Take An Experimental Approach To Discover The Impact Of Tech In Finance

This article is co-written by Antonio Reza and Anders Liu-Lindberg 

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Finance professionals know that their function is getting invaded by technology solutions. It has been like that for ages, yet the development is accelerating. However, still most take a reactional approach to the situation and wait for management to come with solutions. There is a better approach. Become proactive and explore for yourself how technology can enable you to become more impactful. 

Today, we are speaking with Antonio Reza, a senior finance manager at Microsoft. Antonio is one of these proactive finance professionals who have decided to explore himself and his colleagues how they can better use technology. Essentially, he is constantly experimenting with new ways of applying technology. Here is a concrete example from Antonio. 

One good example of experimentation – and how impactful it is in the finance function – is what we call “App in a Day”. In Microsoft, it is very common to hold these types of events with our partners and customers to showcase what our technology can do for them. In very simple terms, an expert in a technology solution (partner) guides a team of people (customers) in the development of an application that tackles an existing pain point in their business model. If there is enough interest after the event, this typically turns into a lead and hopefully revenue in the near future.

Inspired by what this type of event accomplishes for our customers, I thought that this could also help internal stakeholders such as Finance. Finance is a pivotal support function in any business and the expectations that business partners have of it are high. Finance must have deep domain expertise, a strategic mindset, a strong compliance backbone, and commercial intensity. Even if a finance team manages to excel in all the business skills when it comes to decision making, it is not exempt of having bureaucratic processes or performing non-value-added tasks to accomplish its goals. In other words, there is a lot of room for improvement in how finance processes are run.

 We can probably all agree about the potential but let us get a better understanding of how such an “App in a Day” workshop could work for Finance. 

Bringing the right people together to solve the main pain points 

Having already run these sessions with a commercial purpose it was easy for Antonio to get started for Finance as well. 

I reached out to our Marketing and Technology Center teams to organize something specifically for an internal finance audience. After a few brainstorming sessions, we decided to use one of our most powerful tools called PowerApps. This is our no-code/low-code application development platform, which allows anyone to develop an app on his/her phone or computer without having to write a single line of code. The power of this solution is that the people that are closest to operations will be able to create applications that best serve their needs. We believed that if we gave finance professionals the ability to develop their own apps, we could create something that would add a ton of value.

We held several brainstorming sessions to come up with a list of ideas that would either a) simplify a process, or b) help business partners obtain insights quicker. Some of the best ideas were to build an app that could track investments granted throughout the whole deal cycle, an app that could be the equivalent of “ask.com” for credit and collections status, and an app that could track the progression of internal audits and the resolution of issues found.

We invited the full finance team and even other functions that deal with finance data and/or processes such as sales excellence. We split into teams of five people and asked them to take specific trainings to come prepared for the full-day session. In addition, we invited one of our partners to lead the exercise. Everything was set up for an eventful day and impactful apps to be built. For now, COVID-19 has paused the event further though.

It is a shame that we are yet to figure out the value that could be derived from such an initiative. However, it does not take anything away from the approach. 

How can you get started with experimentation? 

Now your company might not have access to the same technical expertise as Microsoft, yet this should not stop you from getting started. Regardless, what technology suite you use i.e. Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. there are a ton of apps already available that can help you increase productivity. In addition, it is also easy to start making your own apps using open platforms such as glide.io. 

However, to get started you should not consider what solutions are available. Rather you should figure out what are the main problems to solve i.e. where do you have the biggest pain points in your finance function. This is also what Antonio and the team did and yielded them a nice gross list of pain points to solve and what solutions they could potentially build. We can almost guarantee that whatever pain point you have from a process or platform perspective that there is a solution available or easy-to-build that can help you solve it. You just need to start experimenting! 

What have you done in your finance function to experiment with technology? How did you go about the experimentation? Did you first find some pain points to solve or did you go straight to the building phase? To accelerate the pace with which we bring Finance into the future we must start experimenting more and as you can see it need not be that complicated. When are you starting with experimenting?

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This was the third article in the series "Tech in Finance" and you can read previous articles in the series below.

How Technology Enables The Future Of Finance And Accounting

The Proper Way To Do A Tech Implementation In Finance

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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the co-founder, COO (Chief Operating Officer), and CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with close to 9,000 members. I have ten years of experience as a business partner at the global transport and logistics company Maersk. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger on LinkedIn with 50.000+ followers.