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Many organizations have realized that finance plays an increasingly important role in their digital transformation journey. The role of finance functions has been redefined to support organizations in developing and executing business strategies such as enhancing business agility, responding to competitive threats and ever-changing market demands, and creating new revenue streams.
In Accenture’s “Value Architects: Digitally Transforming Finance for the Intelligent Enterprise” research report, the consulting firm revealed that there is a 70% correlation between digitizing finance and overall finance effectiveness. The finance effectiveness for organizations that digitize financial planning and analysis is 50% higher than those that only digitize accounting and finance operations.
Advanced finance capabilities can be powered by various ways. Intelligent technologies, decentralized financial systems and digital finance workforce are some of them.
Technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are advancing the finance function. They can reduce manual processing time and errors, automate financial reporting, transform from backward-looking reporting to intelligent forecasting, identify risks and opportunities for business growth. They also help with internal and external connectivity and collaboration, enabling more responsive and customer-centric digital supply chains.
With the rapid advancement of new technologies, decentralized financial systems built on bitcoin and blockchain have gained traction in recent years. Without the involvement of intermediaries like governments or traditional financial institutions, a decentralized financial system provides greater accessibility, traceability and security to users while lowering financial costs.
The decentralization and immutability characteristics of blockchain have spurred many CFOs or finance leaders to use blockchain in various applications such as smart contracts, audit operations and fraud prevention. Blockchain reduces financial costs, the risk of fraud and identity threats in transactions. It also makes internal audits possible as data can be verified quickly. All these can help finance executives process transactions easier, perform faster corporate reporting and achieve efficiency gains.
To transform finance functions, organizations have to take a more strategic approach to talent management. Their employees have to be equipped with a range of capabilities, ranging from technical knowledge to analytical thinking. The finance workforce in particular has to change from traditional focus on accounting and controlling to supporting the business as key advisors.
Enabling intelligent finance is not an easy task. FlexSystem has a strong track record in helping organizations implementing strategies to build intelligent finance and rapid innovation. The financial service solutions and consultancy service of FlexSystem support organizations to change finance functions in order to run their transformation projects smoothly and successfully.
