The financial industry is no stranger to disruptions and complexities that create ripple effects of challenges. Even before COVID 19 pandemic, financial leaders were grappling with volatile and unforeseen challenges that were not only restricted to number crunching and budgeting. The global pandemic has resulted in a massive number of hurdles such as regulatory compliance in finance, cut-throat competition, market and customer demands, etc., for CFOs around the globe.
They are expected to accelerate success and drive innovative approaches that help organizations to stay agile and win that competitive edge. This is why many CFOs collaborate closely with CEOs to understand the nitty-gritty of the ever-evolving and expanding financial and business environment. As the global pandemic has showcased an intense impact as to how dramatically organizations and the business world can change, CFOs are constantly on their toes to withstand the upcoming disruptions and win the race.
Let us dive right into how today’s financial leaders can adapt to disruptions and stay focused on business growth.
The shift to remote and hybrid work
Many financial service companies are still dependent on legacy financial tools and systems; the reason might be due to several long-standing priorities related to other technology solutions, or customer concerns. A few other companies tend to use heavy technology-based solutions that might turn out to be extremely overwhelming for the financial teams, IT, and security teams to manage and control. Combining all the stored data from disparate sources and ledger has gotten even more complex when finance teams started working remotely. This resulted in further relying on each other to retrieve data and process the workflow.
As financial companies realized that they needed to automate their processes to overcome disparity and enhance productivity, this disruption led to a path of greater results.
The speed of disruption
Earlier, financial leaders had the option to choose between whether they should adopt new technologies, strategies, and approaches to bring changes and regulate compliance or whether they should wait until the right time comes. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, they were forced to implement automation and technology solutions in order to stay afloat in the business environment. There was not even some wiggle room for the financial services firms to allow human errors, resulting in very little time for quality checking, analysis, and strategic planning.
This led to the quicker adoption of automated solutions as the monolithic systems did not have enough potential to resolve existing challenges and extract value from high-volume data.
The importance of extensive data
Today, financial leaders recognize the role of big data and how they need to take control of their data to stay ahead of the competition and survive another phase of disruption. Data-obsessed organizations are more likely to witness expected financial and business results than companies that rely relatively less on their data. To become an agile financial enterprise, leaders must deploy and reinforce modern enterprise resource planning systems and look beyond traditional and restricted financial approaches. Real-time reporting and metrics can be highly influential for leaders, and it is more manageable with the help of enterprise management cloud systems, offering better visibility into financial data.
