Financial technology: A trusted co-pilot for decision-making
Ninety-one percent of business leaders say financial technology is a valuable tool for decision-making. But with so many options, benefits, and offerings, how can you nail down what you actually need from a solution and what you should prioritise?
Here are five ways the best solutions help your business soar, all while reducing turbulence:
1. Gather, integrate, and synthesise data for rapid decisions
Managing large data sets isn't a mammoth task when armed with innovative solutions. The best finance tools won’t just take the tasks off your team’s hands, they'll improve accuracy and speed up task completion. This speed gives your team real-time insights and valuable time back, which is essential for timely, thoughtful decisions.
For example, companies using AI in their financial reporting see a 33% uptick in productivity and a 37% jump in accuracy while also slicing four days from month-end close.
2. Track insights efficiently to nail your targets
With financial technology that includes features like multi-entity spend dashboards and real-time reconciliation, your team can focus on the insights that matter most to them. This includes cash flow, expenses, and spend irregularities. Such a setup helps you to understand your company's financial position faster. From here, you can adjust strategies with confidence to meet company goals.
3. Gain productivity and accuracy to protect company gains
Speed is the secret weapon to getting ahead in today's fast-paced, competitive market. Yet:
It doesn't have to be this way. Imagine you're a CFO at an ecommerce company with in-house manufacturing. Your team tracks spending, production efficiency, and revenue with spreadsheets and emails. It may be 'digital', but it's slow, fiddly, and prone to mistakes. So, if raw material costs spike, your team might not realise until too late.
By onboarding the right financial technology, you can end these issues fast. Efficient data access lets you assess the impact of changes on margins quickly and then decide whether to adjust pricing or renegotiate with suppliers to protect profits. Making this switch can have huge payoffs. Data-backed companies outperform their competition by 6% in profitability and 5% in productivity.
4. See into the future to prepare for the highs and lows
You know the importance of FP&A, but did you know that the average FP&A employee spends 75% of their time collecting data, leaving just 25% for analysis that drives decisions.
Predictive analytics and advanced forecasting can change this. By using historical internal and external data, these tools help you take control of critical areas like liquidity, costs, and inventory needs. Instead of reacting to challenges, you can build proactive strategies that reduce risks, avoid unexpected costs, and improve overall business performance.
The result? Businesses using advanced analytics are 2.7 times more likely to rank among the top performers in their industry. It’s not just about better insights — it’s about staying ahead.
5. Improve compliance and risk management
Keeping your company’s financial data safe is a top priority. At Payhawk, for example, every access point to the platform and management system is protected by 2FA. From biometric authentication on our mobile app to encrypted logins, our customers know that only the right people have access to financial information, thanks to:
- Data encrypted with industry-standard AES 256
- Single sign-on via Okta, Microsoft Azure, and Google Workspace
- 3D secure payments to protect online transactions
- Full compliance with ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, and PCI DSS standards
- Regular stress tests to ensure only authorized users maintain access
Simplify fund access with smart HR integrations
As a finance leader at a growing business, empowering teams to spend as they need while controlling expenses and keeping track of starters and leavers is a major headache. But managing company funds really doesn’t need to hurt.
Choose finance technology that lets you instantly onboard or offboard departing team members, giving HR and IT teams an easy, automated way to control who has access to cards and, therefore, company funds.
By automating these processes, you’ll eliminate time-consuming manual work and reduce the risk of errors, ensuring your company spend is always in the right hands.
Common gaps in organisations’ finance technology
So, what are the top finance tools finance leaders say they are missing? And how can you use these insights to uncover your own gaps? Our recent CFO agenda report revealed the following:
Smart spend management, integration, and a robust data strategy
With rising costs and a shaky economy to contend with, spend control, risk management, and accurate forecasting are now key priorities.
- 54% of respondents said they’re focusing on streamlining costs to weather this storm
- 48% say they’re battling the tough economic market by improving cash flow forecasting
But how can you manage cash flow, stay on top of security, and make predictions using your spend data across multiple tools when they don’t talk to each other?
Truth is, you can’t. You’ll end up in a maze of lost expense reports, duplicated transactions, delayed payments, siloed data, increased manual admin, difficulties getting live insights, increased fraud risk… the list goes on.
According to The CFO agenda, visibility is the biggest roadblock when managing multiple tools (85%). Closely followed by data quality and consistency.
Managing disparate tools: How it becomes a major headache for finance teams and CFOs
When it comes to the differences between ‘all-in-one finance tools’ vs ‘multiple tools,’ the benefits are clear… As are the challenges:
- Ununified finance technology makes processes sluggish: Remember your last busy day balancing the books. Now, picture it with unlinked solutions like separate credit cards, bank transfers, expense management software, general ledger solutions, and accounting software. And different reporting formats for each. It'll be a long and painful day looking for, entering, and checking critical data. This fragmentation creates inefficiencies and delays making it challenging to create timely and accurate financial records.
- Lost and missing receipts hinder progress: Have you ever spent hours looking for receipts or invoices? It’s a massive waste of time and energy. Worse, your employees may end up holding the tab. If not, it's your company that may miss out on tax deductions, which can impact profitability and stunt growth
- Manual reconciliation tools take swipes at your bottom line: Reconciliations become painful when you don't sync financial data. Your team has to pull information from each system and align it with bank statements. They'll then have to triple-check the numbers and hope everything is correct. This manual process isn’t just slow; it's costly. Your business will be footing the bill for the extra work hours and any mistakes in the financial reports
Take action: How to balance standardisation and local nuances with the right fintech
You may have gone through some digital transformation in the past few years and even onboarded some good tools. The problem may be that by now, you’ve started tipping the scale to the point of too many tools. The answer? Switching to an all-in-one solution supported by AI, automation, and more that lets you:
Manage insights efficiently with data extraction, integration, and analysis
You don’t have to settle for scattered, error-filled data. The right finance tools will help you pool and organise data on autopilot. They should also equip you to interpret insights quickly. Look for solutions with self-service features to accelerate data sharing and drive uniformity. 49% of finance leaders view self-service data and analytics solutions as employee productivity drivers.
For example, this could look like implementing:
- A mobile app enabled with an AI camera and OCR technology to extract key data from expense receipts
- Automated workflows for expense, invoice, and purchase order approvals
- Automatic mileage tracking for business travel expenses, including calculating trip distances and associated costs
- Expense management software or APIs that push data to customisable dashboards to track insights at a glance
- Finance technology equipped with powerful native integrations. For example, linking HR, accounting, business travel and ERP tools to an expense management solution to create a unified platform and gain a holistic company data view
- Predictive analytics to gain insight into upcoming challenges and opportunities
Learn more about our time-saving automations in the short video below.
