19DECEMBER 2019The SMART PhilosophyBy Mark Szczepaniak, Chief Financial Officer, Velocity Mortgage CapitalIn today's ever-changing market environment, CFOs have the responsibility to provide management, investors, regulators, lenders, rating agencies, and analysts with enhanced financial reporting that is accurate, timely, and transparent. At Velocity Commercial Capital, we are leveraging the use of technology to significantly improve the financial reporting process by automating many manual processes and establishing end-to-end subsystem communication designed to eliminate the need for manual intervention in recording financial data. The more the data can be calculated and processed through system solutions, the more time our financial staff members will have to analyze trends and provide management with recommendations for improvements in business processes. We have adapted the "SMART" philosophy in applying technology to our financial reporting. All databases and systems that impact our financial records are measured against the five areas below. Structured data"Big Data" got its name for a reason. And it's still growing. And it's not just about the sheer volume of data, but how much of it is structured. Unstructured data (data that does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner) requires a lot more time to sort, format and process for companies to be able to analyze it, let alone glean useful insights from it. IDG estimates that unstructured data is growing at a rate of 62 percent per year, and by 2022, 93 percent of digital data will be unstructured. We saw this happening within our own business years ago. The amount of time and resources required to leverage the data was growing exponentially with the volume. In turn, we designed processes that standardize data across multiple platforms and centrally store the data in a data warehouse. The data warehouse is used for online analytical processing ("OLAP") and can be accessed with user report-writing tools such as Microsoft's Power BI. Now data from different sources can be pulled together in automated reports to enhance financial reporting. That Mark SzczepaniakCFOINSIGHTS
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