Much has been written about the customer journey and the customer experience along the way. The thinking goes that if we can empathise more closely with what the customer is experiencing, then we can better serve them with product and services. Indeed, FSN’s research, The Future of Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting shows that 70% of … Continued
The accelerating pace of technology innovation is undeniable and whether it is in the home or in business, potential users face a bewildering choice of solutions. Smart Homes may be de rigueur in our personal lives but smart technologies are also transforming business processes. Natural language processing, social collaboration, robotic process automation, machine learning and … Continued
According to a recent survey, 34% of finance functions are actively pursuing finance process innovation. But that still leaves 66% mired in legacy systems and unable to break out of the pack. The FSN “Innovation in the Finance Function” study, harvested the views of more that 1,000 senior finance professionals globally as it sought to … Continued
Despite the huge interest in innovation and the thousands of column inches written in the media every day, innovation is one of those terms that defies precise definition. So rather than attempt to define it, FSN’s 2018 Innovation in the Finance Function research invited the global finance community to offer examples of what it thought … Continued
Finance professionals place a premium on “insight. When asked where innovation is most needed in the finance function, more than 80% of finance leaders responded that it was most needed in the delivery of business insight, and this is a recurring theme of FSN’s recent research. Yet for many organisations, insightfulness, i.e. the ability to … Continued
A recent FSN study, “Innovation in Financial Reporting” shows that finance functions that have mastered their data outperform their peers in terms of the speed of forecasting, accuracy of forecasting, and time needed to close the books. The report defines four categories of finance function, namely; the “Data Overloaded” who are overwhelmed by too many … Continued
FSN’s 2018 “Innovation in the Finance Function” research confirms the crucial role that innovation plays in finance function success. The study, assembled the views of more than 1,000 senior finance professionals globally, and reveals that not only do innovative finance functions reforecast the enterprise more swiftly and accurately but they also close the books more … Continued
Today’s discerning consumers have come to expect a high level of service and convenience – from targeted shopping suggestions to smart-home assistants and one-click ordering. But businesses have forged ahead with these front-end innovations without a backward glance at the back-end systems expected to support them. Many finance functions are in desperate need of technological … Continued
Finance functions have suffered chronic underinvestment for many years. Compared to the front-facing customer functions, finance, and the back office that facilitates sales, are under increasing pressure as businesses grow and change. Putting finance investment on the backburner isn’t just an unnecessary business risk, it also means missing out on the substantial rewards of an … Continued
Innovation is very much in the ‘eye of the beholder’. What is innovation in one setting could be considered mainstream in another. While modern finance functions naturally seek to explore the very latest and more experimental technologies (digital assistants, artificial intelligence, natural language processing), there is a treasure trove of benefit to be gained from … Continued