Making The Impossible Possible

Technology is transforming finance — and audit and assurance along with it. EY investigates the potential impact on businesses, auditors and regulators.

- Sally Percy

In the 21st century, technology has transformed the way we live, work and communicate with each other. It is disrupting virtually every industry that exists, overturning old business models and creating new ones. Myriad start-ups are harnessing the power of technology to find innovative solutions to complex problems.

Some of these are problems that have vexed humans since the dawn of time, such as generating more food from an unproductive field or finding ways to prevent the spread of a virulent disease. Others are exclusively modern issues — for example, automating the trading of cryptocurrencies.

“This is not science fiction,” says James Canton, CEO and Chairman of the Institute for Global Futures and author of Future Smart. “We’re at the edge of creating smarter, connected, vastly more powerful digital platforms that may end up transforming industries such as agriculture and health care, as well as finance and trading.

“We are also on the edge of creating autonomous thinking machines,” he believes. “Within 20 years, artificial intelligence (AI) will have become so successful that it will be a key component of creating guaranteed income for a large part of the global economy.”

THE FUTURE OF FINANCE

What does this smarter, more connected world mean for finance teams? It has been widely forecast that they can expect to hand many of their routine manual tasks over to machines — jobs such as account reconciliation, financial modeling and report generation. With less of their time taken up with handling basic transactions and preparing financial statements and reports, they can focus instead on providing valuable insight that helps to drive business performance and growth. In other words, finance is evolving from being a compliance-driven, backward-looking function to a more strategic, forward looking one.