"Sustainably and ESG topics have high media attention but can be a jungle for businesses - understanding the underlying drivers and picking the right standard is key"

Heike is a CFO of international tech companies. She started as an Auditor at KPMG in Paris/France, worked in different finance and business functions at large corporations and is now helping start-ups to scale or grow internationally and prepare for successful exits. In parallel, Heike provides trainings, workshops and seminar work with the intent to demystify Finance and to define and implement ESG business strategies.

During the first phase of the podcast, we spoke about the importance of a wide range of experiences outside of Finance functions for any CFO to better understanding the constraints and objectives of colleagues and business partners. According to Heike, the challenges of a start-up CFO is the relatively high degree of complexity, almost similar to large corporations, all while having fewer resources and a business that evolves rapidly. Effectiveness in Finance, says Heike, is closely linked to the entire Finance team and stands on two pillars: The "kitchen" and the business. The kitchen (back-office functions, such as accounting or reporting) provides integrity and trust to the various stakeholders whereas Finance colleagues working within the business teams (e.g. commercial finance) are forward looking and drive performance. Often overlooked as “no news is usually good news”, the kitchen team needs to be put in the spotlight from time to time.

The second focus of the podcast was on ESG. Companies report on the impact their business has on Environmental, Social, Governance criteria due to a mix of market expectations and increasing regulation and disclosure requirements. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) established by the United Nations are an important corner stone to define objectives and measure results. Very tangible for me was the comparison of the SDGs with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and the example of how instagrid contributes to the reduction of CO2 emissions as part of their core business model. We also discussed how to deal with conflicting interests between profitability and ESG measures. Finally, Heike gave useful hints what ESG strategies mean for Finance: Understanding the variety of ESG standards and picking the right one is key - and challenging in the current jungle of standards.