Plenty of steps to be taken towards real-time reporting
Amsterdam 15 May 2022 – The importance of blockchain and robotisation has declined over the years for finance professionals. In 2019, 33% still said they expected blockchain to have a major impact on the financial sector and 29% thought so of blockchain. Since then, these percentages have shrunk to seventeen and twenty percent respectively. This is evident from the FinTech Barometer, a study of the financial status at Dutch companies conducted over the past five years by fintech company Visma | Onguard.
Big data, AI and IoT remain popular
There has also been no noticeable difference in recent years in the number of finance professionals who say they will use robotisation in their systems. Whereas seventeen per cent said this in 2020, that figure has now risen to just twenty per cent. So which technologies have not lost popularity over the years? They are big data, AI and IoT. Both big data and IoT have been in the top three most influential technologies according to finance professionals since 2018.
Adriaan Kom, CCO at Visma | Onguard: “It is striking that finance professionals have the idea of not doing much with robotisation and do not see the influence on the financial sector. At the same time, it is also a compliment for this technology, because it is now so embedded in systems that professionals do not realise how much they are already using it. After all, that the use of robotisation has increased in recent years is certain. Blockchain, on the other hand, does not yet seem to be living up to its promise at the moment and is being used far less than was thought a few years back.”
Real-time reporting
With the right technologies, finance professionals will also be able to report in real-time, which is necessary to make the right business decisions. Unfortunately, the number of professionals already working with real-time data has not increased in recent years. In 2020, fifteen per cent said they already had access to it, in 2022 it was only fourteen per cent. The positive news is that the number of companies that only report financial figures once a year is at zero percent for the first time this year. In 2020, six per cent of companies did so.
In 2020, the biggest stumbling block for real-time reporting was outdated systems (36%). Fortunately, this problem has been less of a problem in recent years. In 2021 only fifteen percent said it was a stumbling block and in 2022 seventeen percent.
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About the research
Every year, Visma | Onguard investigates how financial professionals view the current trends and developments: Fintech, big data, digital transformation and data-driven. This research is called the FinTech Barometer and is conducted both in the Netherlands – through research agency Markteffect – and in the United Kingdom – through research agency Censuswide. At least one hundred of the respondents work as chief financial officer (CFO) and another two hundred as a financial employee in an organisation with at least one hundred employees.
