Women sweep the individual awards at the CFO Awards for first time

Thursday, 15 March 2018

Chief Financial Officer of the Year is Jennnifer Whooley from Stride Property Group.

Women have made a clean sweep of the individual awards at the CFO Awards.

It's the first time in the awards' nine-year history.

Chief Financial Officer of the Year was Jennifer Whooley from NZX listed Stride Property Group, while the award for Emerging Financial Manager of the Year went to Hannah Howard from the rapdily-growing My Food Bag.

The award for Outstanding Contribution to Finance & Business went to Dame Alison Paterson, chairwoman of KiwiSaver provider KiwiWealth.

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Dame Alison Paterson won the award for Outstanding Contribution to Business and Finance.

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At the awards in Auckland, presented by Stuff, EY and Conferenz, Air New Zealand won the Finance Team of the Year, and the New Zealand National Fieldays Society carried off the Finance Innovation Project of the Year.

Head award judge Jonathan Mason said: 'Jennifer Whooley's ability to devise and implement innovative solutions to the major challenges and obstacles Stride faced, as well as her humble attitude to the extraordinary outcomes she has accomplished, were key reasons as to why she won the award.'

Mason praised Paterson's track record in business of more than 50 years.

Emerging Financial Manager of the Year is Hannah Howard from My Food Bag.

'Dame Alison has touched countless New Zealand businesses and finance employees and is the model of the award, he said.

The presentation of awards followed a day-long summit at which chief financial officers were confronted with the challenge that climate change and technology were bringing to their roles.

Jonathon Porritt, director from Britain's Forum for the Future the days were gone when companies, and their financial officers, could ignore their carbon and environmental footprints.

'You might well have been thought to be a bit 'flaky' if you had shown a consistent and pronounced interest in all of these areas,' Porritt said.

'Those days have gone, just like a stable climate has gone forever, and we will never see them again.'

EY's Juliet Andews says CFOs need to be collaborative and adaptive.

'No longer will it be acceptable for CFOs to delegate all of these issues to the increasingly hard-pressed sustainability officers on the grounds that it does not really impact on them.'

'Don't do it because you have always been a closet 'tree-hugger'.

'Do it because this is the new reality which we all have to get extremely good at. There's nothing flaky or woolly about this whatsoever.

'All of the companies we work with in New Zealand have an absolutely rock-solid business case for seeking to outperform on environmental, social and governance issues, which means it goes straight to the heart of shareholder expectation about long-term value creation.

EY's Juliet Andrews said CFOs were facing a wave of change in the world's 'fourth industrial revolution' driven by digital technology.

CFOs had to become 'change leaders', and cope with increasing information flows.

'As CFOs you will have more information for you to understand, and to report on, and do it quickly.

That would increase pressure on CFOs. The great CFOs of tomorrow would have to be adaptive, collaborative and being mentally agile enough to 'shift focus rapidly as the change just keeps rolling over us, and it will keep rolling over us.'

Andrews said New Zealand was unusual globally in that many of its CFOs took on their current roles after rising up through the accountancy ranks. In Oceania, 88 per cent of CFOs it surveyed were accountants, compared to only a third in other parts of the world.