the data entry and other
tedious, high-data volume tasks are
automated, it also eliminates human
error, increases speed and accuracy,
leading to higher-quality data and
insights overall.
How can the finance function
navigate the changing regulatory
landscape, including tax reform and
new financial reporting require-
ments, and ensure the company
stays compliant with evolving
regulations?
With the changing regulatory landscape,
most businesses have global operations
with a diverse and complex set of
compliance mandates in each jurisdic-
tion that increases the cost and
complexity of financial disclosures.
Using technology with built-in XBRL/
iXBRL tagging can help companies meet
the regulatory compliance requirements
of these formats and also make their
financial information standardised and
easy to share. Coupled with the
automating features of compliance and
disclosure management processes, a lot
of the base level work is taken out and
the finance team is then able to focus
on other strategic tasks such as
analysing data for business insights.
How can CFOs help mitigate risks
associated with digital transfor-
mation?
As digitisation grows and technology
advances, cyber risk is always top of
mind for organisational leaders and
boards. Being naturally risk sensitive,
CFOs can be a critical business partner
to the organisation by asking due
diligence questions to mitigate risks.
They may not be technical experts, but
CFOs can and should work closely with
CIOs to manage the risks through the
proper selection of solutions and
providing education to the organisation
to raise risk awareness. As an example,
when CFOs are able to translate data
security risk into quantifiable business
terms that resonate with stakeholders,
then the company is able to make
strategic decisions and make invest-
ments to mitigate such risks.
What metrics should CFOs use to
measure success when leading
digital transformation in financial
reporting?
When we think of financial reporting,
the biggest downside of a manual
reporting process is that it is time
consuming. This prevents finance teams
from being more strategic and raises
the risk of human error. As a company
grows in size and stature, so does its
financial obligations. By using a financial
automation solution, it scales with it.
Being able to collaborate in real time
within a single, secured cloud environ-
ment where the data in their reports are
linked, auto-feeding one another for
accuracy and reducing time spent on
repetitive, transactional tasks that are
automated, is what finance teams are
essentially looking for.
Therefore, the success metrics they
should be looking at are employee
productivity - the amount of time spent
producing financial reports before and
after using a solution; Secondly,
employee satisfaction - lower turnover
rate within the finance team. Lastly,
accuracy of reports - percentage of
financial data that is error-free.
As a
company
grows in size
and stature,
so does its
financial
obligations
How CFOs Can Lead the Digital
Transformation of Financial Reporting

2. The Finance Network –
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About the CFO Summit 2024
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practical and progressive ideas and strategies adopted by successful pioneers.
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About Workiva
Workiva transforms the way people manage and report data. People all over the world use our connected, cloud platform to
seamlessly enable collaboration and deep integration into existing workstreams to simplify financial and ESG reporting.
www.workiva.com
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To view the web version of this interview, please click here:
https://events.marcusevans-events.com/cfo2024-erik-saito