The role of finance departments is changing dramatically and will continue to do so over the next decade, moving from primarily a number-crunching role to adopting a more strategic position in the organisation.

A recent economist study found that CFOs and senior finance executives are concerned with their ability to keep up with the pace of change and adapt quickly to changes in the business environment. But in this change there is opportunity for finance departments to thrive and adopt new technologies and tools to take advantage of current disruptions.

The increase use of transformative and intelligent technologies – such as in-memory processing, machine learning, predictive analytics, and cloud – are changing the way finance professionals work. Finance is being enabled to automate many day-to-day tasks, increase operational and financial control, deliver complete and accurate financial analytics insights and find new ways to save money and improve financial processes. All adding real business value rather than simply processing numbers and data.