Digital in Finance Departments

Franck Personne and Laura Izoard are talking to us today about digital in Finance departments. “Digital,” in all Executive Committees, in all companies: this word is omnipresent. It is one of the most fashionable words in managerial vocabulary right now, but what does it really mean?

Digital has the particularity of affecting all company functions. It is a multifaceted concept, each facet having its own function, scope, and composition depending on the interlocutor:

• In Human Resources departments, we will talk about: Wikis, Electronic Pay Slips (BPE), MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), digital HRIS (SuccessFactors, …)
• In Sales departments, we will talk about: “in the cloud” CRMs, Big Data, digitalization of the customer journey, predictive analytics, …
• In Marketing departments: personalized offers, SEO / SEM, DMP, social media marketing, …

And for Finance departments, what does it mean?

Digital has already left its mark on operational functions at the heart of business activities: websites, “Retail” order taking, insurance contract monitoring, online bank accounts, …

The impacts and challenges are significant: new players, new sales channels, anti-crisis weapon, … These orientations lead finance departments to follow this trend with greater responsiveness and “collaborativity” within information systems. They become a true analysis hub capable of quickly simulating and analyzing hypotheses to anticipate and make the right decisions.

CFOs expect improvements in analysis functions in this area, particularly through a more ergonomic data presentation and an extension of exploratory capabilities. This also ensures better security and traceability of analyzed data.

We have identified 5 major challenges.

The Administrative and Financial Director must grasp the complexity of digital challenges if they want to continue to support general management because the impacts are significant: search for more collaborative tools, adapted recruitment policy, staying up-to-date in terms of technological watch (robotization of financial processes, future impact of Blockchain on financial transactions such as transfers, Artificial Intelligence linked to the boom in digitalization, …).

Graph: Challenges & concerned areas.

This strong current trend particularly favors finance solutions of the “digital” era: planning with collaborative workflow, dematerialization of invoices, mobile executive dashboards, real-time data simulation…

Traditional publishers suffer from complexity and a lack of agility – necessary today – amplified by the fact that their basic technological foundation has not been (re)thought to fully leverage all the innovations brought by digital: cloud, big data, social media, collaborative accelerators, … New, smaller but more agile publishers are emerging: a new landscape is taking shape.

MeltOne invites you to discover it in a series of upcoming reports and to illustrate all facets of digital for finance departments:

• Development of challenges and current situation in Finance Departments: What if we interviewed the stakeholders?
• Functional mapping vs. publishers
• Example of a digital finance process

Discover our digital offer: DIGITAL AT MELTONE

Would you like to know more or assess your level of maturity? Do you want to build a Digital roadmap or be supported in its implementation? MeltOne can help you, do not hesitate to contact us by email:

cmaurice@meltone.com (Digital Offer & Analytics Manager)

jsaccona@meltone.com (Sales Director MeltOne)