In a recent report published by Gartner, Inc regarding the top Initiatives in 2020 for finance executives of Mid-Sized organizations, cost-cutting remains a top priority. In a key finding, the report claims seventy-seven percent of CFOs cite the business’ lack of interest in right sizing cost structure as a top challenge, but only 18% are confident in their ability to solve this cost Structure Challenge.
Not surprisingly, 43% of CFOs report inefficient or ineffective long-range planning as a top problem with only 14% reporting a high level of confidence in solving this challenge.
The other top priorities include:
- Metrics and management reporting
- Finance and technology optimization
- Finance organization strategy and structure.*
Interestingly, payment fraud and security did not make the top five initiatives in the above report, but there is some interesting data that indicates it should be a concern. The AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report showed that 82% of companies were targets of payment fraud last year. This figure is climbed dramatically to the tune of 20 percentage points higher than reported in 2014.
A couple of other key stats around payment fraud as cited by the report:
- 80% of organizations experienced Business Email Compromise
- 54% reported financial loss as a result of the compromise
- 70% of scams targets checks
- 70% of organizations experienced check fraud
- 64% of attempted or actual payment fraud resulted from actions of those outside the organization**
Both reports mentioned above include additional detail around the statistics and are both good reads.
*Information cited from Gartner, Inc Finance Top Initiatives in 2020. The full report is available at Gartner.com
**Information cited from 2019 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey. The survey is available at AFPonline.org.
