Chief financial officers (CFOs) should realise that they need to continue to evolve if their businesses are to compete globally, according to a survey by KPMG International and CFO Asia Research Services. The survey of 514 CFOs, chief executives, directors and other senior executives outlined the changing nature of the role of CFOs across Asia-Pacific and showed that they remain largely focused on their traditional finance-related tasks. This is preventing them from fulfilling their evolving role as the CEO's trusted strategic adviser, and also casts doubt over whether their finance teams have the depth of skills to provide their companies with more strategic support. According to the survey report - Future Perfect: The CFO of Tomorrow - 62 per cent of respondents are still spending more than a quarter of their time on traditional finance tasks, and some 26 per cent spend more than half of their time on such tasks. Almost half of the survey's respondents spend less than a quarter of their time on roles such as decision support and business strategy. Aaron Lo, a partner in Risk Advisory Services at KPMG China, said it is no longer enough for CFOs to simply extract financial data and provide historical analysis. 'With Asia opening up and foreign companies continuing to expand into China, CFOs here are realising that their role is to provide the CEO with advice on strategy and to lead major initiatives like cost optimisation within an organisation. 'They must improve efficiency, not just within the finance function but also the working efficiency between functions, departments and business units,' Lo said. In fact, only 21 per cent of respondents felt that their finance teams had sufficient depth of talent and experience to undertake non-traditional, more strategic finance operations - i.e. to fill the gap that the CFO hoped to create by moving further up the evolutionary ladder. The survey found that 45 per cent of respondents felt that teams lacked strategic and broader management skills. Perhaps most worryingly, 34 per cent felt that they also needed to improve on technical accounting and transactional skills. When the respondents were asked how they expected to be allocating their time in two to three years from now, a swing became evident - away from traditional duties (63 per cent expected to be spending less than a quarter of their time on this) and towards more value-added operations (48 per cent expected to spend between 25 and 50 per cent of their time on decision support). In terms of the skills needed to play this different role, Lo noted that while CFOs in Hong Kong have been exposed to the more international management model, those in China still have room to improve, largely because organisational change in many of the local companies has been slow to take hold. 'Much of the change is driven to a certain extent by competition, while the government-linked companies are steered by the national agenda of the country and tend to be reactive rather than proactive,' Lo said. 'But foreign companies operating in mainland China bring with them a better finance management style, and they are trying to groom the CFO or finance director towards that direction.' In practical terms, he highlighted three key areas in which those wishing to balance their role as head of the organisation's finance function with being the CEO's strategic thinker should focus their energies: first, develop and maintain trust with all stakeholders; second, simplify and run an efficient operation; and third, provide insight regarding business performance to senior management. 'If the CFO has a strong finance operation, that allows him or her to spend more time in the non-transactional and non-traditional finance tasks. 'There are many organisations that have a fantastic CFO, but because the finance function is not properly managed he or she is constantly pulled back into handling the day-to-day work,' he said. 'CFOs need to go beyond putting out a report to the CEO. They need to tell the senior management what's behind those numbers. It's the interpretation that they provide that will help them plan strategy.'