The Robots Are Coming To Corporate Finance

When you mention robots, most people think of Star Wars or those car-manufacturing assembly lines where giant, agile machines move heavy parts, make spot welds or secure bolt-on chassis. Robots have developed to the point where robotic process automation (RPA) is now coming to the world of corporate finance. In finance, we've automated by implementing general ledger and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, as well as spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel. Yet many corporate financial processes are still stuck in the 20th century. Corporate finance teams spend about 80% of their time manually gathering, verifying and consolidating data, leaving only about 20% for higher-level tasks like analysis and decision making.