Articles

Big data has meant chief financial officers are investing in smart software which can increase their effectiveness and standing with the board.

From Generation CFO

The explosion of data in companies has left many chief financial officers (CFOs) struggling to manage the information. The result has been a surge in finance chiefs implementing business intelligence and analytics tools to help them address the issue. But these tools bring many challenges and opportunities that are forcing CFOs to redefine their data strategies, skills and mindset.

Gartner forecasts global revenue in the business intelligence and analytics software market to grow from $18.3 billion in 2017 to $22.8 billion in 2020. Most of this (79 per cent) comes from CFOs as finance is the department that most often invests in analytics, according to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

In times of rapid change, organisations that have been taken by surprise can find themselves playing catch up and racing to gain control. And in doing so, may make the mistake of trying to carry on – business as usual, failing to see that many of the external factors have fundamentally changed. Now is the time to consider your core activity and where this fits in the new landscape and what needs to be changed. Blockbuster didn’t fail because people stopped wanting to see films, but the way they wanted to do that shifted almost overnight.

Following the acquisition of Determine earlier this year by US based Corcentric, we caught up with President and COO, Matt Clark to find out some more about the deal. Matt pointed out that the idea behind the move, was to shift the company’s focus towards delivering an entire end to end solution and consider what that might look like, delivered from a single platform. At Corcentric, while there was a firm footing in the worlds of finance and accounts payable, the executive team felt there was a need for something in the upstream eprocurement space to be able to deliver on their end to end vision.

Guest article by Magali Michel, Director, Yooz

AI fascinates us, excites us, even scares us a little (I’m still not sure I want to be on the same roads as self-driving cars!) But there is no denying that AI makes our daily lives so much easier than it was just a few years ago, and much more than imagined.

The positive impact of AI on finance teams

When we talk about AI, we immediately think about virtual assistants or chatbots, like Siri or Alexa, smartphones that identify us through fingerprint or facial recognition, cars that are able to detect pedestrians and to park themselves (often better than humans do). We also think about computers that recognise and analyse documents automatically.