Manage Risk and Reduce Fraud
Finance leaders are responsible for more than ever before… Whether ensuring resilience in times of uncertainty or managing digital transformation, CFOs are no longer expected to simply look after financial operations but play a larger strategic role across organizations.
- CFOs are becoming increasingly cutting-edge resilience or transformation specialists, or Chief Future Officers, as businesses look for CFOs to improve cash flow, find new markets or revenue streams, and assume more strategic decision-making roles around future investment decisions. A survey showed that change is ubiquitous with 91 percent of respondents say their organizations have undergone at least one transformation in the past three years. The results also suggest that 44% of CFOs are playing an active role or leading these transformations.
- As customer needs and organizations transform, not only do business models need to keep up, but organization’s internal capabilities must evolve. From managing forecasts to looking at business value drivers to managing risks, data can no longer be looked at in silos and analysis must be both in real-time and predictive.
- While your role as a savvy financial leader is more important than ever with ever pressing financial performance demands and as global regulation and compliance expertise becomes a must have for all CFOs.
- Corporate fraud is among the most critical and growing challenges that CFO’s face today, you most help your company enforce accurate reporting at scale and technology to minimize fraud and revenue leaks.
- More and more CFO’s are being asked to take on more operational responsibilities in order to increase automation and efficiency across the business.
Roadblocks to Success
While you look to juggle the demands that come from each of these critical roles, you keep hitting similar roadblocks which impact performance, increase risk, and hinder operations.
Although a company’s financial management system is critical to its success, many organizations have outdated and fragmented systems. These not only create data silos, but lead to static, untimely reports and limit our ability to anticipate necessary changes and adapt financial operations.
Similarly, growing regulatory requirements, digital threats and an acceleration of risk continue to increase the risks which need to be accounted for and further threaten customer experience and revenue.
Yet as we recognize the need to address these issues, our employees continue to be bogged down by manual, inefficient and error-prone processes which not only hinder our operational effectiveness, but prevent our people from driving the strategic, value adding work they’re capable of.
CFOs cited “staff capacity to adapt to change” as the main barrier to adopting new technologies. Effective change management — including transparency about the rationale and continuous communication — will be critical for technology transformations to be a success.
Unlock Business Continuity with Predictive and Proactive Financial Operations
We must overcome these challenges and ensure access to business-wide, real-time data to provide the most relevant insight, risk analysis, predictive forecasting and modeling. At the same time we must maintain business continuity, across our operations, and this means planning for both the short and long term together, rather than as distinct and separate entities.
- Performance requires redesigning the Finance structure and roles with the right delivery models across the organization
- Protection strategies help you control risk by reducing transaction and account fraud. Minimize revenue loss due to improper discounts, merchandise return fraud and stolen merchandise.
- Purpose-driven strategies and process optimization will empower your workforce to stay focused and motivated during challenging
Drive Essential Business Outcomes
These changes are often easier said than done. To be successful, we must focus in on key scenarios and ensure we’re focusing on business outcomes, rather than the underlying processes.
- Whether it’s in response to the likes of Covid-19 or other unforeseen challenges, times of uncertainty require greater emphasis than ever on cash flow management and accurate forecasting. As we review our financials, we must be able to move beyond delayed payments and unpredictable liquidity to accurately predict cash flows, accelerate and proactively manage collections and ultimately reduce write-offs
- Similarly, as we see fraud increase we must be proactive in its management. Rather than reactively responding to fraud or blocking reliable customers, we can reduce wrongful rejections and boost fraud immunization by using global fraud insights
- These scenarios and others often require immediate operations changes which are inefficient, disconnected or even band-aided together. Instead, we must ensure our systems empower agile operations which will not only drive efficiencies, but reduce growing operation costs
- In times of change, we often over pivot around technology and operational processes. Yet our people play a leading role in successful change….
- Let’s take a deeper look at how you can drive these business outcomes and more by focusing on the performance of financial operations, protection against fraud and risk and driving operations with purpose
Performance: Optimize Financial Operations
Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations delivers unified, real-time visibility of financial and business operations for better and faster decisions. From smarter and more connected operations to exceptional customer experiences, strategic, data-driven financial insights, to all-you-need information across business organizations you can accelerate business activities, while simultaneously leveraging the global scalability and digital intelligence capabilities in the cloud that enable you to grow your business. With Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, you can reduce operational costs and rapidly respond to changing business needs in today’s highly dynamic and competitive world.
Finance empowers you to re-imagine your ERP to unlock what is next for your business.
Protection: Guard Your Revenue Against Fraud 
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps e-commerce, brick-and-mortar and omni-channel merchants protect their revenue and reputation by providing tools to decrease fraud and abuse, reduce operational expenses and increase acceptance rates. Combat purchase, account, and omni-channel return and discount fraud with adaptive AI technology continuously learning evolving fraud patterns
Protect revenue streams by reducing wrongful rejects by issuing banks
Transaction acceptance booster enables merchants to share transnational trust knowledge with issuing banks to help increase authorization rates and reduce wrongful rejects, helping protect revenue streams.
Boost fraud immunization by gaining visibility and insights from a global footprint of fraud patterns Adaptive AI technology and the fraud protection network provide merchants with insights and tools to optimize fraud controls and immunize against fraud attacks on a continuous basis.
Improve customer service by unblocking wrongfully rejected transactions / customers The built-in customer escalation support tool helps merchants improve customer service by displaying detailed context of customer transactions, including fraud insights provided by the service.
Purpose: Adapt Quickly and Reduce Costs 
Do you spend too much time on transnational activities instead of drawing insights from your business? Do you know the best places to use automation to improve process efficiencies?
CFOs will need to look for different skills on their teams, as well as people who are motivated to embrace change.
Technological breakthroughs are disrupting both business strategy and the ways that finance teams work and collaborate. As CFOs build tomorrow’s finance function, they will need to find people with the skills — and motivation — to complement the technological innovations, as well as to embrace rapid change, different roles and new approaches.
Reduce global financial complexity and risk Quickly adapt to changing financial and legal requirements with guided, rules-based chart of accounts, dimensions, and a no-code configuration service that simplifies regulatory and tax reporting, e-invoicing, and payments. Meet evolving local and global business requirement changes, improve governance, reduce risks, and ensure compliance across 37 countries and 42 languages out-of-the-box to fuel your business growth. Extend Dynamics 365 Finance further with prebuilt partner solutions to meet your local needs. Rapidly deploy new subsidiaries in record time with the ability to copy existing legal entity’s setup to a new company, allowing the on-boarding of a new location to be quick and consistent with the company’s best practices.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations is to connect teams across the project operations life-cycle and unlock the business agility and resilience needed for success. Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects your sales, project management, resourcing, and finance teams around actionable data, process governance, and measurable outcomes. Get everything you need to run your project-based services business—quotes, resourcing, project delivery, time and expense, project accounting, and business intelligence—all in one solution for better insight, collaboration, and visibility. Dynamics 365 Project Operations ensures you can deliver exceptional services to your customers on-time and on-budget, every time
Dynamics 365 Human Resources helps HR professionals get the workforce insights needed to build data-driven employee experiences across compensation, benefits, leave and absence, compliance, payroll, performance feedback, training and certification, and self-service programs. Dynamics 365 Human Resources connects people and operations data to ensure businesses can optimize workforce costs and take better care of employees.
Use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides to reduce errors, standardize skills, close knowledge gaps, and improve training and processes with step-by-step holographic instructions right where the work happens. Equip managers to create interactive content and attach photos and videos, without any prior mixed reality experience. With Guides, no custom coding is required. Quickly deploy training initiatives that target a specific skills gap within a team and create consistency across locations. Enable employees with hands-free training on how to complete the job. Take institutional knowledge out of employees’ heads and turn it into a repeatable tool.
Predictive And Proactive Financial Operations
Success is fully dependent on accessible and actionable data that can drive optimization and rapid innovation, not only in your Finance team, but across the organization.
With connected data and applied intelligence at the core, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform form the basis of the most comprehensive set of connected, intelligent business applications in the world today
From sales, to finance, to talent management and more, you need a deep understanding of the business in order to succeed – not just in your department, but across operations.
With Dynamics 365, we have the unique ability to bring together data from virtually any source, whether it’s a Microsoft system or not and bring it into this connected digital feedback loop
Built on hyper-scale cloud platform with Azure, with inherent intelligence at app layer
Allowing everyone to analyze, act, automate with Power Platform.