Show us your new technology. Then I will show you the unexpected results.
At this week's Finance & Accounting Technology Expo, we learned about the daily struggles of CFOs and their teams. Established industry players, startups, and CFOs had a lot to say about current challenges. Here are three of the most important for the future of finance and accounting technology.
data over
Guy Virgil, Product Manager at Safebooks AI, a new financial data governance platform, said: The startup's existing customers are looking to Safebooks to help them build robust data governance processes and help them through audit season.
Participants like Stephen Lewis, former chief financial officer of the World Economic Forum, say they want data to be more easily available. Lewis told Chief Executive Officer Dan Bigman that the company is exploring dynamic dashboards that change depending on who is viewing the data.
There is hope. Speaker Glenn Hopper, head of AI research and development at Eventus Advisory Group, said the data maturation process allows for more automation. “AI may be what pushes finance to a higher level of data maturity,” Hopper said. GenAI can also eliminate some of the slowdowns in accessing data. “This is not the democratization of data, this is the democratization of data science,” Hopper said.
AI, anyone?
FATE was filled with AI skeptics: those who were not convinced, those who did not believe, and those who doubted. They were balanced by passionate people, fiercely optimistic people, and energetic but rational people.
Some CFOs came to FATE to find AI solutions that would overcome rudimentary tasks for their teams and simplify their finance technology stacks. But many are just here to learn, and the challenge of educating finance executives about AI is still in its infancy.
“Half of the people using AI have no idea what it means,” said Jonathan Einuff, CEO and co-founder of fintastic. Many people think of AI as AGI, or artificial general intelligence, the ability to perform any intellectual task that a human can do. “It doesn't exist yet. I'm sorry to break the news,” Einav said.
Hyperbots co-founder Niyati Chhaya called the term commoditized and said it's up to Hyperbots and other technology suppliers to explain what they're doing with AI. Chaya said: “We can't act like a closed system. We can't share and explain to our users what's going on. It takes a lot of effort.”
cost and value
What are CFOs most interested in when it comes to technology? The growth of resource-hungry tech stacks, the uncertainty of IT spending, and the rising prices of cloud and SaaS solutions this year. On average, per-employee prices for solutions tracked by Vertice rose 26% in 2024, said Jared Greenberg, vice president of North American sales for the cloud and SaaS spend optimization provider.
In an era where profitability is paramount, CFOs want to measure the value of all of these IT purchases. First, you need to combine purchasing, ongoing costs, and utilization. Additionally, you need to understand whether you are getting the vendor's best price when you sign the first contract.
“Some finance leaders at large companies rely on their networks to compare what they're paying,” Greenberg says. “However, it is difficult to find similar examples based on company size and industry.”
A startup called Moneta (founded by members of the CFO Leadership Council) is tackling a growing problem in this space: interpreting arcane billing information from hyperscalers like AWS and Azure.
“We're doing a very poor job of receiving cloud bills and having a hard time allocating them,” said former CFO and Moneta founder Shan Edwards. “It requires the involvement of finance and accountants.”
