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EVENT OVERVIEW

According to IMF, the economic activity in Hong Kong SAR is normalising with the reopening of the border. Strong fiscal policy support has helped the economy navigate through multiple shocks over the last few years. Also strong institutional frameworks and financial buffers have allowed Hong Kong’s financial system to remain resilient and operate smoothly, including the Linked Exchange Rate System (LERS).

Although rebound is expected this year, Hong Kong’s economy is challenged with macro-financial pressures amid rising interest rates, gradually rising inflation, on-going stress in rental and the real estate sector of Mainland China and the global economic slowdown. Given the slowing growth and tightening financial conditions around the world, how should finance leaders in Hong Kong navigate through the global headwinds? How can finance leaders be prepared to remain resilient post-COVID normalisation economic activity, amidst the large decline of labour force over the past few years? Moreover, in the race to innovate, automate and transform, and against the continuing uncertainty, how should finance leaders manage the many priorities on the roadmap of growth and robust recovery?

Themed “Forging Strategic Partnerships with Business”, FutureCFO Conference 2023 series seeks to bring to the fore strategies, process transformation and technology innovations that aim to do just that – make finance, and the CFO, an even better strategic partner to business.

Taking place on 24 October 2023, the 3rd Annual FutureCFO Hong Kong Conference will gather over 120 senior finance professionals from multiple industries in Hong Kong. This by-invitation executive gathering will also discuss strategies to confront challenges facing finance function post-digitalisation, stay agile and drive business forward amidst continuing uncertainty and new challenges.

At this year’s in-person event, we will bring together some of the leading minds in finance in Hong Kong to solve real-world business problems today and seek to present use cases to answer critical challenges facing the various finance functions such as:

  • Managing the margin pressures in an inflationary environment
  • Making FP&A more predictive and agile
  • Automation to drive down cost
  • Narrowing the financial close and aiming to make it touch-less
  • Closing the talent hole and managing the future of finance generation

 

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

CFOs, MDs, VPs, Directors, Heads, GMs, and Senior Managers, involved in:

  • Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)
  • Strategic Planning & Forecasting
  • Costing & Budgeting
  • Treasury Operations
  • Project Financing
  • Accounting and Reporting
  • Merger & Acquisition (M&A)
  • Investment / Portfolio Management 
  • Auditing & Internal Control
  • Tax Governance
  • Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC)
  • Statutory & Regulatory Reporting
  • Fiscal Policy Planning
  • Financial Technology Solutions

WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND

The FutureCFO Conference aims to give CFOs, who also act as their company’s strategic business partner and catalyst, insights on ensuring corporate growth and successfully mitigating risks and challenges amidst the current economic and political uncertainties in their countries. The conference will also address strategies and best practices on how CFOs can reimagine finance functions and their organizations to survive and thrive in today’s fast-paced and digitally driven landscape.

This by-invitation only one-day event will gather over 120 senior finance leaders from multiple industries and offers the best opportunity to hear from the industry’s leading professionals, contribute questions from the floor, engage in incisive panel discussions that discuss real-life business cases, updates and strategies to meet the most pertinent challenges facing the finance function in 2020.

High-Level Industry Speakers

We gather 20+ industry speakers and experts from leading organizations for keynote presentations and incisive discussions so you can tap on their invaluable insights and best practices important to your finance function management and transformation.

Interactive Discussions

Be part of our interactive panel discussions that address the current hot topics, share ideas and experiences and get the answers to your pressing questions from prominent finance leaders on stage.

Networking Opportunities

Meet new business partners, engage and forge new connections with fellow finance and treasury leaders in the region, solution providers and many more at our event through luncheons, coffee breaks, one-to-one meetings and informal introductions.

Targeted In-Depth Sessions

8 hours of learning and networking opportunities packed into 10 in depth sessions. Listen to corporate-driven best practices and case studies sharing that are targeted to your profession through the personalized country-specific conferences we crafted for you - FutureCFO Conferences.

FUTURECFO CONFERENCE SERIES

AGENDA

09:00

Chairman’s Welcome Remarks

Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

09:15

PANEL DISCUSSION I: Continuing the Pace of Change: Unlocking Growth Opportunities and Tackling Challenges in 2024

The confluence of rising inflation and interest rate, tensions in geopolitical, regulatory changes, energy security, foreign exchange volatility, supply chain disruptions as well as climate change risk had reshaped CFO’s responsibilities in magnitudes. With things changing rapidly locally and globally, exacerbated by slowing growth, planning for 2024 is certainly not an easy task for finance leaders in Hong Kong. CFOs are required to drive the necessary transformations, be agile and flexible to capture new opportunities especially with the potential shrinking in customer demands as the world is likely or already in recession.

  • Doing more with less in the growing volatility, uncertainty complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) environment
  • Managing the margin pressures: How can finance leaders help accelerate recovery and ensure long-term sustainable growth post-pandemic?
  • Areas to raise and cut spending in 2024
  • Keeping pace with sustainable financing and ESG efforts in 2024
  • Navigating the changing tax landscape in 2024-2025

 

Moderator:
Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

Panelists:
Calvin Lim, Group Finance & Administration Director, AMAZON PAPYRUS CHEMICALS LIMITED
Dr. Yanir Landenberg, CFO, GOLDSTAR LINE
Sundararaman Venkateswaran, CFO & Group Finance Director, MASON GLOBAL LIMITED

09:50

KEYNOTE I: Moving beyond Automation and into Autonomous Finance

Finance functions want to close faster, cheaper and with fewer errors. According to recent Gartner’s survey, 55% of finance functions aim for a touchless close by 2025.

The pandemic, including social and operational restrictions it imposed, rising needs of the stakeholders and macro-economic pressures are creating impetus for a touchless close. However, to achieve a touchless close, it will require finance leaders and controllers to move beyond automation and into autonomous finance.

  • Shifting from process automation to intelligent automation
  • Autonomous finance for augmented real-time insights, effortless compliance and greater flexibility in financial strategy
  • Narrowing the financial close and aiming to make it touch-less
  • Accelerating back-and-middle-office finance operations to ensure digital maturity
  • Operationalising AI to move an autonomous, touchless financial close

10:15

PANEL DISCUSSION II: Digital Transformation and Reality Gap: What’s Next Post Digitalisation?

Digital transformation has saved many businesses when the pandemic struck. However, in reality, almost no organisation has finished their digitalisation journey. While most organisations are now more digitally mature and they are in the better position to thrive in the post-pandemic era, what businesses are asking for constantly evolves.

  • Advancing digitalisation initiatives vs. traditional work environments
  • Capitalising on digitalisation investment to stay resilient, flexible and efficient amidst escalating costs
  • Keeping up with digital acceleration while ensuring employee’s continuous engagement
  • Lesson learnt from 2022-2023: What can be done differently in 2024?
  • Setting finance’s technology strategy and roadmap for 2024

Moderator:
Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

Panelists:
Dr. Darron Sun, Fellow Member, CIMA
Steve Tsang, CFO, SSP ASIA PACIFIC

10:50

MORNING COFFEE BREAK & NETWORKING

11:15

KEYNOTE II: Getting It Right with Spend and Growth

The unprecedented change in recent years showed that business, geopolitical and macroeconomic disruptions can happen at any time. Today’s changing economy is driving new spending priorities as organisations look to boost operational fundamentals. As profitability and cost control have been at the forefront of CFOs’ priorities in 2024, decision-making around expenses and ensuring enterprise growth have become the CFO’s mandate.

  • Managing enterprise growth and spend in a volatile environment
  • Aligning spend to growth: Where to continue to invest, where to pull back spend, and how to create an optimal ROI
  • Creating a comprehensive visibility into company spend
  • Leveraging data-backed insights and decisions to manage spend and growth cycles

Sammy Yeung, Regional Finance Lead, WORKDAY

11:40

FIRESIDE CHAT I: Aligning Business, IT, Finance and Operational Strategies for Effective Planning and Decision Making
  • How to successfully align finance with operational plans, people and data
  • Deploying advanced technologies to support finance strategies and enhance FP&A amidst uncertainty
  • Best practices and lessons learned

Interviewer:
Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

12:05

PANEL DISCUSSION III: More than Turnover and Profits: Making Finance a Better Strategic Partner to Business

This session will unfold the new expectations for finance role as strategic business partner and how to transform finance function into strategic business-partner, capable of providing critical supports and insights to deliver sustained profitable growth and seamless operational excellence.

  • Rewriting and solidifying finance function’s roles as the most trusted strategic business partner to capture new opportunities
  • Evolving transactional finance to value creation and become enterprise’s critical enablers
  • Communicating and engaging with the Board
  • Up-skilling the finance team to leverage fully on digitalisation and better partner the business

 

Moderator:
Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

Panelists:
Dennis Ip, CFO and Company Secretary, IMPRO PRECISION INDUSTRIES LIMITED
Danny Ho, Executive Director and CFO, SASA INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS
Sunny Cheng, Group CFO, UCP GROUP
Elaine Ong, Services Lead, WOLTERS KLUWER

12:40

NETWORKING LUNCH

13:45

KEYNOTE III: Driving Organisational Speed and Agility with Self-Service Data and Analytics

A Gartner survey reveals that companies that invest in productivity and efficiency to fight inflation will outperform those who just increase prices. Instead of just passing on inflationary costs to customers, improving efficiency, productivity and quick data-driven decision making is a better bet for the business’s long-term competitive advantage.

  • Leveraging big data and self-service analytics to drive innovation, higher productivity, growth and revenue
  • Empowering finance teams to take on the leadership role with deep, trustworthy and data-driven insights while reducing risks and costs
  • Enabling finance teams to turn data into insights independently with self-service data analytics capabilities
  • Creating secure collaboration for quick data-driven decision making with autonomous, self-service, cloud data warehouse
  • Ensuring data governance and security in self-service data analytics

14:10

FIRESIDE CHAT II: Leading on Sustainability: How CFOs Can Create Value through ESG

Today’s CFOs are often tasked to ensure their organisation’s sustainable initiatives successful. With the myriad and speed of ESG developments, creating further value for the organisation and calculating the value of the return of ESG initiatives are difficult.

  • Leading sustainability from the CFO’s seat
  • Stepping up enterprise’s ESG initiatives
  • Managing the ESG’s values and risks as regulations and standards change
  • Tying the benefits of ESG back to the business’ financial returns and income statement
  • Leveraging technology to improve productivity, customer experience and intertwine these with ESG strategy

Interviewer:
Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

14:35

PANEL DISCUSSION IV: Smarter FP&A for Sustained Financial Resiliency

Pritika Bhattacharjee, Vice President, Research in the Gartner Finance Practice says: “CFOs are telling their FP&A leaders that they need to improve flexibility of budgeting and forecasting, enable faster capital reallocation, and updated financial models to reflect rapidly changing business realities”.

With economic activity slowing down, optimising sales is often a challenge for many businesses. As businesses enter into low-growth and high-cost setting, securing collections has become difficult and cash flows get increasingly difficult to predict.

  • Improving working capital and cash flow amidst high interest rate and squeezing credit to ensure business continuity
  • Transforming cost structures to operate efficiently and balance fluctuations
  • Creating more agile, scalable and flexible FP&A
  • Optimising business decisions and cash flows with AI/ML-driven scenario planning
  • Rolling forecasts and scenario planning to protect free cash flows and reserves

 

Moderator:
Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

Panelists:
Joseph Leung, Group Finance Director, THE KOWLOON MOTOR BUS COMPANY (1993) LIMITED
Jemi Lam, Asia Pacific Finance Director, WESTERN DIGITAL

15:10

AFTERNOON COFFEE BREAK & NETWORKING

15:35

FIRESIDE CHAT III: FinOps for CFOs: Taking Control of Cloud Costs

When the pandemic hit, organisations pushed themselves to rapidly modernise their applications and platforms and in the pursuit of cost savings, many aimed to become ‘cloud-first’ enterprises. However, as businesses squaring up this year, organisations may overspend on their cloud technology and struggle to keep the cloud costs under control. This session will delve into FinOps or cloud financial operations, an approach that let organisations realise the maximum business value from using the cloud by making data-driven spending decisions. 

  • FinOps in the top of CFO agenda 2024
  • Developing structure and strategy for cloud financial management
  • Establishing FinOps for internal finance, IT and other teams across the organisation
  • Metrics that support cloud cost optimisation
  • Cloud cost saving methods and mistakes to avoid

Interviewer:
Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

16:00

KEYNOTE IV: Fighting Fraud from the CFO’s Seat

According to a report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, organisations lose an estimated of 5% revenue due to fraud every year and 12% typical fraud cases occurred in the finance function or accounting department.

The permanence of hybrid work model and growing use of cloud have increased the occurrence and severity of fraudulent activities, thus added a new dimension to CFO’s overall risk and fraud management strategy within their organisation and possibly in their finance department as well.

  • CFO’s role in mitigating organisation’s risk related to unethical conduct
  • Using financial rations to investigate fraud
  • Auditing company policies, procedures and internal control for weaknesses and bad actors
  • Creating a secure environment for all cash transactions regardless of the payment channel
  • Cultivating a corporate culture that fights unethical conducts
  • Investing in cyber security to prevent fraud and protect sensitive data

16:25

PANEL DISCUSSION V: The New Breed of Finance Team: How to Start a Team of Experts for the Future Finance

Gartner predicts that by 2024, 30% of organisation will implement and use AI-enabled processes within their financial management infrastructure. Also, 40% of organisations in service-oriented sectors will consolidate their core financial and operational solutions in a single ERP system.

To prepare for the future of finance function, CFOs will need to assemble a squad of finance employees that speak data and even write in Python.

  • The future of finance organisation
  • Determining the needs and skills beyond accounting
  • Developing the latest digital and data competency in the finance team
  • Finding and retaining digital skills: How to attract business-savvy and tech-savvy finance talents?
  • Managing the new breed of finance talents in Hong Kong

Moderator:
Allan Tan, Group Editor-in-Chief, CXOCIETY

17:00

CHAIRMAN’S CLOSING REMARKS & END OF CONFERENCE

SPEAKERS

Allan Tan

Group Editor-in-Chief

CXOCIETY

Calvin Lim

Group Finance & Administration Director

AMAZON PAPYRUS CHEMICALS LIMITED

Danny Ho

Executive Director and CFO

SASA INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS

Dennis Ip

CFO and Company Secretary

IMPRO PRECISION INDUSTRIES LIMITED

Dr. Darron Sun

Fellow Member

CIMA

Dr. Yanir Landenberg

CFO

GOLDSTAR LINE

Elaine Ong

Services Lead

WOLTERS KLUWER

Jemi Lam

Asia Pacific Finance Director

WESTERN DIGITAL

Joseph Leung

Group Finance Director

THE KOWLOON MOTOR BUS COMPANY (1993) LIMITED

Sammy Yeung

Regional Finance Lead

WORKDAY

Steve Tsang

CFO, Asia Pacific

SSP GROUP

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CFO & Group Finance Director

MASON GLOBAL LIMITED

Sunny Cheng

Group CFO

UCP GROUP

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POST-EVENT HAPPENINGS

CXOCIETY (reads “society”) provides engagements with the C-level community in Asia through Digital Media, Custom Content, Events, and Research and Reports. The leadership team at CXOCIETY has over 50 years of experience in C-Level Engagements and truly understands the challenges faced by C-level executives in their day-to-day work.