Finance business partners are like a channel or a bridge between finance and other functions. This role requires not only technical (financial and management accounting) skills, but also a good understanding of the business, customers, competitors, and the environment. Good finance business partners provide not only analysis, but also a synthesis with suggestions, or insights that can influence decisions. There is no need to stress the importance of interpersonal skills, such as leadership, communication, presentation and influencing skills needed for the business partners. In terms of profile, these individuals have experience in finance, they can be mostly extraverts with good analysis skills and passion for success. Business partnering contributes not only a financial perspective to the decisions, but also can increase the quality of decisions with new perspectives. Business partnering is what the individual makes out of the role for her/himself and for the business.

Risk Management: As seen in the Covid-19 pandemic, risks that can be seen far or less possible can become global, unescapable, and uncontrollable. For this reason, it is very important to assess and manage the risks that an organisation may face. If there is a risk manager or a risk committee in the business, they should work closely with finance, not only to manage the financial risks, but also to elaborate on and calculate the impact of other risks including the operational, en vironmental and strategic ones. The new enterprise risk management philosophy starts with and links to the strategic management. In assessing and managing the risks, finance is an important customer, and a supplier of ideas, information, and calculation. Finance is an important pillar in the enterprise risk management.

Digital Transformation: We are in an era of the Fourth Industrial revolution, defined as a digital revolution with an accelerated speed, velocity and physical, biological and digital fronts, that has been taking place since the middle of the 20th century. The inclusion of artificial intelligence, robotics, metaverse, and internet of things are just a few examples of the things that are being embedded in our everyday life. Without doubt, these have implications for the business world, including how customers interact with us, what they expect and how we deliver goods and services, and surely how finance function works as well. Digital transformation has a few implications for the finance teams, and these are as follows: 

* Agility: Organisations are turning their attention to being more agile, meaning human centric, dynamic, and able to move fast. In that respect, finance organisations should assess their speed in terms of data providing, monthly closures, supporting the business and can reorganise for the changing circumstances to be more proactive and fast in reacting.

* Data and Analytics: Data and knowledge are becoming important tools to be able to foresee the trends and consumer expectations in driving growth. According to a survey by Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA) on over 2,000 CFOs, 87% say that data has the potential to change the way business is done, but 86% of the finance professionals surveyed state that their businesses are struggling to get valuable insight from data, due to issues such as organisational data silos, challenges relating to data quality, or the ability to work with unfamiliar non-financial data. Companies are talking about open innovation, even open strategies where the consumers and the general public are part of these processes. Finance will have an important role in aggregating the financial and non financial data to arrive at the insights necessary for better decisions. Also data governance and data security will be important areas for the finance professionals to consider together with their Data Science and Information Technology colleagues. Today there are very interesting revenue management approaches in practice, such as dynamic pricing. Finance without the knowledge and involvement in these tools, will not have the opportunity to make a contribution to the top line. Analytics will improve the predictive power for future decisions and can support the strategy and scenario studies for finance.

* Process and Transaction Automation: Revisiting and improving the business processes and using tools such as robotic process automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) , Purchase to Pay, Order to Cash and Record to Report processes can be handled accurately and in a speedy manner. Combining the reports with dashboards and self serving tools will save on the human effort of preparing long reports and distributing them to the business.