Investigating the Impact of 4 Tech Trends
Increasingly, finance leaders are tasked with streamlining their businesses, managing risk, and driving new growth. Finance leaders can play a key role in understanding how technology can deliver on these directives in the midst of digital disruption. Here’s a brief overview four big technology trends, and how they help finance.
1. Automation
With automation, finance can integrate data across disparate systems, automate transactions, collect invoices, expenses, accounts payable, receivables, and automatically block unwanted transactions.
Automation can liberate finance from mundane and repetitive tasks. By incorporating automation into aspects of their role, finance can focus on strategic decision-making rather than transactional activities.
2. Artificial Intelligence
With AI, finance can extract data insights, enable decision support, streamline tasks, detect fraud, and automate report generation processes.
Artificial intelligence (AI), a subset of machine learning, has been a hot topic for the past few years. With AI, finance teams can analyze large volumes of data more efficiently. However, to derive value from AI efforts, finance professionals need to assess their level of readiness and data maturity. The limitation of AI is that it requires the right resources (human, financial, and capital), infrastructure, governance frameworks, and culture to deploy.
3. Blockchain
For finance, blockchain can offer an effective and secure way to validate transactions, standardize and reduce costs and human error from operational processes.
Blockchain, in its simplest form, is a chain of encrypted records that is stored on a general, public ledger that aims to resolve data management and sharing challenges. However, blockchain has its own challenges. Some of the pitfalls of blockchain are its lack of standards and regulation, the public availability of its data, ongoing security challenges, and its complexity.
4. Internet of Things (IoT)
For finance, IoT can help businesses reach new markets, automate their trading processes, enhance and tailor investing activities, and improve asset allocation.
Although IoT refers to wearable devices and sensory technology, there is enormous potential for finance professionals. IoT’s functionality is based on its ability to track tangible objects and measure their impact to optimize processes and experiences. With its focus predominately on intangibles, finance’s opportunity depends on its ability to develop ways to track and measure their intangibles (or tangibles) and capitalize on these insights.