Digital-First CFOs Empower The Enterprise With Data

Among the countless negative impacts of the global coronavirus crisis is a surge in cyberattacks on the global business community. A perfect storm of work-from-home requirements and pandemic-related uncertainty has widened the playing field for malicious actors, and the demand for anti-fraud technology has consequently spiked.

That’s good news for Featurespace, a technology firm focused on fraud and financial crime prevention. But it has also created new challenges for the company, which must now navigate customer interactions in a wholly digital atmosphere. According to Jonathan Crossfield, Featurespace’s CFO, it has also put a renewed emphasis on workflow digitization, spurring deeper conversations about how a digital-centric company can fuel modernization in both the front and back offices.

Speaking with Karen Webster for this week’s installment of “A Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO” series, Crossfield recounted how he has helped the organization navigate the new normal of connecting with customers digitally, accelerating financial management modernization and placing data at the center of the CFO’s ability to empower other business leaders with actionable insights.

The Pandemic’s Deepest Impacts

Though many organizations struggled to find their footing as professionals worked remotely, the digital-first nature of Featurespace’s business model meant that disruption in the back office was relatively muted in a work-from-home setting.

That doesn’t mean the company didn’t face significant effects from the pandemic, however. According to Crossfield, among the most prominent impacts was the acceleration of digitization efforts already in place in areas like expense processing. “This has been an opportunity for us to look at how we could do that better, because the volume of expenses coming through has dropped as travel has dropped significantly,” he explained.

The pandemic reinforced other preexisting initiatives within the enterprise, too. The company had already been prioritizing the connectivity between the finance function and customer relationships, for example – a focus that was only strengthened as a result of the crisis and consequential increase in product demand. For finance teams, that means collaborating with sales and customer success teams, said Crossfield, and supporting that shift from in-person customer outreach efforts to online marketing and webinars.

A Data-Centric Approach

Though being restricted to virtual customer meetings can be frustrating, these digital interactions have also created an opportunity for Crossfield to utilize data from those client interactions – and use it to guide other financial initiatives. “We want to make sure we have all of the data to support customers as best as possible,” he said. “We use that to drive our investment decisions throughout the organization, whether it’s in the customer support, engineering area or implementation area.”

It’s indicative of a broader emphasis on the role data plays in the company’s overall financials. Integrating information from the firm’s CRM (customer relationships management) system with other financial systems is paramount to quickly accessing and analyzing information that guides those investment decisions, for example.

Indeed, Crossfield said that utilizing data – and empowering business leaders with actionable insights – is at the heart of what it means to be a digital-first CFO. “We focus on trying to capture as much data as possible across the organization, so that we can support partners with their business decisions,” he explained. “By automating and using more digital processing around basic financial functions, we’re able to add more value, put analytics around data and give more real-time information to the business leaders across the company.”

Driving Progress

Before the pandemic, Featurespace had already been relatively far along in its own back-office digitization journey. But with access to data becoming even more important than before, Crossfield said efforts to digitize and automate various financial workflows were accelerated. As the company continues to make progress in its expense management digitization and automation efforts, it is also focusing on payroll digitization, which Crossfield said has historically been an area of manual processing.

Overall, this digitization push is guided by an effort to obtain a holistic view of what’s occurring throughout the operation, a vantage point that can only be achieved through the connectivity of data across systems – not only within the finance function, but also throughout various departments of the enterprise, like sales and customer outreach.

That digitization boost will continue to play an important role as companies like Featurespace prepare for the months and years ahead. It’s unclear when remote working models will shift, if at all. And while Crossfield said that Featurespace has proven that a fully remote workforce can be achieved without back-office disruption, he’s looking forward to having professionals connect in person within an office setting sometime in the future.

In the meantime, driving further automation and data integration will increasingly prove valuable in supporting teams operating from afar, while also empowering business leaders with holistic, real-time information. This is aiding the firm in not only reacting to shifting market pressures as a result of the pandemic, but also in better responding to customers’ needs as the fraud threat itself evolves.

“We’ve seen fraudsters looking at new ways to try to attack the payments industry,” said Crossfield. “And that’s an area where our adaptive models can really help.”