Martin Luther King, Jr. said that "the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The origin of this sentence can be traced to Theodore Parker who was a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810. Parker called for the abolition of slavery in the USA in an 1853 collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion”.

So, what does this have to do with the mission of the Profitability Center of Excellence (PACE)? Plenty.

The top 7 trends shaping FP&A today can be grouped into 3 key building blocks: Process, Technology, and People.

The building blocks are a 3-part recipe to create the perfect cake. Each part will help to curate a strong finance professional and a successful cross-functional FP&A team.

xP&A is more than an attempt to ‘fix’ the planning process. It is a complete transformation of the FP&A function to continually challenge the status quo, to educate, shape and influence management decisions on how the organization achieves its goals.

FP&A is getting more and more relevant in the organisations as a key role to support the strategy and decision making. This article covers the main skills FP&A professionals should develop to succeed in the context of 2030s, highlighting the mix of technical skills such as data analytics and data architecture with soft skills such as influencing and storytelling.

In a world in which increasingly little can ever be taken for granted, the core capabilities needed for thriving FP&A teams are continuously developing.

At the end of the day, FP&A isn’t a technical department. Its role is to develop the operating and financial plan and help the organisation to achieve set goals. It is therefore very important to receive technical support and advice from qualified professionals. This support will be much more helpful if it considers finance and planning specifics. In other words, the technology specialist should be a part of Finance or, even better, the Planning department itself. This role can be called a “Finance Technology Officer” or FTO.