Moore spoke to CFO Innovation’s Cesar Bacani about career challenges facing CFOs, the importance of mobility and mentors, and the perennial issue of being an accountant versus having an MBA as the best preparation for becoming a finance chief. Excerpts:

 

They come in all shapes and sizes. I’ve got four CFOs [as clients] right now. All different. One has a lot of experience in working with Asian companies, Asian CEOs, Asian chairmen, Asian owners. He’s an expat and has been here for 20 years. He doesn’t want multinationals. He loves those kind of family-owned local companies.

 

He knows how to do road shows and he’s done IPOs. He’s done a lot of M&As, a lot of financial restructuring. You talk to him about doing the accounts, he’d say, Oh, I did that when I was 25. Now I’ve got a really good team, I’ve mentored them and they get those things done while I’m out on a road show with the chairman raising funds for our next project. But I sign off on [the accounts].

 

I’ve got another client who’s from the logistics industry. He’s a CFO, but he hasn’t done IPOs, never worked in public companies. You don’t deal with the investment community, you don’t deal with the banks. It’s a multinational, so he reports into a global CFO in the US. So he doesn’t have ultimate responsibility to raise funds, going to road shows, do IPOs because he’s part of a bigger picture. He’s more concerned with economies of scale, strategic cost management, revenue enhancement opportunities, managing cash, just running the business in a more efficient way.

 

She is an MBA from India, living in Singapore. Not a CPA. She’s the CFO for ASEAN and South Asia for a multinational, so she goes out to Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India. She has only worked in commerce and came [to the CFO post] through the financial analyst route.

 

The [first] company that she joined out of MBA school in India was this massive multinational giant. They looked at her CV and it didn’t matter that there was no accounting qualification on there. They just saw the business smarts, the analytical skills, the financial acumen. All the roles she’s had since then have all been about analysis and joint ventures.

 

She did a JV in China and was director of the board when she was 32. She now wants to move back to India. I’m helping her do that and getting a lot of attention. She can be a country CFO for India who has worked 12 years in India, then got shipped over to do this Southeast Asia role in Singapore, been there for about five years and now happy to go back to India.

 

That’s her goal. There are so many different directions to take based on where they have come from. They’re stopping at the CFO post and defining the role based on what they’re bringing into it and what’s necessary, and then from there, you go to CEO. So many different ways to go. For example, the person that used to play the role of head of finance at Credit Suisse here [in Asia] is now a partner in a Big Four firm in the UK. 

 

He has spent 30 years in one organisation but has been posted all around the world. He said to me that he might as well have been with eight different organisations during his time because they’ve all been different businesses.