In the wake of modern technology, modern Chief Financial Officers (CFO) are driven into maintaining innovative and progress-driven organizations. Apart from their core responsibilities, CFOs see the need to steer the finance teams through a successful digital transformation and into the future. The finance teams are constantly seeking innovative financial technologies such as continuous accounting and cloud computing to incorporate within their existing infrastructures. By leveraging robotic automation process (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to do the heavy-lifting, effective analysis of growing volumes of data in the financial landscape is now significantly easy. These new, emerging financial technologies are transforming the realm of financial functions as we know it. But how will this overwhelming wave of technology help the digital initiatives in the financial sector?
With all the arrows directed towards a faster pace of innovation, CFOs today can leverage a plethora of cloud computing applications coupled with finance automation to enable finance and accounting teams to manage financial closes and accelerate budgeting cycles effectively. Integrating RPA into the financial system further improves the financial automation process by eliminating any repetitive, high-volume reconciliations. Coupling RPA with AI and blockchain technology adds value to financial automation inducing an efficient workflow, all streamlined on a cloud platform. The solutions built for the cloud allow business users to customize the application programming interfaces (API) that enables them to be integrated with other on-premises apps for invoicing, banking and credit card systems.
Currently, finance follows a hybrid model to develop and deploy applications to the cloud, creating a new blend of cloud technology and existing legacy on-premises applications. This model simplifies the addition of applications for reconciliation automation and financial reporting onto the cloud platforms, without the need for replacing the existing infrastructure. The cloud platforms feature apt data analytics and reporting, along with business intelligence (BI) and visualization tools to achieve superior analysis of variance in finance trends, expense data, and infrastructure thresholds through detailed reports. Nowadays, cloud solutions also deliver rich, pre-built connectivity to enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, strong, simple object access protocol (SOAP) and representational state transfer (REST) APIs for the ability to connect to on-premises systems across firewalls.
However, it is imperative the financial data be available round the clock. The bulk of financial data is transferred to cloud data warehouses to enable finance teams to integrate operational and mission-critical data, to fortify a business partnering or cross-functional team supporting role. As the technology landscape continues to evolve at a dizzying pace, digital savviness of CFOs is the key in order to ensure their organizations are prepped to thrive in the digital world.
Check out: Financial Tech Review
