Last Updated on November 28, 2025
<![CDATA[It was once again that time of the year when finance professionals and thought leaders of some of the most influential companies in India would come together for the 8th annual CFO Leadership Conclave. The 3-day event at The Ananta, Udaipur not only ensured a break from the daily rigors of professional life but also gave an excellent platform for like-minded individuals to assemble and network in the breath-taking backdrop of the Aravalli Hills.
This year’s agenda, Big Eight: Ideas that are shaping our world, invited prominent speakers to delve into the granularities and debate on the most pertinent and current issues concerning the financial world including the era of isolationism, demonic data and future of work (man or machine) among many others.
The event also had sessions on Mindful Leadership: predictive or responsive? and The Future CFO in which the audience was taken through the different steps involved in developing sound leadership skills and the importance of the role future CFOs have to play in this VUCA world.
Mr. Ramesh Iyer, Sr. Adviser, Happay also took the audience through a presentation on how the business frontier and the process landscape are immensely impacted with the introduction of concepts such as AI, ML, Big Data etc. and why the CFOs should lay emphasis on automating the spend management to stay relevant and enhance productivity and competitiveness of their respective organizations. With an experience of over 25 years in IT, Telecom and new-age tech organizations, Mr. Iyer very easily connected with the audience coming across from various verticals of the industry. Having spearheaded Concur Technologies – India, an SAP company, as Managing Director for 3 and a half years, he has been pioneering the concept of spend management from its very nascent stage in India. His detailed session on Happay’s product proposition urged the CFOs to reach out to our business representatives and straightaway ask for a meeting. Networking was never so easy!
- Fifteen days after the event and having met many of Udaipur attendees, we could draw some common concerns, especially in larger enterprises, some of which are as below:
- Solutions available but mostly less versatile and less flexible: Expense management is not a very new concept in India. There are legacy solutions available in the market for quite some time. However, all these solutions come with certain amount of rigidities in terms of configurations, workflows, system integrations etc. which at times do not suit the processes of bigger enterprises.
- Legalities: These legacy solutions also come with very stringent and long contractual obligations which always have the stakeholders worried and perplexed with the thought of “what if this solution just doesn’t work out?” The financial and legal implications in such set-ups should be very meticulously worked out with little left to the imagination.
- Cost: This is probably one of the most important factors in the Indian set-up. Despite how best-fit the solution is, companies are always overwhelmed by the already existing business expenditure; a legacy system further adds a significant financial burden that sometimes even outweighs its benefits making the entire drill counter-intuitive. Hence, companies look at changing the existing legacy systems in favor of state of the art, cost-effective and flexible cloud solutions.
We were glad to realize that in most of the cases, Happay could not only fulfill the system requirements but also added a significant amount of simplicity in the entire expense management process so much so that evaluations have already begun in some cases where organizations are now thinking of replacing the already existing and cumbersome systems with an intuitive, agile and affordable Happay’s expense management solution. For more details on Happay, please visit www.happay.in and don’t forget to schedule a demo with our business representative.]]>
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