Technology Trends in Finance: The Role of Automation & APIs

Finance teams deal with numbers - a lot of numbers. While the different areas within finance each have different needs, there’s one thing that’s common when it comes to technology trends in finance - the need for data assembly and validation. Whether it’s financial accounting, FP&A, or accounts payable, any business finance online course will teach you that accurate data is the bedrock on which the projections and analyses are built.

The sources of data in a typical organization are - ERP, CRM, HRIS/Payroll, CLM, Department budgets, bank accounts, Spreadsheets, etc.

Traditionally the data has been assembled manually via a combination of CSV exports, shared files, email exchanges, and sometimes APIs. The data is then populated in spreadsheets and manually validated for errors/typos. After that formulas are created to generate the desired output. Typically in the form of -

• 13-week forecasts
• Monthly forecast
• Quarterly & annual Budgets
• Budget vs Actual cash flow analysis

Lately, technology trends in finance are seeing an uptick and I believe these API and automation trends will accelerate in the future. The reasons behind this are primarily -

• Increasing connectivity and proliferation of APIs into the systems mentioned above. While the APIs themselves are not new, IPaaS platforms are becoming increasingly sophisticated and comprehensive to cover a wide-enough spectrum to enable the entire ecosystem to come together.
• Open banking regulations are making it mandatory for erstwhile closed financial institutions to open up access to bank transactions via API.
• Maturation of AI/ML technologies. Basic statistical techniques such as regression analysis have existed for a long time and can even be run manually in spreadsheets but the ability to gather data autonomously, continuously, and the ability to compare against peers really takes it to the next level.

We built Payference to supercharge Finance with the latest in tech and API and automation trends. At the heart of it are seamless integrations and PayIQ - our proprietary machine-learning algorithm. Payference dcapitalizes on the technology trends in finance and does the heavy lifting for you, letting you focus on higher value items instead of repetitive, error-prone, data-intensive, and time-consuming tasks.

Would you like to discover how businesses like yourselves can achieve a decreased DSO and accelerated payments, generating over 10x ROI using Payference?

Book a meeting to schedule your free consultation today.

For more information write to us at: contact@payference.com