A community for finance leaders at the forefront of Asia’s New Economy

The entire finance world is transitioning from a 'bean counter' role to being a critical business partner. The increase in automation has already allowed finance to move away from being solely a reporting function, to becoming an insight-driven role. In the next 5 to 10 years, the reliance on data will be more important. That's where the finance role, with its deep understanding of numbers, combined with financial technical knowledge, will allow the function to become a decision enabler as well as a decision maker. Some roles will become redundant as more processes fall under a RPA (Recurring Processes Automation) charter. This would also allow finance professionals to think of themselves as business leaders and have an important seat at the table in driving company strategy and results.

It's thrilling to witness first-hand the growth in the financial ecosystem world-wide, especially the fast growth in the South-East Asian region. Finance had long been considered a monotonous, recurring, reporting function. Moving away from this notion is what personally excites me the most. Getting the chance to build teams from scratch, who can leverage on various automation tools from Day 1, allowing them to bring their insights and analytics rather than only financial reports, is a massive value-add to the function and the business as a whole. The finance team has the most visibility on numbers. Growing that team to use data visibility to deliver tangible business results is the best part of being a finance leader.

Auro is the Head of Finance and FP&A at ULA, where he has built the finance and legalfunctions from a Pre-Series A to a Series B+ company. Prior to that, Auro was the Head of Finance, Southeast Asia at Bookmyshow, having joined them after having stints at IBM and EY, where he started his career. Auro specializes in building teams and scaling companies from the ground up, having done the same across Indonesia, Singapore, India and Malaysia. He also leads the legal and compliance functions across these geographies. Apart from being a huge fan of everything finance, Auro is also a sports fanatic and indulges in playing football whenever possible.

At the Carbon Trust, our mission is to accelerate the move to a decarbonised future. We see finance as playing a key part in this. In the next 5/10 years, it is critical to help financial institutions deliver genuinely green outcomes. We envisage that this will become increasingly important to navigate the risks and opportunities of climate change and the transition to a low carbon economy.

The transition to a low carbon future can be realised through different trajectories but unlocking capital is the common ingredient for successful and impactful outcomes. In this rapidly evolving landscape of sustainable finance, I’m excited by the challenge of identifying new possibilities across South East Asia and how I can spearhead partnerships to channel financing where it is most needed.

Xin Yi is Green Finance Lead, South East Asia at the Carbon Trust. She is a passionate and committed advocate for the role of Green Finance in the journey to decarbonise. She advises and performs assurance for a range of Green and Sustainable Finance projects involving bonds and loans. She further provides capacity building related to the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), including managing and delivering a series of climate risks workshops for financial regulators and banks in Taiwan. Her writing has been featured in various local and regional media outlets such as The Business Times, The Straits Times, The Myanmar Times, TODAY, The Nation and The Jakarta Post.

Finance leadership is probably the only role in the company where you not only get to work with great people, but also get to see the whole business and its place in the wider economy. CFOs are uniquely positioned to advise the board, protect investors interests, support managers and employees as a business partner and understand the implications of business decisions on the wider community in which the business operates. Many CFOs are overworked precisely because their position makes them the obvious choice to pick up many other responsibilities. Thankfully there are an increasing number of solutions to make the CFO's life easier, because most of the data we work with is structured and hence, ideal for automation.

Richard is the Group CFO and a Board Member of Nutrition Technologies, a VC backed biotech and agritech company. Richard sets International Valuation Standards (IVS) as a member of the Standards Review Board of the International Valuation Standards Council (IVSC), where he was also a founding member of the Social Value and Glossary subcommittees. He was previously a Big Four Accounting Firm Senior Partner and listed US Consulting Firm Senior Managing Director. After leaving professional services, he helped set up a USD1.5billion international charity addressing plastic waste. Richard also held the post of Honorary Treasurer and Board Member of an international dispute resolution charity for seven years and was an Adjunct Faculty member at Singapore Management University Law School.

I believe Finance will play an increasingly critical role in crafting a company’s long term strategy and bringing discipline to decision making.

What’s exciting to me about leading Finance in an organisation is we play an integral role in virtually every major decision a company makes.

Will Vaya is currently the Chief Financial Officer at Love, Bonito. He oversees finance, strategy, capital formation, accounting, tax, and legal teams. Prior to this, Will spent almost a decade in private equity and investment banking. Most recently, he was at Affinity Equity Partners, where he focused on consumer and healthcare investments within Southeast Asia. Before that, he was at La Mer (Estee Lauder Companies) in Global Marketing. Will completed his MBA at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

To maintain pace and evolve alongside the rapidly changing business environment, businesses need to embrace hybrid finance functions, digitize their processes and focus on high value-added activities. To enable this, finance functions need to be wholeheartedly embedded within the business, which requires those in finance to broaden their responsibilities beyond core finance.

Nothing makes me happier than to be able to influence and encourage changes within a corporation in a meaningful way. I always provide my best support in ensuring we build a strong bedrock for the company to achieve its purpose.

Christine Tan is the current Senior Vice President of Financial Control at Chope. With over 20 years of experience across both start-ups and multi-million dollar corporations, she has been applying her versatile accounting and finance skills in helping bring to life Chope’s ambition to become the next leading dining platform in Asia. Christine deploys her array of skills across Chope’s multifaceted business that serves both merchants and end consumers, ensuring that her expertise in cash flow management, strong financial controls ensures operational efficiency and provides a strong and solid foundation on which Chope can build its growth from. With a proven track record in implementing complex and large-scale Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Christine makes integrating business and financial processes across functions into a centralized ecosystem appear almost easy. A proud mother, Christine graduated from Curtin University with a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting, and currently holds Board positions for Project Consultancy firms.

With the continuous evolution of technologies that make finance professionals more efficient, the function would evolve from predominantly focusing on reporting and operations, to becoming partners of planning, business intelligence, strategy, and business development functions. Finance needs to keep up with the pace at which corporations need to make decisions. Financial data needs to be available to key decision makers as close to real-time as possible

I am excited by the opportunities to look into new solutions that may help team members become more efficient and effective. As with any company, systems and processes in our company were first done manually, but as the company scales in terms of revenues, expenses, employees and transaction velocity, we need solutions that can support our envisioned growth.

Mark is the Chief Financial Officer of Kumu. He led the execution of its US$73m Series C funding round, which closed in November 2021. Before joining Kumu, Mark had more than 13 years of investment banking experience, executing M&A and capital markets transactions across Southeast Asia. Previously, he was the Head of Corporate Finance for ING Bank in the Philippines and Vice President in the Corporate Finance team of Credit Suisse in Singapore. Mark is a CFA charterholder, a member of the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Management Engineering from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2007.