Welcome to the latest edition of the Finance and Accounting Technology Briefing, a biweekly newsletter from StrategicCFO360 and The CFO Leadership Council.
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The inaugural Finance and Accounting Tech Expo at the Javits Convention Center in New York City is in the books! Hundreds of executives converged on the Javits Center for two days of demos, booth conversations, thought leader viewpoints and keynotes filled with foresight and practical advice.
We’re already getting ready for 2025, which will take place on October 27-29 at Javits! Registration is open at a discounted price.
The Finance and Accounting Technology Briefing, meanwhile, will continue to cover stories from the Expo and elsewhere to help finance pros make confident technology choices and give software providers a better understanding of their customers' needs.
If you have feedback, ideas or product, people and company news for the Briefing, please email the editor at vince@CFOLC.com.
Learning From FATE
Our multifaceted coverage of the inaugural Finance & Accounting Technology Expo (FATE) appears on StrategicCFO360. Read about the Faces of Fate, Daymond John’s “shark points” and the swag scored by attendees.
Technology solves problems but also creates unintended consequences. FATE was an all-too-brief window into what CFOs and their teams struggle with daily, and established industry players, startups and, of course, CFOs had a lot to say about the current challenges. Here are three of the most important to the future of finance and accounting technology:
- Data runneth over. “I haven’t yet run into an organization that doesn’t have data problems,” said Guy Bar-Gil, product manager of Safebooks AI, a new financial data governance platform. The startup’s existing customers look to Safebooks to build hardy data governance processes and lend a hand during audit season. Attendees like Stephan Ruiz, former CFO of the World Economic Forum want to, “get to the data more easily.” Ruiz told Chief Executive Group’s Dan Bigman he was on the hunt for a dynamic dashboard that changes based on who’s viewing the data. Speaker Glenn Hopper, head of AI R&D at Eventus Advisory Group, said, “a lot of automation can happen just as part of an organization’s data maturity process. AI may be what propels finance to a higher level of data maturity.” GenAI could also remove some of the speed bumps to accessing data. “It’s not about democratization of data,” Hopper said, “it’s democratization of data science.”
- AI, anyone? FATE was sprinkled with AI skeptics: the unconvinced, the disbelieving and the suspicious. They were balanced out by the passionate, the vehemently optimistic and the exuberant but rational. Some CFOs came to FATE to find AI solutions that would vanquish their teams’ rudimentary tasks and simplify the finance tech stack. But many came to just learn—the task of educating finance executives about AI is still in its early innings. “Half of the people using AI have no idea what it means,” Jonathan Einav, CEO and co-founder of fintastic, told the Finance and Accounting Technology Briefing. Many people think AI is AGI—artificial general intelligence, the ability to perform any intellectual task a human can. “That doesn’t exist yet; sorry to break the news,” Einav said. Niyati Chhaya, co-founder of Hyperbots, called the term commoditized and said it’s the responsibility of Hyperbots and other tech suppliers to explain what they are doing with AI. Said Chhaya: “We can't behave like a closed system—not sharing, not explaining what's happening to the user. A significant effort needs to go into that.”
- Controlling costs. What vexes CFOs most about tech? The growing tech stack that requires resources to manage, the opacity of spend and the higher prices this year for cloud and SaaS solutions. On average, the price per employee of the solutions Vertice tracks rose 26% in 2024, said Jared Greenberg, VP of North American sales for the cloud and SaaS spending optimization provider. In a time when profitability is paramount, CFOs want to measure the value of all of this IT buying. They need to marry purchases and ongoing costs and utilization, for one. Additionally, they need to understand when they sign the first contract whether they’re getting the vendor’s best price. “Even some finance executives at large companies rely on their networks to compare what they’re paying,” said Greenberg. “But it’s hard to find a like-for-like example based on company size and industry.” A startup called Moneta (founded by a member of the CFO Leadership Council) is tackling a growing problem in this area: interpreting the inscrutable billing information from hyperscalers like AWS and Azure. “We do a very poor job and struggle with taking that cloud bill and allocating it,” said former CFO and Moneta founder Shan Edwards. “We need finance and accountants involved.”
If you weren’t at FATE, keep in mind that the real value of FATE was connections—and there were some fascinating people to meet. From keynote Daymond John (read about his 5 “shark” points for success) to four-time fintastic founder Einav, who once developed a patented treatment for coronary artery disease, to 20 entrepreneurs building breakthrough products. You’ll hear more about these people—as well as the issues and trends we uncovered—in the coming editions of the briefing.
—Vince Ryan, editor, The CFO Leadership Council. vince@CFOLC.com
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Kadidia Cooper, CFO of 10,000 Degrees, gave us the scoop on which software platforms the nonprofit college scholarship provider uses and the changes it has planned.
Our outgoing ERP is Fund EZ. It’s nonprofit specific but a relic—ours is still sitting on a physical server in our offices, and its “cloud version” still needs to be accessed through a VPN. “Integrations” are really uploads and downloads.
Our instance of Salesforce was originally implemented for development as a CRM; it is also used as the primary system by our scholarship department and programs to track student interactions and data. [But] the system was so heavily customized with no thought to usability and other departments’ needs. It’s almost impossible for anyone else to use or get data in a format that doesn’t have to be heavily manipulated or assembled from several reports. When we try to make a change somewhere, we often have no idea what was affected downstream and how.
We are looking to integrate SF with [the organization’s new ERP] Gravity for at least scholarships to feed awards, modifications and disbursements between the two systems. Future goals: budgeting software, assuming Gravity cannot meet our needs, and grant-tracking software, like KarmaSuite. Both need to integrate with Gravity.
What’s your joy, and what’s your headache?
Systems that work and do what we need them to are my joy. Systems I can maintain myself once set up are what I love. Inclusive and self-sufficient systems are what I look for. My headache is trying to evaluate new systems, especially when trying to fit them into an existing stack (sometimes getting rid of the whole thing, or at least several parts of it, is not a bad idea).
My biggest headaches currently are: (a) Across the organization we used a dozen different IM systems, in addition to text messaging on personal phones. Multiply this by dozens of other programs and software in daily use. While we have made great strides, we still are working on getting things like this under control. (b) For us, Salesforce is way too big a system. I hate that we need to pay outside consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just to keep it functioning, let alone upgrade and update. It’s likely we will always have that outside expense in addition to two dedicated FTEs.
If you could wave a magic wand, what would you make software companies do for you?
My biggest wish is that software companies would be more flexible with their contracting, especially for smaller businesses or nonprofits. Almost throwing your product at customers for free or no money and then hitting them with 50% year-over-year price increases at renewal is unethical, especially given the time and expense needed to implement a system. More than that, my business needs do not change conveniently at contract renewal time and, yes, sometimes I need a concession mid-contract.
Otherwise, my biggest pet peeve is when software/platform providers slap the word “business” on a consumer product and sell it to you and yet it’s clearly not a business product. Venmo is one of the biggest offenders. Google is not far behind.
What’s your best piece of tech advice for others in your job?
Keep your tech stack as small as possible, and that includes thinking of all the add-ons (branded or third parties) you need to make your main system functional.
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Have news to share? Drop me a line at vince@CFOLC.com — Vince Ryan, editor
Genpact introduced a new Finance Data Hub on Databricks that unifies a company’s financial information, including unstructured data, on the Databricks open-source AI and analytics platform. The platform provides finance “with clean, reliable data in near-real-time, enabling advanced analytics and AI-driven insights,” said Genpact.
Business planning platform Pigment announced new AI features and product updates, including generative AI capabilities that let users interact with data using conversational language; use cases for supply chain and ESG performance monitoring; and application testing to ensure secured changes to models.
KPMG LLP made another AI investment, acquiring a minority equity stake in Ema, an agentic AI startup aiming to build “universal AI employees,” for an undisclosed amount. The platform automates processes and workflows in cloud environments, like AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and popular applications, like Salesforce, ServiceNow and Zendesk.
Accounting automation startup LiveFlow raised $13.5 million in a Series A round led by Valar Ventures. The capital will help fund the launch of LiveFlow Next, an accounting tool that offers custom dashboards, industry benchmarking and AI-driven transaction categorization.
Thomson Reuters acquired Materia, a startup developing an agentic AI assistant for the tax, audit and accounting professions. Materia is built on a proprietary library of accounting content; its agentic AI assistant automates and augments research and workflows for accountants.
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Have news to share? Drop me a line at vince@CFOLC.com — Vince Ryan, editor
ServiceNow named Amit Zavery as president, COO and chief product officer. She is the former GM of Google Cloud. She started her career as a software engineer.
PROS Holdings announced the retirement of Andres Reiner, president and chief executive officer. He will remain in his role as the SaaS pricing and CPQ company conducts a search for his successor.
Basware named Donna Wilczek to its board of directors. Wilczek is a former executive vice president of strategy and innovation at Coupa and the chief product officer of Oomnitza.
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Stock performance is as of the market close on October 30, 2024
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Plan to join us at the Finance and Accounting Technology Expo, the country’s largest annual trade show for buyers and vendors of corporate finance and accounting software. This year’s event will occur at New York’s Javits Convention Center on October 29-30, 2024. This is an excellent opportunity to network with industry peers, learn from experts and discover new products and services. Register online at StrategicCFO360.com/FATE/register/
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