New Delhi, Oct 31 (IANS): Less than 20 percent Indian firms manage their finance activities centrally, far behind their global peers, suggesting need for optimisation in their finance activities, a survey conducted among chief financial officers (CFO) of leading firms showed.

According to Global CFO survey conducted by KPMG, compared to global responses, respondents in India reported 14 percent less centralisation across the various core finance activities.

A majority 61 percent of Indian respondents say they are “very willing” to devote resources and funds to improve their finance functions, and over half plan to increase their finance function’s budgets or investments, KPMG said in the survey report.

India also has seen a dramatic surge in the number of finance executives who think that their finance function will play a “larger role” in their company’s development and execution of business strategy in five years from now - 87 percent now agree with this statement, compared to 52 percent five years ago.

Some 440 CFOs and other senior finance executives from 15 countries participated in the survey.

“With a tight market for skilled finance professionals and increasing demands on finance functions, companies need to sharpen their focus on talent management if they want to build and retain a competitive and intelligent finance team,” Rajiv Gupta, partner, Financial Management Advisory Services, KPMG India, said in the report.

"It is promising, however, to see that the majority of respondents in India expect to make major investments in talent management in the next two years,” Gupta said.

According to the survey, finance professionals globally have spent much of the past decade dealing with rapidly changing financial reporting standards, new corporate governance requirements and cost-cutting initiatives.