By Neo Mathe, Financial Services Industry Value Engineer at SAP Africa
CFOs and their finance teams continue to deal with a complex operating environment in 2023, marked by ongoing supply chain uncertainty, recessionary fears, persistent inflation and the disruptive impact of new technologies.
Over the past decade, the digitisation of finance has helped CFOs and finance leaders adapt to challenging market conditions more easily. By liberating finance decision-making from the confines of spreadsheets and manual processes, organisations have unlocked huge operational efficiencies while improving the accuracy of decision-making within finance functions.
The proliferation of AI within financial business processes promises an even greater wave of innovation for finance leaders. AI is a transformative technology, allowing organisations to unlock the power of their financial data and improve decision-making while also easing regulatory compliance and providing accurate predictive and analytical insights.
The International Monetary Fund highlights AI applications in finance that range from the use of machine learning algorithms to improve forecasting and credit risk scoring, to natural language processing powering chatbots that support customer service and report generation processes. For CFOs, AI's ability to improve anomaly detection provides an essential layer that can help financial institutions limit insider trading and enhance fraud detection.
McKinsey data suggests the potential annual value of AI and analytics within the global banking sector could reach $1-trillion, with marketing and sales, risk, and HR as the highest-value business functions for AI support. A separate report by IDC found widespread interest in AI among global finance leaders, who recognise its potential to dramatically increase the performance of a broad range of finance processes.