What key financial transformation trends must be looked out for in 2023

By Puja Sharma

In the current tough macroeconomic environment, the drive for finance teams to find efficiencies and stimulate growth through digitisation has become more pressing than ever

AccessPay, a corporate-to-bank integration partner, announced the release of its report: The Drive to Digital: Finance Transformation Trends for 2023. The report follows AccessPay’s series of Drive to Digital events that took place in late 2022 and explores the theme of financial transformation and the possibilities offered by embedded corporate banking.

Anish Kapoor, CEO, and Co-founder, AccessPay, explains, “With this report, we wanted to highlight the key challenges facing finance teams and how digital transformation can help them. Throughout our Drive to Digital events, we took the opportunity to electronically poll delegates on a range of topics such as regulatory pain points and the challenges of multi-geography, multi-bank relationships. This report shares those results and provides an insight into corporate sentiment on the subject of finance transformation as we go into 2023.”

“In the current tough macroeconomic environment, the drive for finance teams to find efficiencies and stimulate growth through digitisation has become more pressing than ever,” added Kapoor. “This report highlights these challenges and also reveals the widespread recognition that the manual processes pervasive in the world of finance bring numerous operational issues. Enacting finance transformation and in particular taking an embedded corporate banking approach can overcome many of these issues, by enabling finance teams to centralise disparate data sets and reap the benefits of automation.”

Key findings

• Finance teams are prioritising technology adoption

Technology adoption is the number one challenge or objective of finance departments, according to 58% of those polled. In contrast to the digital transformation that has taken place in consumers’ lives, finance and corporate banking processes remain manual and time-consuming. Corporates recognise the need for financial transformation, but knowing exactly what technology to adopt is a key challenge.

• Digitisation is considered key to achieving operational resilience

59% of those polled cited reducing risk and increasing operational resilience as key drivers for finance transformation. The concept of operational resilience is particularly important in sectors such as financial services, where regulators will require firms to demonstrate they are operationally resilient by 2025. Processes carried out by people are considered to be higher risk, as they are not readily scalable if volumes increase. They also leave companies open to increased risk of errors and fraud. As such, finance teams are increasingly looking at how to automate key processes.

• Managing cash visibility is a key concern for international businesses

Conducting business across borders brings additional complexity to finance processes. 40% of those polled flagged the visibility of cash across regions or bank accounts as a key issue. Lack of cash visibility can have several implications, such as hindering a company’s ability to optimise cash holdings in interest-bearing accounts. With interest rates now rising in many markets, this is a growing consideration for finance departments and highlights the importance of having a single view of a company’s cash position across banks and borders.