May 11, 2022

The CFO Forum, Annual Meeting: ‘New Growth: from disruption to transformation’

The CFO Forum is a peer-to-peer platform for CFOs from leading organizations across wide-ranging industries offers a platform to exchange ideas and take inspiration from each other’s ideas and initiatives.

Theme & Topics

While the long-term impact of the pandemic is still unclear, the current geopolitical situation makes the major challenge of ensuring new growth even more relevant. It is increasingly important that companies don’t rely on growth in isolation. Companies and their leaders need to re-assess their unique sources of sustainable & humanized growth, and the interconnected risk and short-term uncertainty and disruption in a broader sense. We must ask ourselves how we can realize ‘new’ growth in a world where inflation is a concern, supply chains remain unpredictable, natural resources are limited, talent is scarce, and geopolitics pose significant risk.

And a holistic approach to ensuring ‘new’ growth is just one piece of the puzzle. This begs the questions:

• How can we ensure we remain relevant 10 years from now?
• How can we deal with short-term disruption?
• How can we best define value creation, and does our definition measure up to the company’s valuation?
• What is the leadership role of the CFO?

Most importantly, is value creation and recognition in sync?

Keynote speakers and contributors

Moderator: Bas van Werven, News Anchor BNR News Radio

Gavin van Boekel, CFO Heijmans
Carmen Dijk, Partner KPMG
Marieke Driessen, Partner Stibbe
Frank van den Driest, Founder Institute for Real Growth
Eric Kramer, Country Manager WPP
Derk Lemstra, Partner Stibbe
Hans Ploos van Amstel, CFO Partners Group
Rogier Raas, Partner Stibbe
Haroon Sheikh, Senior scientist  WRR and Professor Strategic Governance of Global Technologies VU Amsterdam
Ingo Uytdehaage, CFO Adyen

Location: WPP Campus, Amsterdam

Key insights

• In humanizing growth, it’s all about breaking down internal silos.
• Humanizing growth is a corporate responsibility: you can’t delegate it to a function or department.
• Profit is a reward: it should follow, not lead.
• Storytelling can be a powerful instrument in finding a corporate purpose.
• In geopolitics, we should look beyond our own narrative.
• Trust is stronger than control. Don’t rely on procedures.
• ESG is the new financials.
• Apart from standards as a ‘push’, we need market ‘pulls’ to drive ESG further.
• The CFO should monitor the integrity of the reporting and the data, but should not own ESG, as it is in the end owned by the business.

Read the extensive report here: Report CFO Forum, The Annual Meeting 2022

Aftermovie CFO Forum, The Annual Meeting 2022