In an exclusive conversation with The Mainstream, Chitresh Agarwal, Associate Director – Finance, CFO Office | Finance Transformation & Corporate FP&A at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, shares his perspective on the evolving role of finance and its growing influence on enterprise growth.
Drawing from his experience in finance transformation and corporate FP&A, he explores how finance is moving beyond traditional reporting to become a strategic business partner—using data, technology and forward-looking insights to support better decisions, strengthen agility and create sustainable value across the enterprise.
1. With a distinguished professional journey spanning finance transformation, you have seen the function evolve significantly. Which experiences and milestones have had the greatest influence on your leadership approach, and how have they shaped your perspective on transforming finance for a changing business environment?
My biggest learning has been that finance transformation is ultimately business transformation, not a technology project.
Across my career, I have worked across global FP&A, business partnering, manufacturing finance, strategy, M&A and finance transformation. Each experience has reinforced the importance of connecting financial outcomes with the operational decisions that drive them.
One of the biggest shifts I have seen is finance moving from explaining what happened to helping the business understand what is likely to happen and what we should do about it.
My experience working closely with operations and manufacturing has particularly shaped this approach. When finance understands the underlying drivers, capacity, productivity, pricing, mix, working capital and costs-it can challenge decisions constructively rather than simply report their financial impact.
For me, transformation therefore starts with simplifying processes, improving the quality and speed of information and building teams that think like business leaders rather than just finance professionals.
2. As organisations balance growth ambitions with profitability and financial resilience, how can modern finance teams use data and forward-looking insights to support better planning and decision-making?
The starting point is to move from reporting numbers to explaining business drivers.
Planning becomes significantly more valuable when financial models are connected to operational drivers-volume, pricing, productivity, capacity, working capital, customer behaviour and cost structures, rather than simply extrapolating historical performance.
For example, in a manufacturing environment, a change in volume or input costs can have a very different impact on profitability depending on product mix, capacity utilisation, and productivity assumptions. Bringing these drivers together allows finance and business teams to understand different scenarios early and identify the actions that can change the outcome.
I believe finance should increasingly operate with a driver-based, scenario-oriented mindset:
What happens if demand changes? What if input costs increase? Where should we deploy incremental capital?
Finance’s role is to turn this analysis into choices and help the organisation act before the numbers appear in the financial statements.
3. Digital transformation is reshaping how finance operates. What areas of the finance function offer the greatest potential for automation, and how can organisations ensure these efforts translate into measurable business outcomes?
The greatest opportunity is to automate the repeatable and transactional layers of finance, while using technology to strengthen the analytical layer.
Data extraction, reconciliations, standard reporting, consolidation and recurring management reporting are natural areas for automation. But the bigger opportunity is to make insights available to people when they need them, rather than requiring them to navigate multiple reports and dashboards.
In one of my transformation initiatives, we built an internal conversational analytics capability that brought finance insights to users through a simple interface. Behind it was a structured and cleaned-up data foundation, with dashboards and analytics designed around the questions business users actually ask. Instead of waiting for a report or searching across multiple dashboards, users could access relevant insights almost at their fingertips.
That experience reinforced an important lesson: Digital transformation succeeds when technology changes how people make decisions, not simply how finance processes information.
4. As finance processes become increasingly automated and intelligent, how should organisations rethink their operating models, roles and workflows to build a more agile finance function?
Automation will change finance roles, but I don’t believe it reduces the importance of finance talent. It changes where that talent creates value.
The traditional finance model often has multiple layers of manual reporting, consolidation and reconciliation. As these activities become automated, organisations should redesign workflows around three capabilities: transactional excellence, analytical insight and strategic business partnering.
I have seen this shift first-hand while working on finance transformation, when repetitive reporting and data activities are streamlined, the real benefit is not simply fewer hours spent on processes. It creates capacity for finance professionals to spend more time with business teams, understanding drivers, challenging assumptions and identifying opportunities.
This also requires a different talent profile. Finance professionals increasingly need financial expertise combined with commercial understanding, data literacy and the ability to influence stakeholders.
The strongest finance organisations are those where teams spend less time debating whose number is right and more time discussing what the number means and what action should follow.
5. As AI and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats reshape the business environment, what should finance leaders consider when evaluating the opportunities and risks associated with these developments, particularly around governance, security and responsible adoption?
AI presents an enormous opportunity for finance, but CFOs should approach it with the same discipline they apply to any significant investment or risk.
The first question should not be, “Where can we use AI?” but rather, “Where can AI materially improve the quality, speed, or effectiveness of a decision or process?”
My experience with conversational analytics reinforced the importance of this balance. Making financial insights accessible through a simple interface is powerful, but it only works when the underlying data is reliable and appropriate controls exist around access, accuracy and accountability.
Finance deals with highly sensitive financial and business information, so data quality, cybersecurity, access controls, governance and human accountability need to be built into AI solutions from the beginning.
I also distinguish between AI-assisted decisions and AI-made decisions. For critical financial decisions, accountability must remain clearly with people.
The winning approach is controlled experimentation, start with high-value use cases, establish guardrails, measure impact and then scale.
6. As organisations look beyond cost efficiency towards sustainable value creation, how can finance leaders bring greater strategic rigour to sourcing and investment decisions while balancing cost, quality, scalability and long-term business value?
Finance can add significant value by moving the conversation from “What is the cheapest option?” to “What creates the best economic value?”
A sourcing or investment decision should consider total economics, including quality, productivity, working capital, capacity utilisation, resilience, scalability and the cost of potential failure, not simply the immediate P&L benefit.
I have seen this principle play out in M&A and strategic investment evaluations. Looking beyond the headline valuation or expected returns is critical; finance must also assess the underlying business economics, potential synergies, integration costs, working capital requirements and risks. This helps ensure that an investment is evaluated not just for its immediate financial attractiveness, but for the sustainable value it can create over time.
The same principle applies to capital allocation. Every major investment should have a clear strategic thesis, measurable value drivers and an understanding of the risks and alternatives.
Finance’s role is to bring fact-based challenge and a long-term perspective to these decisions, ensuring that financial discipline supports—not constrains—growth, resilience and sustainable value creation.
7. Looking ahead, what will define a truly future-ready finance function, and which priorities should CFOs focus on today to make finance more agile, intelligent and capable of driving enterprise-wide growth?
I see the future-ready finance function as one that is digital at its core, analytical in its thinking and deeply embedded in the business.
CFOs should focus on three priorities.
First, build a single, trusted data foundation. Without reliable data, neither advanced analytics nor AI can create sustainable value.
Second, automate intelligently. Remove the processes that consume disproportionate finance capacity and redirect that capacity towards business partnering, scenario planning and strategic decision-making.
Third, invest in people. Technology can accelerate finance, but judgement, curiosity, commercial understanding and the ability to influence the business remain critical differentiators.
My own experience has reinforced that the biggest value from transformation comes when finance teams move beyond producing information to using it to influence decisions.
Ultimately, the future CFO will not be measured only by how efficiently finance operates. The real measure will be how much better the organisation makes decisions because finance is at the table.
That, to me, is the real reinvention of finance, from being the steward of financial information to becoming a catalyst for enterprise-wide value creation.
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