Any modern company, regardless of the domain of activity, needs to have its own financial department. Finance teams, along with their CFOs and team members, have become indispensable for the success of both large and small corporations. In addition to operating with a high level of integrity, they have a lot of responsibilities and thus require all the help they can get to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

Below, we want to dive into 8 things that companies need to focus on when leveraging financial technology to stay ahead of their competitors. Each aspect discussed brings a new layer of performance and innovation to the finance teams, enabling them to reap the benefits of technological advancements in 2022 and beyond.

Without further ado, let’s dive straight in, by looking at the most important aspect related to financial tech: security.

1. Enhance cybersecurity

While traditional banks are governed by strict cybersecurity regulations, fintech and the associated financial technology products are not so well protected against cyber criminals. A single breach could dramatically hurt your company and could prevent you from making the most of your financial instruments. Thus, we recommend you go with a modern unified framework for managing finances and facilitating operational audits. Also consider using modern accounting software to streamline risk, governance, and compliance activities.

2. Focus on innovation

Using an integrated financial system can allow your financial team to focus more on business innovation than on daily, recurrent tasks. To fully leverage financial technology, you should focus on creating innovative products and automating tasks.

3.  Better collaboration between teams

Another thing you can do to make the most out of financial technology is to focus on improving the collaboration between your teams. While it’s seemingly easy for accounting and finance departments to function as standalone silos within your organization, you need to collaborate outside the departments to have a truly global view of the business. Try implementing group discussions and recurrent meetings inside your team to get real-time progress and drive innovation and collaboration between departments.

4. Improved reporting

There is no doubt that data on its own is meaningless. Successful finance teams need to know how to capitalize on the power of reporting in order to come up with forward-thinking business recommendations that drive business growth and expansion.

The reporting platform you want to use in this instance should allow your team to easily perform drill-down and drill-across actions, use imaging integration and monitor the account across several verticals.

5. Tasks automation

For finance teams, using automation is mandatory for reducing workload. Just imagine automated accounts payable invoice scanning, a modern RPA capability that can save your team hundreds of hours of work each month. You can create your own enterprise cloud software that allows you to perform allocations, keep recurring journals, create automatic reversing entries, and perform intercompany eliminations.

6. Streamlined processes

Being smart from a financial standpoint means making data entry more efficient. What you can do is automate AP invoice entry using an imaging solution, streamline the approval processes with workflows that are tailored to your company’s internal hierarchy, and use a modern account monitoring system to ensure each transaction goes into the right account by the end of the month.

7. Employee empowerment: better tools, more rewards, more engagement

According to recent stats, over 51% of employees in the United States are disengaged with their work. Add to that the 2022 quiet quitting trend and we soon realize that employee satisfaction has become crucial. In the financial departments, employees can be empowered to better do their job and receive the satisfaction they deserve by implementing better tools, offering more rewards, and enabling them to stay in control of their work by using user-friendly interfaces.

8. Gain a 360-degree vision over the entire system

It’s common knowledge nowadays for companies worldwide to overcome a standard siloed business system, in which new systems are not integrated within the core infrastructure and the business does not grow as a whole. To gain a 360-degree vision over your entire business and boost efficiency, visibility into key core operations, and decrease IT operational costs, you should create your own enterprise business solution.