The fast, highly disruptive pace of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced organizations to rethink their traditional approaches to financial planning, modeling, and risk management. Treasury and finance teams are navigating toward an uncertain future by using diverse sets of real-time data to gauge the impacts of different "what-if" scenarios on corporate performance. However, the complexity of today's market conditions, not to mention the pandemic's evolving impacts on business drivers, makes the standard scenario analysis process unreliable.

The global crisis has revealed the need for treasurers and CFOs to embrace a new, more robust approach to managing complexity in real time. This means making proactive, permanent changes to their forecasting, planning, and analysis processes. Why? Because the financial models of the past are no longer relevant. Finance teams cannot succeed if they think in terms of quarters and years; instead, they need to be planning their response to projected conditions in the coming months or even weeks.

As market and business volatility continues, finance and risk leaders will be at a major disadvantage if they don't leverage dynamic scenario planning. Characterized by real-time modeling techniques and rapid simulations, this approach helps treasury and finance professionals better predict and plan for future challenges. Dynamic scenario planning leverages predictive internal and external financial data. The resulting strategic action plans stand up to disruption and macroeconomic risks, and they identify opportunities for revenue growth, while optimizing customer and supplier relationships.