Learn how new age data analytics is pushing private company CFOs to adapt and innovate

The EY DNA of the CFO survey revealed an increased growth in data volumes, with 35 percent of the finance leaders significantly involved in providing data and analytics to reduce cost and improve effectiveness of their organizations.

In this episode, podcast host Myles Corson welcomes Jennifer Crowe, CFO of CognitiveScale, and Anthony Sgammato, Americas EY Private Assurance Leader, to discuss how private company CFOs can identify and effectively use this rising amount of data to make a difference.

They explore how private company CFOs use data analytics to maintain a competitive edge. Tools such as business intelligence systems, artificial intelligence and cloud storage can offer insights from data, in real time. However, these tools may bring new challenges of cyber-attacks and staff and cultural issues.

Recent EY research on DNA of the CFO revealed while CFOs understood that data analytics is a critical tool for staying relevant in the market, they also acknowledged the challenges of cyber-attacks. From a CFO perspective, cybersecurity has been a major risk from an enterprise perspective, and firms are strongly looking at rescaling employees, adding incremental staff, while some are using services to help with monitoring and identifying open-source threat indicators. 

For an AI software company such as CognitiveScale that makes augmented intelligence software, this increase in data has proven beneficial in providing true insights to market route. Jennifer points out that they can now integrate with other sales tools to target customers in a smarter and more efficient way. For many others, the benefits outweigh the challenges offering the opportunity to leverage business intelligence systems, artificial intelligence, and cloud storage to bring insights from data in real time.

The initial reluctance within the board to put sensitive financial data into the cloud is now fast changing. At CognitiveScale, cloud has allowed employees to work anywhere on a real-time basis and has been key to online collaboration and flexibility, both internally and externally. Many other firms are leveraging them in different ways with more CFOs working with external partners for data hosting and management.

These new systems and data that’s being driven are providing private companies with insights that young talent can use in a more efficient way, do more with less and be more cost efficient, as well as work on different projects throughout the organization to expand their experience.

Key Takeaways

1. Private companies CFOs are flooded with data and understand that data analytics is a critical tool for maintaining a competitive edge. They recognize that the end benefits exceed the challenges of cyber-attacks and offers the opportunity to leverage business intelligence systems, AI, and cloud storage to bring insights from data in real time.
2. Finance accounting may not have been one of the early adopters of cloud, but we are witnessing an acceleration of adoption in finance.
3. Private companies, as opposed to public companies, gives young talent the opportunity to really build from the ground up. From an accounting and finance perspective, this helps people to take on new and exciting projects and explore different things across the board.