The shifting mandate for finance

The current business environment is complex and uncertain. Yet in the midst of it, many enterprises are finding and harnessing opportunities to compete and grow. The proof: the average M&A deal by Registered Investment Advisors in 2018 set a record at $1.3 billion, topping the $1 billion average from the same period in 2017. What’s more, it was the third consecutive year with an average deal size above the $1 billion mark.

This is having a particular impact on CFOs and their teams. Given all the M&A activity, boards are insisting that finance expand its focus and priorities beyond the bottom line. Boards expect CFOs to become strategic partners supporting enterprise strategy and driving growth – while managing risk and compliance, market volatility, and creative destruction. And they are seeking ones who embrace new ways of working.


Reach new heights. Transform F&A.

F&A teams across industries are combining digital technologies and analytics with new skills and capabilities to turn finance into a strategic partner.

And that’s where we come in.

We give you a transformation roadmap that empowers your workforce, rethinks compliance, and delivers accurate forecasts and performance insights that shape business decisions.

Digital and Analytics, Business process automation and robotics, Machine languages - help access state of the art techniques.

- Realize on-demand financial close: Start by closing the books 60% faster
- Act on performance insights: Automate 70% of reporting for faster, better decisions
- Anticipate risk: Get ahead of threats to you and your customers
- Make sharper predictions: Gain 95% forecasting accuracy with AI and advanced analytics
- Build a hybrid workforce… of man and machine
- Deliver an excellent user experience
- Bring consumer-grade experiences to the enterprise

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fueling innovation across industries with the rise of self-driving cars attracting much attention. Tech companies and car manufacturers have been making great strides in advancing autonomous vehicles, with the promise of fewer accidents due to fewer distracted drivers, and smarter, quicker driving routes thanks to real-time traffic information.

Today, AI can review large data sets to connect the dots, identify patterns,and easily produce results and new intelligence.

With AI performing more time-consuming transactional work, F&A teams can use the analysis and insight to get better outcomes. This is augmented intelligence – where the combination of human with machine intelligence delivers real business results, such as growth, profitability, competitive advantage, and customer satisfaction.

F&A teams shift gears
Instead of reviewing line after line of financial documents, people can refocus and dedicate more of their time and resources to looking at the outputs from AI to guide their business in the right direction. Likewise, CFOs can become strategic partners, aligning finance functions—including the technology setup, reporting, KPIs, goals and ongoing day-to-day executions—with the overall business strategy.

Another way AI can take on transactional work and elevate F&A personnel is on invoice exceptions in accounts payable. While robotic process automation (RPA) is effective at rules-based, high-volume automation, such as supplier invoice and receipt matching, there are exceptions where a bot can't finish the job. In these cases, you need intelligent, multi-dimensional matching.

Have a focused purpose: First, identify where AI can really transform the finance function and deliver continuous value. If there are critical processes that consume people's time, involve lots of documents, or are too complex or variable for standard RPA, bring in AI. By analyzing structured and unstructured data, both internal and external, AI also surfaces insights that can make decisions more accurate.

Establish robust data management and governance: AI is only as good as the data that it has to work with. With a centralized data foundation, different functions and people work with the same, consistent data sets. But you also need people with data engineering and master data management skills to create and maintain the pipelines going into the lake so that your data is clean and comprehensive.

Eliminate bias: AI bias can creep in when decisions made by AI reflect the conscious or unconscious values of the people who designed it or data it's based on, for example, when finance teams make decisions on customers' credit or payment terms.

Think through change management: For AI deployment to go off without a hitch, you need to manage the change with your F&A teams. Leaders can minimize bumps in the road by communicating how AI enhances their day-to-day jobs, in addition to enabling them to take on more important roles.

As transactional work no longer stalls efficiency, F&A teams can use augmented intelligence to improve decision making.

Find and nurture the right talent: Applying AI to F&A creates new demands for teams with both business and technical skills. People need industry and functional knowledge to provide essential context and review algorithms. Advanced teams are even hiring behavioral scientists and anthropologists. But they also need technical skills, such as forecasting, data scientists, and engineers, analytics, design thinking, and agile programming. Once you have the right people, they need the right infrastructure to work with. With easy access to intuitive technology at home, a workplace with outdated, clunky systems won't encourage them to stay.

Accelerate your approach: Realizing the benefits of AI can take time, but you can speed things up. Rather than redesigning entire systems and processes, you can take a modular approach using pretrained AI accelerators. Find solutions that use insights unique to your industry and can plug and play into core business processes to improve experiences, accuracy, and efficiency at previously impossible speeds.