Jordaan Burger: New era for CFOs and finance
CFO Club Podcast spoke to Jordaan Burger, VP of Finance for Sage’s African, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific regions. Jordaan offered unique insights on how CFO can use technology to move from the backroom to the boardroom.
Written by: Staff Writer
Jordaan Burger is a double threat. While his background is in finance, as a Sage VP, he is uniquely placed to understand the interaction between technology and finance.
“I can’t see myself leaving the technology space; it’s an exciting space to be in, especially with where the world is going and where it touches on finance,” says Jordaan.
He dissected this intersection of technology and finance for the CFO Club Podcast.
Sage advice on moving from the basement to the boardroom
“I think it’s very difficult for us to lose that old boring number crunching, sitting in the basement, just looking backwards stigma that’s linked to finance people,” admits Jordaan. “The more you put yourself at the table as a trusted business advisor for the other areas of the business, the easier you can get rid of that stigma.”
“I’m trying with my finance team to have everyone very commercially focused.”
“I’ve got finance business partners who support the various areas of the business and an FP&A team, and that enables us to really be commercially focused, doing the storytelling, acting as a trusted business advisor,”
“So that’s where CFOs and finance teams should be going, and it’s really exciting. It feels like we’re contributing more.”
The digital transformation future looks cloudy
While technology is a core reason why modern CFOs can be forward-focused, managing the risks of rapid digital transformation is challenging task. “If we talk about digital transformation in finance, it covers five elements. You’ve got people, processes, technology, data and information, and that’s quite a wide scope for just a CFO to deal with standing still.”
This is particularly straining for CFOs of smaller businesses.
“If we take an element such as security, smaller companies don’t have the capacity to either have an internal security or risk division nor can they appoint an outsource vendor to deal with that for them. But on a cloud platform, you’ve got the peace of mind that specialists are dealing with the security elements of it on your behalf.”
South African CFOs are ahead of the curve in this regard, according to Jordaan.
“If we look at elements such as the adoption of cloud South Africa, in terms of the Sage picture, we actually are ahead, and that’s really encouraging. I think in the adoption of technology, we’ve always been good at that. We can see it in our banking sector; moreover, we can see it across multiple industries in South Africa.”
Jordaan offered exclusive tips for aspiring CFOs on the podcast and gave insight into how Covid has accelerated the digital transformation. To learn more about how you can access the podcast, exclusively available to CFOClub members, check out our offers.
Watch the full interview below:
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