Nursel Gül

We sit down with Nursel Gül, CFO of Microsoft Türkiye, to map the global and local risk landscape of 2023 — and how digitalization is redrawing it. Nursel graduated with honours in Industrial Engineering from METU, completed her master’s at Sabancı University, and built a career that spanned twelve years and seven roles at P&G İstanbul before moving to Novartis İstanbul in 2017, transferring to Novartis Switzerland’s drug-development arm in early 2020, and returning to Türkiye as CFO of Microsoft in August 2021.

The risk list on every leadership table heading into 2023 is long: pandemic aftershocks, the Russia-Ukraine war, supply-chain disruptions, energy crises, rising global inflation and a winter expected to be harder than the last. Nursel’s read is direct — opportunities live inside that risk envelope, and the question is whether you can spot them and move fast.

Knowing and forecasting risk is no longer enough. Companies that want to capture the opportunity inside risk now need a formal risk-management plan, a rehearsed contingency playbook and a sharp answer to how, in practice, the playbook gets executed. That discipline has become the baseline equipment for finance leaders steering volatile periods.

This is where digitalization earns its seat at the table. The technology stack is the single most powerful lever for converting risk into opportunity, Nursel argues. From inside Microsoft she lays out how digital transformation is not only a technical workstream but a capacity expansion — sharpening the speed and accuracy of every finance decision.

The conversation also widens out to how finance functions held together inside multinationals during the pandemic, how to balance global and regional priorities, and how a CFO who has worked across multiple geographies reads the dynamics of the Türkiye market today.