Sustainability - Closer than you think.

Sustainability Rises as a Top Finance Priority

Recent survey shows that sustainability has risen to the top of the business-priority lineup for midsize finance organizations. Across the board, midsize companies are incorporating sustainability directly into the strategies they create and the decisions they make to drive revenue growth, increase efficiency, and mitigate risk.

This represents an important shift in priorities. Survey respondents view sustainability as a revenue driver on equal footing with traditional drivers, such as increasing sales to existing customers, creating new products and services, and improving customer experiences.

But leaders are also prioritizing operational sustainability, along with conventional methods such as improving cost control and spend management and automating processes, to make their businesses run more efficiently.

In addition, business leaders are connecting sustainability to their overall risk mitigation strategy and prioritizing the reduction of reliance on scarce resources.

The bottom line: Sustainability is now an essential element of the bedrock activities of growing revenue, increasing efficiency, and mitigating risk. Most notably, it plays a vital role in a company’s brand recognition and reputation

Finance leaders recognize that their organization’s digital transformation is critical to help increase business performance today, better respond to future risks, and remain competitive.

Nearly 90% of these leaders see a positive relationship between profitability and competitiveness and their organization’s busi-ness transformation.

Two-thirds of respondents claim to have made progress, trans-forming some planned areas, with 31% reporting that they’ve completed their journey as initially conceived. However, the survey findings do not portend good things for companies that haven’t already started transforming – most of them expect to have made very little progress two years from now.

Looking ahead, participating finance leaders view technological innovation as their top priority in the next three to five years, with digital-experience innovation, sustainability innovation, and product-service innovation also being considered as very important.

The technologies most sought by businesses reflect the recent hardships of increasingly hybrid workplaces and cybersecurity incidents. They are investing in technologies ranging from

• collaboration tools (75%) and
• cybersecurity infrastructure (74%) to
• cloud computing (72%) to transform their processes.
• Automated business intelligence dashboards (63%),
• application development platforms (60%), and
• business process intelligence (59%)

Busy times ahead. Focus and Planning will be key.