Cyril Aubry shares his vision of current and future developments in the transformation of finance functions.
Finance Forward, the event that brought the corporate finance ecosystem together
On June 24, 2025, Finance Forward, organized by Micropole and Talan at the Musée National de la Marine in Paris, brought together over 150 decision-makers and finance function experts. The aim was to create a forum for constructive exchange between peers, to decipher the major transformation challenges facing finance departments up to 2030.
A morning of keynotes, round tables, conferences and workshops explored themes at the heart of the function's challenges: modernizing technological tools, adapting to new regulations, performance management, strategic data exploitation, and the growing role ofartificial intelligence.
Participants were able to discover the technological solutions of our partners, including Anaplan, Board, Informatica, Jedox, Oracle, Pigment and Sage.
At this morning's event, Cyril Aubry, Chief Operating Officer at Société Générale, shared his vision of future priorities and developments for the finance function. Here's a look back at the key points from his interview.
Acceleration and volume: a dual requirement for finance
Cyril Aubry's first priority is clear: to produce faster and deliver more data.
Financial processes - monthly, quarterly, annual - are already well established and managed. But management's expectations are now different: they need to reduce production times, while increasing the granularity and quantity of information shared.
In other words, the finance function must rise to the challenge of efficiency and immediacy, without compromising on quality. This imperative places technological tools and data management at the heart of its priorities.
Towards more hybrid profiles: finance and technology in synergy
Societe Generale's COO also emphasizes the changing skills required of finance departments. Although financial managers are not destined to become IT experts, mastery of the tools has become essential.
"You can't ask a Financial Business Partner to do his job without a good knowledge of the tools at his disposal," he explains.
This reality calls for more hybrid profiles, able to navigate between business expertise and intelligent use of information systems. Tools are becoming real catalysts of performance and autonomy for finance teams.
Regulations: balancing constraints and opportunities
The subject of regulations is an inescapable part of everyday life for finance departments. For Cyril Aubry, there's no getting around it: "Basically, it's a lot of constraints". Nevertheless, he recognizes that these obligations can sometimes be transformed into levers for progress. By forcing organizations to revisit certain aspects of their processes, they reveal areas of fragility and create opportunities to improve quality or efficiency.
But the difficulty, he stresses, lies in striking the right balance: meeting obligations without over-interpreting texts, at the risk of imposing unnecessary additional constraints. It's a subtle balance, but one that's essential to contain costs and avoid excessive complexity.
Let's face it, when the regulator comes down on us with a subject, he generally knows where to look and why. On the other hand, our challenge is to avoid over-interpreting these regulations and overdoing it.
AI: between exploration and waiting for convincing use cases
At a time when artificial intelligence is gaining ground in many sectors, Cyril takes a pragmatic look at its application in finance. For him, AI is still in the exploratory phase: POCs are underway, but no massive exploitation has yet been deployed in finance functions.
Use cases are still rare, and need to demonstrate their added value before they can be generalized. For the time being, AI is being used more in business than in finance.
This cautious approach illustrates a broader trend: finance, by nature rigorous and regulated, is taking a measured approach to the adoption of new technologies, favoring robustness and reliability over fad.
Tomorrow's finance: adaptability is the watchword
In a constantly changing economic and regulatory environment, marked by accelerating deadlines, an explosion of data and uncertain geopolitical contexts, the finance function needs to develop a capacity for continuous adaptation.
This "regular adaptability" will be the key to meeting the growing expectations of general management and effectively accompanying the transformations to come.
