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The role has certainly evolved and expanded over time. It is no longer limited to financial reporting, treasury management or tax efficiency. It now extends to shaping what the business should look like over the next five to ten years. CFOs are well placed to lead this thinking because they understand the numbers and have strong visibility into what is happening across the industry, which gives them strong commercial acumen.

To be an effective strategic partner today, a CFO needs to go beyond finance and develop a deep understanding of the business, the market and the opportunities ahead. This has to be seen in context, especially in India. Unlike a saturated, stable economy like Japan, where the focus is largely on running existing processes, India over the next five to ten years will continue to be a market of significant opportunity and change.

That means CFOs need to think about what needs to be done today in order to align with the country's growth story over the coming years.

This requires building a roadmap based on the company or group's vision, combined with the opportunities available in the market. It calls for forecasting, projections, business evaluation and data analysis, and that is where the finance skill set becomes particularly valuable. The core skills were always there, but today they are being applied much more closely to business strategy and decision-making.

Strategy of this kind also requires capital allocation decisions. This includes assessing an organisation's leveraging appetite, evaluating funding options and allocating capital to the areas that matter most.

In PCBL Chemical’s case, for example, while we continue to invest in organic growth, we are also looking to take a leap in our technological capability and equipment understanding.

That means investing in technology, collaborations, higher levels of automation and digitisation, and increasingly AI. Every one of these areas competes for capital, and no organisation, regardless of its size, has infinite resources available. Planning and allocating capital wisely therefore becomes a critical part of the strategic role that finance now plays.

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A CFO needs to go beyond finance and develop a deep understanding of the business, the market and the opportunities ahead.

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As important as growth is for organisations, internal controls and discipline in processes are equally important. Finance teams maintain checks and balances, define what is acceptable and what is not, and guard against ad hoc decision-making creeping into the system. However, processes are not meant to slow down operations, they are meant to facilitate them.

Finance can become a catalyst when it works alongside the business to create processes that are clear, efficient and scalable. The objective should not simply be to approve or reject decisions, but to enable teams to move forward with confidence, knowing that the right controls are in place.

The friction usually appears during periods of significant change because people naturally become accustomed to a certain way of working. Even something as simple as changing an old car comes with an emotional attachment, and it takes time before people fully accept a new way of doing things. The same happens in organisations. When processes change, they can initially feel unnecessary, even though the underlying objective is usually to improve consistency, discipline and efficiency.

This discipline also helps organisations execute better and grow faster. If fifty people are each left to decide their own way of working, pulling all of that together into something coherent becomes very difficult. When everyone follows a defined process, it creates uniformity, ease of understanding and smoother collaboration across teams. Seen this way, finance is not just a checkpoint but an enabler that helps the organisation execute with greater speed, clarity and consistency.

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When processes change, they can feel unnecessary at first - even though the goal is usually better consistency, discipline and efficiency.