4 Ways to Make Finance a Strategic Business Partner

Shifra Kolsky, CPA SVP, Chief Accounting Officer, Discover Financial Services
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As corporate finance professionals, we play a key role in the operations of our organizations and help enable good decision-making based on sound analysis. We help assess the impact of each option that’s weighed and help hold our colleagues accountable for meeting goals and targets. While we’ve historically been seen as scorekeepers across industries, we’ve also fought to secure our seat at the table as strategic business partners who can share important insights and help guide meaningful conversations in the interest of driving greater outcomes for our companies.

I spent some time with my colleague Vishal Shah, business unit CFO of Discover Global Network (the payments brand of Discover), to understand his approach to being an effective strategic business partner. Shah sits in a unique, and sometimes challenging, position where he serves two bosses—his business unit head and our enterprise CFO.

“To be successful, you have to remain unbiased and be willing to advocate for your business unit while still remaining true to your responsibilities as CFO,” he says. “It may require some alignment conversations and some finesse, but if you ensure that everyone is talking with each other about a shared goal, you can play a key role in helping folks meet in the middle.”

According to Shah, there are four elements every corporate finance professional needs to be mindful of to be an effective strategic business partner.

1. UNDERSTAND THE BUSINESS

While deep knowledge of the numbers is always important, exercise your curiosity to learn more about what’s behind the numbers and spend time gaining a deep understanding of the business you support and how it functions. Talk with your stakeholders to learn both what they do and why they do it. Be clear on how the business makes money and what it takes to be successful. A business model canvas, which is a template for documenting a business plan on a single page, can be a useful tool to guide your research and summarize what you learn. With this understanding, you can better assist in blending business and financial goals.

2. BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

If you want your business partners to listen to your views and consider your thoughts, it’s important to build trust and credibility. Start by getting to know your partners. Learn what’s important to them, their passion projects, and how they view their business unit’s role within the context of achieving the enterprise’s overall goals. Then, demonstrate your competence to them by bringing ideas that are meaningful to helping drive the success of the business.

3. MAINTAIN ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY

Strong partnerships are fostered through clear lines of accountability and transparent reporting, which are key to successfully driving desired business outcomes. Remember, as a strategic business partner, you’ll be engaged in both annual planning and project-level planning. Better business decisions will be made when everyone involved has a clear understanding of the project’s plan, how it’ll be managed, and how it’ll be measured.

• Project planning: During the planning process, the finance team often takes the lead to connect business initiatives to desired financial outcomes. Understanding how value is created and how different levers drive impact is important to building the business case for a particular initiative, and you’ll want to ensure early on that project leads can clearly articulate how their initiative will drive value for the company. It’s important to have a clear understanding of the risks and opportunities, as well as any assumptions used to build the business case for the initiative. Using this information, you can translate the desired financial outcomes into a system for managing financial decisions and can pressure test the assumptions to ensure the plan is appropriately balanced between being aggressive and achievable. A documented decision tree or criteria to consider in a decision framework can clarify expectations and decision thresholds up front.
• Project management: For any initiative, implementing general project management principles will help with accountability. It’s important to put a scoping document together to clearly establish a common understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish or the value you’re trying to create, the timeline and key milestones, the workstreams, tasks, ownership, help needed from others, and key dependencies. By documenting everything clearly, you can gain alignment up front and clarify anything that needs to be further refined. Once that’s all documented and agreed upon, it’s critical to put systems in place to ensure information flow, processes, and structure are there to help drive the right decisions.
• Project measurement: With these systems in place, you should have the data available to transparently influence outcomes, ensuring that the right thing is rewarded and receives visibility. Often, you’ll need to help the team determine the best metrics or measurements to track key decisions and actions, and using a scorecard that reflects the appropriate metrics can help. During this time, consider whether your value drivers are at the right level of detail or whether you need to break them down further for tracking. Additionally, identify your hypothesis on achievable outcomes and ensure that the items you expect to move or change, or that are most sensitive, are being tracked. Lastly, ensure that scorecards are shared broadly across the team and that there’s time set aside to review and understand progress on a routine basis.

4. NAVIGATE CHALLENGES

At times, you may find yourself at odds with the team you’re trying to support. In order to get these relationships back on track, you may have to sit down and directly discuss the root cause of your disagreements. While you may not come to a full agreement in these discussions, you can at least understand where each party is coming from and find a better way to resolve the issue(s) going forward.

Becoming a strategic business partner requires corporate finance professionals to look well beyond the numbers. A strong understanding of your business, a dedication to your partners, and effectively driving outcomes for the company must all become top priorities. However, with clear communication and by consistently demonstrating that you’re always seeking the best outcomes for the company, you should have no problem earning a seat at the table and bringing your business partners together to support each other’s—and the enterprise’s—success.

Related Content:

• CPA 2027: Corporate Finance Refocuses: In the coming years, corporate finance teams will see a shift away from old-fashioned number-crunching and toward automation, data analysis, and strategic insights.
• How to Strategize During Disruption: After a tough year, organizations and their boards may be tempted to completely overhaul their strategic plans and planning processes. Here are three tips on what to do—and what not to do—to create and execute strategy in turbulent times.