The Future of Finance

What comes to mind when you talk about innovation and the future? Surely the terms will be related to startups, their cool environments, and young organizational cultures.

The direct relationship is true, but it is also important to keep in mind that innovation goes far beyond companies that are born with a latent young spirit in their corridors and processes.

One of the biggest challenges of innovation is precisely maintaining the expertise gained over a long corporate career - combining history and technological efficiency, reinventing and digitalizing extremely manual processes and sectors.

Gone are the days, for example, when the financial sector was restricted to spreadsheets, in a mechanical and not strategic job.

For companies with complex processes and high exposure to risks - whether in credit or supply - there are significant challenges in putting into practice innovation to implement data-driven management. Nevertheless, the implementation of best practices is fundamental to enable sustainable growth through relationships based on transparency.

We have collected what you need to know about the trends in the finance department so that you can prepare yourself and increase your corporate efficiency. Check it out!

3 future trends for the financial sector

At a glance it would be possible to say that the future of the finance department can be summed up in one word: technology.

However, looking deeper, the trends show that the purpose is actually to use technological advances to make the industry increasingly more human, analytical, and strategic.

In general, the expectation is to reduce mechanical or repetitive tasks, broadening the analytical focus of finance departments and increasing the companies' adoption of best practices and growth. This will enable another step in transforming the finance department from "back-office" to being a strategic partner for companies' revenue growth.

Learn more about the 3 trends for the finance industry:

Automating to increase efficiency

A financial department that is more analytical through automation. This is one of the strong trends pointed out by experts for the industry.

According to data from McKinsey Global Institute, about 40% of financial activities could be fully automated, and another 17% could be partially automated.

The data also shows the importance of looking at internal processes and evaluating how technology can be an important ally to increase efficiency and make the department more analytical than executional.

At the same time, while many CEOs and CFOs are looking to apply the efforts of their finance departments to digital advancements rather than keeping them focused on routine tasks, many companies still have entire teams managing critical operations manually.

This scenario increases the chances of risks for the corporation, while decreasing predictive data intelligence from the finance department.

The trend goes along with what CIAL Dun & Bradstreet believes: that finance and credit professionals are under pressure to manage risk and drive profitable growth, while success depends on automated data collection and management.

Through CIAL Dun & Bradstreet's financial solutions, which has the largest database of companies in the world, automated monitoring based on customized patterns is possible.

CIAL360 Credit, exclusively a SaaS platform, enables a more comprehensive analysis as the solution is fed with the most recent, comprehensive and accurate commercial data available in the market. With the tool, it is possible to make more reliable credit decisions, evaluate customers and partners based on data, and increase company scalability through higher credit concessions without increased risk.

On the path to digitize processes, manual collections can also be managed from a technological solution offered by CIAL Dun & Bradstreet - increasing the productivity of the department and the assertiveness of accounts receivable.

Data for more assertive analyses

In order for the finance sector to progress towards the future of the department, it will be necessary for executives, leaders, and analysts to change their concepts of priorities.

This is because what was once unthinkable or distant from the reality of most financial departments is now a requirement: the use of data in a way that allows for more accurate decision making, increasing predictability and speed in the workflow.

A solution that allows the automatic analysis of third-party risks, for example, mitigates risks as verification is no longer a manual task, increases productivity and profitability by avoiding interruptions in the company's operation.

Today it is increasingly clear that it is not enough to have data scattered in several spreadsheets, without actually having insight from them.

The trends for the financial department involve targeting efforts to higher value-added activities, and data visualization allows analyses to be made in an assertive manner, achieving this purpose.

In addition, data visualization as a reality in finance departments will allow analyses to move from being based on historical data to taking on a character of predictability of the future.

The key in this scenario is to define parameters, technological paths and limit the data to be monitored in order to focus on what will really bring valuable insights.

Business Decisioning as a competitive advantage

A company with great growth potential is not one that can execute a large volume of tasks, but one that has the ability to make important decisions in an assertive manner. In many cases, it is necessary to step away from the operation to see the best paths to follow.

A major trend for financial departments is precisely to allow decisions to be made in volume, without losing assurance and allowing operational teams to continue their activities.

The solution comes in the form of a decision platform, where strategic information and data crossing are concentrated, allowing automatic and precise evaluations to support the path to be taken.

The Importance of Business Decisioning:

• Increased profitability of the company,
• Optimization of human resources,
• Influence on the longevity of the company,
• Possibility of tracking after decision,
• and more!

For this purpose, technology also enables manual flows to be removed from the hands of human capital, generating automatic insights for decision making.

In practice, with CIAL360 Credit, for example, it is possible to transform the company's credit assessment and risk management processes into an intelligent platform that generates reliable real-time data.

According to research data conducted by Dun & Bradstreet in 2020, by means of credit decision automation solutions, it is possible to accelerate a company's sales cycle by up to 50%, in addition to increasing credit analysis assertiveness by up to 30%.

Ultimately, the trends identified for finance departments are not far from other corporate sectors: efficiency improved by technology, richer insights based on reliable data.

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