Unleash digital capabilities with analytics, automation, and AI

Automation isn’t a new concept in finance – we’ve been automating financial processes for over a century with punch-card machines and early calculators. Modern financial markets exist only because of a multitude of automated processes. However, in the context of rapidly developing AI, there is a renewed focus on new capabilities of automation.

From a business perspective, automation can help organisations drive efficiencies, improve compliance, keep a lid on costs, and react quickly to market changes. Finance departments, where the majority of work is spreadsheet-based, are well-positioned to benefit from automation.

Productivity, efficiency, decision-making and enhanced control were ranked as the most significant benefits by finance leaders in our recent survey – but employee satisfaction, retention, and attraction are often overlooked benefits of automation. Technology reduces the drudge work of outdated manual processes, giving finance teams more time to focus on value-added tasks, such as strategy and business partnering. 

Finance teams join organisations to focus on these areas, but an administrative and repetitive workload can eat into the time available for these longer-term, value-add projects, resulting in demotivated finance teams and reduced job satisfaction. Here, automation can be an incredible enabler – not just of the efficiency required, but of the subsequent uplift in team morale.

Other benefits of financial process automation can include:

• Efficiency and accuracy: Automation not only saves time by executing tasks faster but should also help complete tasks correctly the first time, eliminating human error and the need for corrections.
• Cost savings: With pressure on margins and profit lines, finance teams can wield automation to increase their output and drive growth. Instead of inflating team sizes to match workload, repetitive processes can instead be automated, allowing for your current team to achieve more within their existing roles. This is particularly relevant for businesses following post-Budget increases to employer National Insurance Contributions and the National Minimum Wage.
• Making best-informed decisions: Automation speeds up processes, providing faster access to better quality data and enabling quicker decision-making. The level of autonomy for automated decision-making is controllable, allowing for delegation of low-risk decisions to automated tools, and fast summaries of large datasets for higher-risk decisions requiring human input.