Looking at financial automation, are there any promising trends that have caught your attention quite recently? Especially with the onset of Covid-19, are there any technological innovations that have helped you in achieving very definitive objectives within your workflows?
One positive thing which came out of Covid-19 is we understood that working remotely is possible much more than we ever thought. And I think it has opened us up to realizing how much technology is out there that can help us automate. I think when it comes to automation, the trend I have been seeing from my view, from the tax point of view, is that we’re moving ahead instead of trying to fix stuff by building tools on existing platforms, like building tax tools on top of SAP or any other. We go much more into the processes that supports, SAP for example, and get it right in the system, instead of trying to extract data and then build on top of it. I’m not sure that’s related to Covid-19 though, but that’s probably an insight that has opened up to people in the tax world.
Would you like to share with us some of the best practices or even some of the tools that you have adopted recently, which have enabled you to essentially ensure better outcomes?
One set of natural development that has come into place is we hire a lot of very talented people, as tax is a complex and complicated area. But unfortunately, a lot of the work in tax is very manual. So we employ these very talented people to do a lot of manual work, which includes pulling data from various systems and working with that data in Excel, reposting and other such work. So I think what we decided as a company instead was that in relation to indirect taxes, we wanted to get ready for real time reporting on indirect taxes in all countries where we operate. We could see that misusing our people’s time on doing a lot of manual stuff is not only bad from a talent management point of view, but is also bad from a systems readiness and accuracy point of view. So we started to go looking at like getting the tax treatment right with the first entry and then automate those processes. So we now use a lot of robots to handle that. Also when it comes to systems that we used to E-file, I think one source is the primary tool that we use, but a lot of the work that goes on now happens in SAP, in the very first entries, instead of doing all the control post the fact and with the filing deadline fast approaching. And I think that would be a best practice to ensure that you get it right with the first entry into your accounting system and then you have automated controls taking place before you almost even start thinking about filing the VAT return, for example.
What is your take on some of these newer innovations that have come into the financial arena like artificial intelligence, machine learning?
I think that is the entire point with the automated controls, whether they’re kind of static or not, is to deliver insight to the talent you’ve employed so that they can analyze data, or see trends, or see issues that arise. There is so much manual work that you can automate. Once it is automated, you can also start designing controls that enable you to actually analyze the data that you work with. We’ve had a lot of data, but if you have to spend so much time extracting the data, and then fixing the data, then that doesn’t allow you any time for analyzing. And I think that’s the biggest change we’ve seen in the last couple of years.
"The point with the automated controls, whether they’re static or not, is to deliver insights to the employees, so that you could analyze the data, see trends, and see issues that arise"
Could you share with us an interaction with any enterprise that is on the verge of transition from legacy systems, or even thinking about it in the near future? And some of your best practices that have helped them or could help them in the near future?
At my company, we still use SAP R/3, for example. So, I don’t know if you can call it the legacy system. But I think that you can actually do quite a lot in old systems as well with automation, and by adding robots and AI. So you can work with the data on these systems as well. But the key is to ensure that you look at your processes to start with any control environmental or analysis environment, not to build on just adding stuff on top without addressing the original processes, because then I think it is bound to fail ultimately.
What do you think are some of the key problems hindering the financial space? in next few years, are there any technological solutions that you are looking forward to that can solve these potential problems?
A major problem is the constant stream of new compliance requirements and very often I think, compliance without a real purpose. In indirect taxes, direct taxes and transfer pricing today, there is no one system that can handle all. Considering the various country by country requirements when it comes to transfer pricing, or the various mandatory disclosure, or reporting requirements when it comes to EU legislation, or the similar thing in the UK, or managing your uncertain tax positions and your real contact reporting from a VAT position. So, there are so many compliance requirements, and my fear is that we don’t have the time to think what kind of solution do we need to address all these compliance requirements, because it’s the same data but just put together in different ways so that we spend too much time trying to get compliant without actually taking a step back and thinking, how could we design a tool or a system or a set of processes that will actually generate, all these compliance reports that we need, but in more or less one click. Though I’m sure that I’m not the only one with this issue. And there are so many smart people out there and so much technology being developed, some providers probably are looking into this.
Is there any piece of advice that you’d like to offer to the millennial crowd that is entering in the financial space?
I think a general piece of advice would probably be to know that as a part of finance, you’re actually part of the business and not just a “support function”.. When you start seeing yourself as a part of the business, you can actually play a much larger role. One huge benefit that you have is you can rely on the data that you have and if you invest time in understanding your data and how you need to analyze your data, I think you can become a very valued part of the business, as opposed to a bit of a dusty accounting function that some people might think about finance.
