How Finance Leaders Unlock the Power of Data

Data is the lifeblood of finance departments, driving forecasts, budgets, and strategic decisions. However, many finance leaders grapple with fragmented data across multiple systems, leading to significant challenges in data consolidation and accessibility. The added burden of manual procedures, security concerns, and limited use of advanced analytics further exacerbates these challenges.

To achieve operational excellence and strategic agility, finance leaders need a unified, trusted, and interactive data ecosystem. Addressing data issues is crucial for improving speed, efficiency, accuracy, and security in financial operations. Embracing modernization, leveraging advanced analytics, and integrating AI capabilities can revolutionize finance decision-making and drive strategic initiatives forward.

The obstacles finance leaders face

Here's where many organizations hit a wall:

Fragmented data

Data is scattered across various systems, hindering consolidation efforts and making it harder to gain a comprehensive overview.

Disconnected reporting

Disjointed and complex reporting processes slow down decision-making and impact responsiveness.

Invisible insights

Key business drivers and insights are often buried within disparate datasets, making them difficult to access and analyze effectively.

Data inconsistencies

Issues with data accuracy, reliability, and governance can erode trust in financial reports and forecasts.

Manual processes

Finance teams often rely on slow, manual processes prone to errors, preventing proactive decision-making and agility.

These challenges are all too familiar, especially in situations such as M&A or reorganizations where the issues are compounded with increased data sources. From misaligned forecasts and conflicting reports to delayed insights, finance leaders face numerous obstacles. The fundamental issue isn’t the lack of data—it’s the absence of a unified, trusted system that can transform data into a strategic asset.

Embracing the consumerization of analytics

The consumerization of analytics empowers finance to harness the power of data, leading to faster, simpler, and more informed decisions and fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making. This is very much needed for AI, GenAI, agents, and other data-hungry applications to come. Data leveraged in this way is an advancement in the old model where data was tightly controlled by technical experts.

What’s driving the shift to consumerization of analytics?

Universal access to insights

AI and automation have made self-service analytics more accessible while low-/no-code tools have democratized data access/analytics.

Decentralized decision-making

Faster, wider access to relevant information is essential for hybrid work environments and globalization of teams.

Empowered data usage

Democratized data enables finance teams to analyze insights quicker and drive more accurate outcomes with tasks such as financial reporting and analysis, invoicing, payroll, and more.

Outcome-focused analytics

Viewing data not as raw material but as curated assets designed for real-world business needs can ensure insights are actionable and aligned with strategic objectives.

Embracing the “consumerization of analytics” positions organizations for success. Imagine advanced analytical tools that are not only powerful but also user friendly, seamlessly embedded into workflows, and a click away from a person’s workspace. This capability enables finance leaders to unlock the full potential of their data assets.

Data as a springboard

By unlocking data, finance data can spring up elsewhere, from creating data products and transforming enterprise performance management to outfitting for intelligent planning. Democratized data access and analytics benefit the entire enterprise. Turning data into products and innovative solutions drives usage and accelerates decision-making.

The KPMG Intelligent Planning approach evolves strategic planning with the infusion of finance data. But what exactly is intelligent planning?

KPMG Intelligent Planning for finance

Intelligent planning unifies data from disparate sources and applies AI and advanced analytics to better inform the planning process. It’s a holistic data approach. For finance leaders, this translates into enhanced speed, accuracy, security, and strategic alignment.

Here's how it addresses the key challenges that finance leaders face:

Data integration and consolidation: Unified data platforms break down silos, ensuring that data from multiple systems (finance, HR, or operations) is consistent and easily accessible.
AI and advanced analytics: Leverage AI to uncover insights, fill data gaps, and provide real-time, actionable information.
Efficiency and automation: Use AI to uncover financial insights, fill data gaps, and provide real-time, actionable information.
Customizable visualization: Interactive dashboards and visualization tools make it easy for users to access and interpret data specific to their roles.
Robust security measures: Implement stringent protocols to protect sensitive financial data, ensuring access for authorized users only.
Strategy and roadmap development: Develop a detailed strategy assessment by creating a tailored roadmap for integrating new technologies and enhancing existing systems.

Finance leaders are harnessing the power of advanced data management to drive strategic decisions and amplify growth. By turning fragmented data into cohesive insights, KPMG helps ensure data trustworthiness and optimizes enterprise performance management.

Let’s start a conversation about getting there Improve Your Finance Planning With KPMG

Leading practices for designing effective data products

Data products transform overwhelming information into actionable insights, connecting the right professionals to the right data at the right time, thereby enhancing decision-making capabilities and aligning with enterprise performance management goals.

Adopting a product mindset necessitates adhering to these seven key principles:

Treat data as a product: Make data consumable and outcome focused to ensure support for strategic financial goals.

Anchor to business outcomes: Identify the critical business decisions that data needs to support.

Design for personas: Understand and cater to different user groups, whether executives, analysts, or operational teams.

Prioritize usability: Deliver intuitive insights that don't require deep technical expertise.

Feedback loops: Capture user feedback to guide new features of data products.

Plan for scalability: Create flexible data products that evolve with your business. For instance, with extensible architecture, data products can easily be combined or extended without rebuilding from scratch.

Leverage AI thoughtfully: Use AI to enhance insights while maintaining a human-centered design for trust and control.

These principles ensure that finance data products meet current needs and are adaptable to future challenges, enabling quicker decisions, better alignment, and increased organizational agility in line with enterprise performance management objectives.

The role of governance in finance: Trust is nonnegotiable

No matter how accessible or user-friendly data is, it’s useless if it isn’t trustworthy. Without solid governance, insights can mislead, and strategic decisions can falter. A shift from fragmented to unified governance platforms is critical, especially with GenAI and AI agents, where robust data governance is essential. Governance should include:

Data quality management: Ensure data accuracy and reliability across all finance function operations.
Metadata and lineage tracking: Maintain a clear record of data origins and transformations for transparency and trust.
Privacy, security, and compliance controls: Protect sensitive financial data, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
Business glossary and data cataloging: Standardize financial terminology and data resources for consistency and clarity.

Unified governance accelerates the demand for trusted insights and assurance that both human and AI users operate from a foundation of accurate and explainable data. As AI and GenAI have become more prevalent, robust governance frameworks take on a more important role, ensuring ethical, reliable data use, and serving as the backbone for enterprise performance management.

Unlocking the power of data is key to achieving your financial goals. Streamlined data management and reporting processes enable quick and accurate insights. Having reliable and accurate data fosters confidence in decision-making and contributes to enhanced data security by safeguarding sensitive information with robust security protocols accessible only by authorized personnel.

By leveraging AI and advanced analytics, finance can uncover insights, automate low-value tasks, and generate dynamic outputs to support sophisticated decision-making. Decision-makers benefit from easy access to comprehensive, consolidated data in intuitive formats, such as dashboards, while aligning this data with business drivers and strategic goals improves overall business performance. Transform your data from a burden into a powerful strategic asset by unlocking the power of data for trusted, actionable insights that can drive business toward a successful future.

Finance leaders face fragmented data issues that hinder efficiency and decision-making, equipping them with a unified, trusted data ecosystem enhanced by AI and advanced analytics is essential.

The consumerization of analytics empowers not just finance leaders but also their teams with faster, user-friendly access to data for more insightful decision-making. Strategic data management enables user-centric, scalable, and well-governed data products. Finance data unlocked can be unified to leverage AI, and offer customizable visualization tools and more, turning data into a powerful strategic asset.