Earlier this month, Digital Nation held its 'Digital as Usual' breakfast event for HR, finance and marketing. The event combined C-suite level players to discuss how the digital tools have shaped each department.
This chapter focussed on the way technology is helping evolve the finance industry across Australia.
It seems digital tools and emerging technology is now ingrained into all departments, including the finance sector.
The likes of automation and AI are shaping not only job roles, but also fast-tracking overall business transformations, a stark change for long-time players in the finance space.
Chadd Kaufmann, finance business partner at Foxtel has noted “quite a bit of change in finance from when I started”.
“I would say we weren't using that much advanced analytics and machine learning in some of the tools, whereas it's pretty common these days to be using a lot of analytics, a lot of Tableau and some automation tools as well.”
With access to digital tools one of the biggest changes he has seen over his career, Kaufmann said when it comes to emerging technology in the medium term it’s still challenging to foresee the full scope of change while in the short term, the focus lies on the uptake.
“If you look at smartphones, computers, it took a while to adopt all those types of new innovations, whereas AI has just been so quick.
“There's always going to be those first movers, those people who are really interested in experimenting and keen to see what's there.
“There are so many numerous AI tools and what we're seeing in partnering is you can have a number of proposals, but within a month, a proposal can actually become redundant because the technology is changing so fast.
Kaufmann further explained that finding value from digital tools can be a “tough one”.
“The way we try to look at it is from different functions within the organisation so typically every role has a number of tasks that they normally allocated.
“What we're finding is that there's certain type of tasks that are best suited for us as transactional recurring tasks, whereas the relational and the more expertise type of tasks we need to maintain with individuals.”
He said he believes the transactional recurring tasks may get handed over to AI “leaving those more relational and expertise tasks for the individual humans."
Right tools for the job
Henry Willmington, head of corporate finance at Optus said while he is less hands-on regarding digital tools, he still encourages his team to keep up to date with the latest tech capabilities.
“One of the things that I've really been trying to instil in my team is the need to leverage technology in a more effective way.
“It's things like reporting dashboards, predictive technology when it comes down to planning and forecasting.
“It's making sure that across the whole finance suite that we understand the technology tools out there and leverage them as best we can.”
Willmington explained that as people become more senior “the need to be hands on from a tools perspective is less” with involvement shifting to the “strategic roadmap for our technology”.
He said in the finance space, the likes of generative AI might find use in predictive modelling.
“As an organisation, we spend a lot of time on planning and forecasting, and a lot of that is done in a fairly fragmented and bespoke to a product level way.
“As we move forward, one of the things I want to understand and make sure we embed more of, is that predictive technology that AI can do.”
Willmington said this will hopefully “to eliminate a lot of the manual effort” and drive operational efficiencies.
Currently, Wilmington explained the company is still considering the best AI use case before investing heavily, adding one of his challenges at Optus is maintaining the balance between insights and data.
“We have a very rich data set in Optus around our customer data, customer trends and data from a financial point of view, in terms of thinking about our operating expenses and our capital expenditures.”
“We are a very granular and data driven organisation [at Optus]. The challenge for me and my role is to get the right balance between data and insight and not to just give people reams and reams of numbers.
“It's to draw out conclusions and to help management and understand what the data means and then what decisions we need to take on the back of it.” Willmington said.
Closing the communication gap
Safwan Arshad group CFO at business fix and Astris PME, said while disruption can be a good thing, communicating the best use of digital tools is key when looking to embed new capabilities into systems.
“The journey begins with engaging your key stakeholders and simplifying for them what it actually means in plain English.
“When we talk about AI, when we talk about transformation, what it means and what it looks like in practice, this is where the biggest gap is coming from.”
“A lot of consultants are talking about all the shiny tools but they're struggling to showcase how they will look like in practice.”
He said he has seen “a lot of finance professionals” look to embed various tools “without having to understand the audience they are working with”.
Arshad further added that while AI is creating change, it’s still important to look into human behaviour with AI is challenging some of traditional models.
Relationship between IT and finance “becoming closer and stronger”
James Osborne head of finance for networking at Jemena said, “At the core of both digital and finance are cost centres, so fundamentally both functions need to drive value with others.
Linkages across digital and finance “are only becoming closer and stronger”, according to Osborne.
He explained that this is because many of the skills and understanding of how businesses make and lose money is available and within reach of digital and finance.
“The current and future needs for digital and finance have evolved from ‘doers’ to ‘enablers’ which means soft skills like partnering, being curious and listening is becoming must haves for both functions,’ Osborne said.
“These soft skills enable many of the base skills that both functions have such as analytics and having attention to detail.”
Osborne said whilst the relationship between digital and finance “may have been historically been transactional, current and future relationships require these functions to work hand-in-glove to enable businesses to be successful.”
