A Letter from CFIT Member David Knea

As a member of FEI’s Committee on Finance IT (CFIT), I’d like to introduce myself.  I’m David Knea, VP of Finance Technology and Innovation at American Express, and I recently had the opportunity to host the CFIT quarterly meetings here at the Amex headquarters in NYC. Through meetings such as these, CFIT strives to bring an impactful point of view to FEI’s broader membership on all things related to the enablement of Finance through Information Technology.

So, what did we cover?  Digital Transformation of course!  After some discussion throughout the year, it became apparent that this continues to be top-of-mind for everyone.  So we anchored on that theme.  Using the pitch, “challenges faced by the CFO and how digital transformation supports them”, I set off on pulling together a little over 10 speakers and panelists to give an under-the-hood look at how we approach digital transformation here at Amex. We kicked off the 2-day session with our Deputy CFO, Linda Zukauckas, followed by speakers on Decision Support, Finance Technology and Innovation, Enterprise Digital and Analytics, Recruiting, and Learning and Development.  Wow.  What a collection.  Participants where heavily engaged in conversation throughout.  You could really appreciate the passion and the pain from each company’s point of view.  The topics landed with everyone.  And while we may not have solved every problem, the feedback was clear that the group had absolutely moved the conversation forward within our CFIT peer-group and also in contributing to the larger body of knowledge we bring back to FEI.

We thought you might enjoy a couple brief articles covering some of the conversation: one piece is on implementing agile transformation and another is on implementing a learning and development approach to support it.

If you want to know more about CFIT, we’d love to hear from you.  Please contact Marisa Peacock at [email protected].