How Digital Finance Can Power a Digital Enterprise

Digital transformation is now present across the length and breadth of enterprise operations and has been responsible for re-configuring business models. For instance, behavioral insights driven by analytics, and bolstered by various technologies like wearables, are allowing retailers to craft hyper-personalized customer experiences. Transportations-as-a-Service has become a reality with the advent of ride-sharing and car rental applications. Greater connectivity between suppliers, contractors, and assets will propel the industrialization of infrastructure, and so on. But what makes a digital enterprise truly viable is the presence of digital finance core.

What is digital finance?

Digital finance is nothing but enterprises leveraging new technologies to execute the finance function. This not only opens up new channels of revenue but necessitates a new way of operating which leverages the best of IT as well as business. These technologies allow finance departments to instantaneously capture and parse uncategorized enterprise data from various datasets and allow them to gain a holistic understanding of client needs. At the same time organizations must also set up systems and processes capable of capturing large data volumes. Insights gained from digital finance also serve as the single source of truth to encourage collaboration between teams, departments, and customers, and ultimately power sustainable enterprise growth.

As more and more businesses go digital, there is an increasing need for digital finance capabilities. According to Thack Brown, a GM at SAP and heads Line of Business Finance globally, a digital finance organization prioritizes real-time reactions to events and sustained innovation. In addition to being able to scale new business models and integrate acquisitions, they need to harness the power of business intelligence. Depending on the type of company, efficiency and automation will be critical to sustainable growth.

While finance executives want to focus on business performance optimization and increasing strategic activities, uncertainty and volatility remain to keep up with the growing volume of real-time transactions, enterprises need compliance and fraud detection to be an existing part of the business processes and new regulations are being introduced to make this a reality. With the current instability businesses face as they embrace this change, currency swings, price fluctuations and global events quickly impact businesses. Finance organizations need to evolve to provide risk management across all dimensions.