Case Study: Turning CPAs Into Business Partners

by Cesar Bacani, 30 May 2012

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topics:
Management

tags:
business partnering finance transformation

Ingo Bank, CFO of US$11.4-billion-a-year-in-sales Philips Healthcare, spent several years as finance chief in Japan and Hong Kong.

“The difficult thing that I found . . . is that you get a lot of people, particularly in Hong Kong, who are either from the banking service industry or who come with a strong compliance/transaction background,” says the CFO, who will be a keynote speaker at the CFO Innovation Asia Forum in Singapore in June.

In this final instalment of a two-part interview with CFO Innovation’s Cesar Bacani, Bank (pictured) spoke about talent management in Philips and the task of transforming Asia’s finance professional into business partners, Philip Healthcare’s strategy in the region’s growth markets and other issues. Excerpts:

Is the business partnering initiative a recent development in Philips?

Business partnering for finance people in Philips has always been there and has always attracted very strong individuals. But right now, these people are also bogged down with accounting and internal control, they need to do reporting, they need to do expense planning.

As a business partner, you’d rather spend your day working with the VP of Sales around pricing strategies, marketing strategies, running through with your VP of Operations the planning of factory output, yields, returns, investments, how to increase margins in the business, reduce risks around receivables . . .

At the end of the day, a business partner still stays accountable for the financials in his or her organisation. In the future, he or she will be getting shared services to help him or her do that, as opposed to the past, when he or she had to do it all by himself/herself. And that’s a big difference.

In recruiting or training up finance professionals to become business partners, does it help if they are management accountants?

Yes, it does help.

The difficult thing that I found when I worked in Asia is that you get a lot of people, particularly in Hong Kong, who are either from the banking service industry or who come with a strong compliance/transaction background, so it’s not always easy.

However, what typically happens is that you get more and more people that have worked for multinationals and they have been exposed to the concepts [of business partnering]. Those are typically the people we draw on. Or we get people early on after they finish university and basically grow them.

Many years ago, we started having our Asian talents go to our headquarters in the Netherlands or here in the US. They get training, they get exposure to businesses, they get to understand what it takes to work in a different cultural environment, what it means to work for a global company and the relationships you need to build to function in such an environment. Then we bring them back to their home country. We have had very good examples of that working very well for us.

Click here to network with Ingo Bank at the CFO Innovation Asia Forum in Singapore in June

Don't forget about trying to

Submitted by Dan Smith on 15 October 2012 - 4:23pm

Don't forget about trying to get the best deal for a printer when you contact your future partners. When you send them a printed offer, it should look professional.

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