Intelligent automation is revolutionising the finance sector like never before

The growth of smart factories will forever affect the way companies operate as they try to recover from the worldwide pandemic. In this article, you will learn about the importance of intelligent automation in the finance sector and how it is revolutionising this sector. Without further ado, let's get started!

Why is Intelligent Automation Important in The Finance Sector?

Despite the fact that the need for finance to implement more efficient, flexible ways of working precedes the worldwide pandemic, the occurrences of 2020 are proving to be a crucial driver for technological revolution. For finance, this means accepting new technologies that can be adapted to key processes, such as deep learning.

CFOs have long sought to reduce the amount of time they spend on procedures like closing, consolidations, accounting, and payroll, and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as alterations in how and where organisations operate, have made this a must.

Digital technologies and more automation can be a brilliant mix for CFOs to change the finance function in the proper hands. Success, on the other hand, will hinge on identifying and prioritising tasks that will provide the most value. When it relates to automation, a finance team's initial priority must be to automate the recurring and transactional operations that need manual intervention or human endeavour. This will open up a considerable amount of time for finance to become a more effective advisor to the company.

Intelligent Automation in The Finance Sector

Need for Speed

Intelligent automation solutions work with current systems and data in the same way that humans do, but without the interruption. These platforms, unlike humans, are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and can thus do work that would normally take weeks or be completely out of reach for human staff. For instance, in the healthcare industry, finance and accounting departments employ intelligent automation to aggregate patient payment information from a number of sources. The system then does a thorough risk assessment of patients and payers in order to reduce overdue debt and total days remaining. Risk analysis is popular in finance and accounting departments, but it requires access to usable data. That access is offered through IA, allowing for data-driven decision-making at volume and on demand.

Importance of Accuracy

Large corporations now frequently employ sophisticated risk modelling to help them make choices, but these systems are only as effective as the data they are based on. With people making an estimated 10 inaccuracies per 100 steps, the data that these models are based on frequently contains inaccuracies. Even a single data input error can significantly affect results. As the volume of data evaluated by F&A departments grows, so does the likelihood of a data entry error. Data input errors can affect everything from decision-making algorithms to basic accounting errors, which can have multi-billion-dollar consequences.

Impact on Employee Morale

Intelligent automation has a considerable impact on speed and precision, but its most critical impact is on enhancing the work experience.

Every day, F&A professionals are faced with a variety of low-skill, high-stress jobs. These staff, for example, pull bills to react to audits, which is a key step for firms. However, no tax professional looks forward to such work. Instead, they'd prefer to work as more strategic advisors who aggressively (and more creatively) deliver business-driven insights to their organisation. That is unquestionably a better use of F&A specialists' time.

Intelligent automation allows staff to focus their time and mental resources on more challenging, higher-value activities by processing data pulls and responding to basic questions from internal stakeholders. When regular and boring tasks are delegated to "digital workers," or computerised team members qualified to handle out a business procedure in the same manner as anybody else, they are completed faster and with fewer errors.

Intelligent automation, for example, allows for top-line revenue development that outpaces any corresponding increase in expenses. The digital transformation of your finance and accounting activities allows you to redirect resources away from support functions and into areas that might help your company develop.

Delivering Faster, Deeper Insights

While intelligent automation of the activities outlined above will benefit finance, the capacity to fulfil the increased need for insights, monitoring, and analysis—as well as the increasing volume and complexity of the data demanded in near real-time from key stakeholders—will have the most beneficial impact. In fact, according to a global CFO research, the key motivation for integrating automation within the financial organisation was to give improved decision support, allowing their teams to become more strategic members of the company. Manual data collecting, aggregation, verification, and structuring will become obsolete as the financial department embraces digital technology to promote increased automation. These non-value-added duties are now extremely time-consuming, leaving less time for assessment for the finance staff. Finance teams will be able to concentrate on value-add tasks like scenario analysis, risk assessments, productivity, and predictive modelling as manual, routine procedures become more computerised.