Fintech Digital Roadshow 2022
Adopting technology to become a digitalised business
Welcome to the launch of the Fintech Digital Roadshow 2022. In this newly launched business roadshow, we want to help you take the next step towards digital transformation.
It’s been a hot topic for business leaders over the last few years, now it’s time to focus on technology trends that maximise the value of what the organisation creates. These technologies demonstrate the IT force multipliers that will in turn win business and market share.
On the 14th September Fintech Digital 2022 kicks off the UK tour in Leeds with this face-to-face roadshow covering the three big topics for business leaders; Growth, Digitalisation and Technology.
Our hand-picked thought leaders and senior business experts, including PwC UK, FSB, Sage, Zap business intelligence, Frontline data security and X3 Consulting ERP transformation specialists will present key topics with a choice of attending either the breakfast briefing or lunch briefing.
The roadshow will provide an insight into building a digital network, embracing technology with a roadmap to digital transformation, forging the way for growth and evolution of businesses into the digital era, and positioning CFOs, CIOs, Finance leaders and business executives as strategic businesses drivers within your organisation.
If you are a business leader looking at how you can transform your business and get future-ready, then this briefing is not to be missed!
The agenda of the roadshow is based around three main topics:
Digital safe spaces: Building a secure environment for businesses by ensuring data is integrated and processed more securely across cloud and non-cloud environments. Create a resilient and efficient data environment to maximise the potential growth of your business.
Technology Trends: Creative technology adoption to scale and accelerate your organisation’s digital transformation. New technology trends allow you to improve business automation, optimise artificial intelligence (AI) more rapidly and enable a comprehensive view of your business for smarter insights.
Growth Transformation: By embracing technology you can gain competitive advantage over your competitors. With a clear roadmap and digital best practice, you can begin to open up new business opportunities and create a digital culture which will enhance the capabilities of your organisation.
What makes this different from all the rest is our meet the experts session post event. Rather than the usual Q& A, we are offering all attendees the chance to come and talk to any of the expert panel on a one-to-one basis, allowing you direct access to ask the questions relevant to your business and needs.
Don’t miss out, register today for either the breakfast or lunch briefing at one of the 6 locations across the UK.
NEW Dates:
14th September Leeds South
15th September Newcastle
28th September Manchester
29th September Solihull
12th October Elstree
13th October Farnborough
Times:
Breakfast event registration 7.15am/7.30am
Event start: 7.45am
Event Close: 9.15am
Ask the Expert session: 9.15 – 10.00am
Lunch event registration 12.00noon/12.15
Event start: 12.30pm
Event Close: 14.00pm
Ask the Expert session: 14.00 – 14.45pm
Companies are searching for ways to reinvent the office and give employees reasons to return to their workplace says the focus must be on the workforce. This is not a new focus for businesses. It is a path we have been on for many years and most of its aspects are well-established, from hot-desking and remote working to new levels of employee well-being and experience. What is new is the profound transformation of the notion of work and how we work. Trends in the way we live and work have taken months rather than years to become deep-rooted – there is no going back to the old normal. Workforce preferences have changed and employers will need to lean into them to ‘win back office workers in 2021’.
Organisations will need to accept that they may never operate again as they did pre-crisis, companies realise that the ability to adapt to new and changing conditions will be essential for success. The pandemic has advanced digital transformation of businesses with the need to remote working and access to critical data. There will also be great transformation of the workplace, with the traditional office evolving to become a central hub redesigned for employee interaction, collaboration, innovation and education.
Microsoft released its Work Trend Index report which studied 30,000 people across 31 countries along with data from Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn. Specifically, Microsoft looked at what we all learned from the great remote work experiment of 2020 and how that will apply as we begin the great hybrid work experiment. Hybrid work involves being in the office sometimes and working remotely at other times, as well as having some folks working fully remote and others fully in the office.
You should definitely read the full study, but here are five things to know about the hybrid workplace.
- Watch out for worker disconnects. Forty-six percent of workers surveyed said their employer doesn’t help with remote work expenses, and 37% say their company is asking too much of them right now. If you feel satisfied and thriving, you’re probably a millennial or Gen X male. If you feel you’re just surviving or struggling you’re probably Gen Z, a woman or a frontline worker.
- Your youngest workers need more help making meaningful connections. Gen Z was found to struggle the most with engaging in meetings and calls in the past year. Pay a little extra attention in helping your 18-25-year-old employees be heard.
- You’ll need to widen the network. This time, I mean the personal network, not the bandwidth. While immediate teams grew closer when working remote, they became more siloed from other teams in the same workplace and that reduced innovation. When lockdowns eased in places like New Zealand and South Korea, even hybrid workplaces saw those siloes start to fall.
- Don’t lose the authenticity. Seeing people’s home offices, kitchens, children and pets actually helped improve productivity. Microsoft said 30% of people say they’re more likely to be their real self at work in the future and 31% feel less embarrassed if their home life shows up in their work somehow. People who felt closer to their coworkers reported higher productivity.
- You have a wider pool of talent. You may not want to restrict that. The switch to remote work has opened up jobs to new applicants. An analysis of the LinkedIn Economic Graph shows women, Gen Z and those without a graduate degree as the groups most likely to apply for remote jobs.
There are a lot more insights in the Microsoft report, but as we face another changing workplace situation, this kind of data can hopefully help you meet the new challenges in the form of innovation and technology. To find out how you could lead your business into this new phase of working, why not speak to one of our business consultants about your business financials software. As finance takes up a greater role within business planning and leadership, isn’t it about time you got your own financials in order.
Images taken from the recently published article here: microsoft.com/…rk-trend-index/hybrid-work
If you’re a CFO preparing to lead your company into digitisation, no transformation is more important than making customers’ experience with your organisation better.
Nearly half (46%) of CFOs are facing increased demand to provide overall business counsel. Additional factors driving the changing CFO role include the availability of real-time data and increased compliance and regulation requirements, as well as the expansion of the role beyond financial management to include functions like IT and cybersecurity.
The enthusiasm behind introducing new innovations is, in part, being driven by the benefits finance leaders are already seeing. Approximately three-quarters (76%) of financial decision-makers currently drive digital transformation in their business. In addition, more than nine in 10 (94%) agree that financial management solutions are helping their teams optimise operations, while 92% believe these efforts can help automate and streamline the compliance process.
Here are four steps CFOs can take to ensure the digital transformation they lead creates value rather than simply cuts costs:
Examine the business model to understand what you’re providing to the customer
Any transformation that doesn’t keep the customer at the centre is a wasted exercise. Ultimately, you will digitise your processes, but be clear on intent. It must be about transforming your customer experience, the way the customer does business with you, and consumes your product or services with the latest tech.
Finance transformation on its own won’t produce impact, results or value if you’re not fundamentally changing your customer experience. You might automate, and you might make back office processes better, but if it doesn’t involve customers quickly getting information at their fingertips and finding your company easier to deal with, then it’s cost reduction, not value creating.
Examine finance, accounting and legacy processes
Upon examination, re-engineer them to fit the business model. Don’t adapt technology to your processes, which does not add value. Rather, change your legacy processes so you can leverage the power of new tech. The modern CFO is evolving from being a backwards-looking number collector to a trailblazing strategic leader who uses data and emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, to create a vision for the future of their business. The digitalisation of business is changing the way finance leaders work and embracing technological evolution will separate the leaders from the laggards in this new era. However, a lack of cultural readiness in the office of finance may slow adoption of new technology and hinder achieving optimal results with any digital transformation.
The enthusiasm behind introducing new innovations is, in part, being driven by the benefits finance leaders are already seeing. Approximately three-quarters (76%) of financial decision-makers currently drive digital transformation in their business. In addition, more than nine in 10 (94%) agree that financial management solutions are helping their teams optimize operations, while 92% believe these efforts can help automate and streamline the compliance process.
Right people, right skills
Use the right people, with the right skills, to understand tech and data, so they can analyse it and provide insights. A CFO must have all of these skills. You don’t need to make your finance people data engineers or scientists, but they need to understand and leverage data science within your function so you’re taking the maximum advantage and leveraging the new capabilities. What finance needs to know is the art of the possible. If you don’t understand the breadth of the available new tech, you can’t leverage the power new tech can provide.
Collaborate across teams
Build your capabilities around human skills by creating a function that’s able to collaborate with the rest of business, operate cross-functionally, and understand the needs of other parts of the business. Be able to influence, impact and change behavior based on clearly communicated insights.
The CFO and the office of the CFO are both positioned to look across the business from the front seat. They know, because of their involvement in numbers and reporting, that they understand the cross-functional impact. They should be driving that enterprise-wide transformation from that vantage point.
To do that, you need people with those human skill sets around collaboration, being able to problem solve, and think critically. These skills, widely talked about in the finance profession, are critical in today’s environment.
These are the four essential building blocks to successfully transform your enterprise, and how finance can play a pivotal role in driving that transformation.
DOWNLOAD OUR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION GUIDE HERE.
SOURCE: Sage
The world of business is changing at a rapid pace. And for the finance department, that sentiment couldn’t be clearer.
As we move to a digitised world, CFOs and finance teams are being required to move away from basic tasks such as manually inputting numbers and reporting on the figures. Now, when it comes to financial management, they are moving to interpreting real-time data.
However, the next step is to become a visionary within their businesses.
But what does that mean for you as a CFO and how can you make that a reality for your role and your company?
CFO 3.0: Digital transformation beyond financial management is a new guide that looks at the evolution of the chief financial officer.
It will show you how technology such as artificial intelligence and automation can help you take your finance team and your role to the next level.
CFO 3.0: Digital transformation beyond financial management covers the following topics:
- Driving digitalisation – from historian to visionary
- Managing uncertainty – the evolution of finance
- Riding the technology wave
An excerpt from CFO 3.0: Digital transformation beyond financial management:
The intersection between technology and human interaction has created an opportunity for leaders to re-imagine business.
Fundamentally, the nature of business is evolving in all manner of ways: end users are changing, employees are changing, and the availability of tools is changing.
All impact the way work happens and how we construct, organise and operate companies. Finance heads have, in the past, used their gut to interpret the figures and understand what it means for their business.
They had no more to go on other than their intuition and experience. But data has changed that and altered the dynamics of decision making. If we look to startups, the impact of technology is clear.
Modern breakout businesses use artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to enhance connections with their customers and employees. Their ‘new age’ and tech-first approach looks very different to past business models.
They have successfully fused human needs with technology, rethinking the way we conduct business from top to bottom.
In mid-sized and larger companies, however, where technology wasn’t birthed at inception, the tide is turning.
All business leaders need to move with the times and digitisation is key to the transition. Knowing where to go, and how to get there, are two very different sides of the same coin.
While the burst of e-commerce has brought about many opportunities, its digital nature also brings about concerns of fraud, cybersecurity and the changing landscape of job roles. But behind all these changes is one driver: the finance department.
Why? Because the very essence of finance is evolving.
The finance professional now needs to be more closely aligned to individuals with the company’s managing director or CEO. They are not just the right-hand person with their finger on the financial pulse of the business anymore.
They are essential in providing up-to-date information, financial analysis and forecasting for rapid response decisions. It’s a far cry from the traditional way of doing business.
Finance professionals used to look in their rear-view mirror to provide business information – always looking behind them while trying to steer in front.
The introduction of predictive analytics is all about understanding data and looking forward, rather than back.
Today’s CFO is transforming into a real-time analyst. Tomorrow’s CFO will be a visionary.
SOURCE: Sage