Playing emerging tech catch up in the finance function

CFOs have an opportunity to cut costs, build for the future, and increase data-driven decision making. I've always been surprised at how finance functions treat their own technology spend. Maybe finance executives are more conservative with their own wallets, or maybe they hold themselves to too high a standard. Either way, they tend to invest less in technology than their counterparts in other functions invest--on average, just 13 percent of tech budgets go toward enterprise functions like finance, risk, and compliance, while IT garners 28 percent and sales and marketing gets 24 percent, according to PwC's 2017 Global Digital IQ Survey. Some CFOs, however, are rethinking the digital investment in their own function--especially the investment in emerging tech, such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain.