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Bringing forward digital transformation: the opportunities for your finance team

Technology has always altered the way we live and work but this year, things have happened at a much quicker pace than many of us ever imagined.

The big difference in 2020 is that technology has not been the catalyst for change. With dramatically different circumstances in both our work and personal lives being forced upon us, change has driven our requirements for technology rather than the other way around.

Accounting COVID-19

Posted 06/11/2020

Accelerating digital plans

In fact, a new study by business and economic researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute found that companies have accelerated the digitalisation of their internal operations by three to four years. When respondents were asked why their business hadn’t implemented new technology before the pandemic, more than half said it was simply not a top business priority.

So, with the pandemic forcing both technological requirements and attitudes to change, we thought now would be a good time to revisit our guide to Digital Transformation and Remote Working in Finance, highlighting the possibilities for finance teams when they have the combination of the right people and technology in place.

Potential opportunities

The Covid crisis will leave many businesses finishing the year in a very different place to where they started 2020. As we all focus on recovery, stability and kick-starting growth, here are the five key technology opportunities that we see for finance teams:

  • Automation will undoubtedly speed up the pace of business, freeing up finance professionals to spend more time on value added work. As we all make economic recovery a priority, this is arguably of high importance right now.
  • Strategic insight enabled by powerful data and analytics will result in more confident and more forward thinking decision-making and planning. The need to revisit and revise strategies, often at short notice, has never been so critical.
  • Widespread and faster connectivity, coupled with enhanced security and remote access makes long-term flexible and remote working a viable option. In fact, the McKinsey Global Institute survey found organisations increased migration of assets to the cloud 24 times faster than they thought was possible before the pandemic hit.
  • New opportunities to collaborate and improve visibility and trust across the supply chain and throughout the procure to pay and order to cash cycles.
  • The chance to reimagine how finance could work and reframe the future with a balance of people and technology that helps businesses to achieve substantially more.

Transformative technology

Each of these opportunities can only be fully realised with the right transformative technologies in place – with many of these being the technologies that firms have accelerated into their businesses, as the McKinsey Global Institute report highlighted.

We see the seven transformative technologies as being:

  • Cloud computing – replacing the need for businesses to buy and maintain their own computing infrastructure, and offering greater security and collaboration possibilities. This takes greater prevalence considering 54 per cent of those responding to the McKinsey Global Institute survey cited remote working and collaboration as a change that is likely to stick long-term.
  • Robotic process automation – a fast and effective way to perform mundane repetitive tasks and free up workers to add value in other ways.
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML) – the former uses neural networks to mimic human behaviour, while the latter adapts and learns from the data it processes, adapting its approach going forwards. Both free up human resource and AI is referenced in the McKinsey Global Institute study as being one of the changes most identified as helping to position organisations better than they were before the start of the crisis.
  • Blockchain – a secure digital distributed ledger across a global network of computers that acts as a trusted third party and creates a secure contract for new relationships between buyers and sellers.
  • In-memory computing – a collaborative approach that combines the RAM from several computers simultaneously to offer greater analytical power and number crunching capabilities.
  • Visualisation – simply the transformation of data into insight. While not a new concept, there are a range of new tools to help transform even the most vast and complex data streams.
  • Advanced analytics – this technology works by using AI, ML and in-memory computing to analyse vast quantities of information from various sources and use it productively.

A clear direction

Referencing back to the McKinsey Global Institute survey, it is an interesting point to finish on that those organisations that experimented with new digital technology during the crisis and invested more than their competitors, are twice as likely to report outsize revenue growth.

Of course, the big question facing CFOs right now is how much their finance function is, and still needs to, engage with new technologies given current trading climates. A clear digital transformation vision and strategy, even if it has been accelerated by three – four years, will inevitably enable finance departments to work more effectively and better manage enterprise performance.

For more on digital transformation and the impact of the seven transformative technologies on finance teams, download the full guide: Digital Transformation and Remote Working in Finance.

Find out more about our financial management solutions here.