The world of modern finance can feel like navigating an unfamiliar city with outdated tools. Taryn Salida, Head of Finance Solution SA for SAP Fioneer painted this vivid picture, recalling the days of paper maps and relying on a Golden Arrow bus schedule – often arriving late and having to make excuses.
“Today, just as GPS guides travellers with real-time updates, financial institutions need modern tools that deliver timely insights and streamlined processes,” she emphasised at the recent Finance Indaba.
Salida said the financial services industry grapples with an array of challenges. This includes managing complex ledgers and data science, particularly when organisations take on other parties’ ledgers, inheriting their data. This represents “baggage” which makes efforts to automate, innovate or strategically upscale complex, as data is often spread across multiple systems.
Adding to this is the heavy regulation of the industry, such as reporting on IFRS 17 for insurers, demanding the production of multiple metrics to different stakeholders and often at the same time.
Furthermore, a critical disconnect sometimes exists between financial and actuarial teams. While admiring actuaries’ way of thinking, Salida remarked that actuaries focused on expectations, while accountants looked at cost. “It’s challenging to bring these two narratives together, especially with outdated technology,” she said.
Modern GPS for finance
Salida highlighted that older technological systems are like paper maps – static and inflexible. They restrict strategic growth and vision, and limit organisations from achieving their key milestones.
SAP Fioneer positions its solutions as the modern GPS for finance, designed to overcome these entrenched challenges. The core principle, according to Salida, is providing finance tools that provide answers without long manual-intensive processes.
Instead of siloed solutions, the organisation focuses on a single finance platform that brings disparate data and disciplines together. The objective is to have one unified platform based on a consolidated and reliable data set.
The integrated finance platform unifies critical components such as the sub-ledger, general ledger, and consolidation, streamlining financial processes into a single source of truth. This robust architecture features multi-GAAP and IT standards within the sub-ledger, enabling the simultaneous production of diverse accounting metrics for various regional and international reporting requirements.
The platform also leverages an AI agent, which, when combined with well-governed data, transforms operational efficiency by offering real-time financial insights and automates traditionally manual and time-consuming tasks.
