Digital Transformation in the Finance domain of TMT organisations

TMT organisations are in the middle of digitization, disruption and innovation. You typically see this happening at the front-office or client side of the company, where new products and services, different platforms and channels are being designed and applied to create a personal experience that exactly matches individual, customer preferences and interests. New technologies enable and drive these developments. At the same time you see internal operations transforming more and more in fully digital models.

These developments in TMT-organizations demand at the same time a high(er) performance of their Finance, Control, Compliance and IT function. We see that the dynamics in the TMT-business as just described require an integrated, agile, flexible and scalable Finance & Control function to support and enable those developments. We call that Digital Finance, the digital transformation of the Finance function. And we also see that where the front-office is getting fully digitized at high speed, the back-office is grasping for air to hang on and cope with the increasing volume and change of demands coming from the business.

Many TMT-organisations are more and more experiencing this kind of issues with the flexibility and scalability of the Finance function, seriously impacting business-agility, -speed and -volume in seizing growth-opportunities. We see ambitions to extend and integrate the operational, digital platform throughout the whole organisation’s valuechain, leading to a Digital Finance function.

Typical investments in new technologies to support the Digital Finance transformation include:

• Data-analytics and dashboarding (for Finance & Control): deep, (near) real-time and accurate insight in relevant and actual financial KPI’s to support fast and good steering and business decision making.
• Robotics Proces Automation (RPA): automation of repetitive, low value tasks with high frequencies (e.g. payment/invoice control, transfers, customer requests, etc.) to drive cost-reduction, process-speed and quality (zero-faults), especially applicable in a digitized environment
• Process Mining: to get fact-based insight how processes (e.g in O2C, P2P) really go, and to understand where causes of delays, non-compliance (especially for listed companies) and/or mistakes are, to enable real process-improvement
• Cloud-ERP Technology: moving from relative old, legacy (finance) systems to new cloud-based ERP solutions to support flexibility and scalability of the finance function (including driving standardization and harmonization of the Finance processes, especially in a decentralized (e.g. country or BU) governance).

Digital Finance is certainly not only about tools, it is also about a new business-partnering role of Finance. It also drives a new profile of the Finance professional of the future.