Everyone’s talking about GenAI. 76% of executive leaders intend to use it in current or upcoming business projects, and as McKinsey & Company puts it: “In the next five years, generative AI could fundamentally change financial institutions’ risk management by automating, accelerating, and enhancing everything from compliance to climate risk control.” CFOs aren’t immune to the trend. But while some think automation and AI are the way to enhance operations, financial controllers who want to streamline their end-of-month financial closing should probably first look at one of the most important components in elevating a financial close – the accuracy of their data.
Accurate data makes or breaks financial closing
An effective financial close starts with reliable data. Data has huge implications for compliance, customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and business strategy.
But bypassing accuracy and quality controls in the name of speed is surprisingly common, so much so that McKinsey & Company illustrates the scenario with an analogy. First, envision two banks, one of which releases new products as fast as possible, without a second thought to compliance or data.
While on the surface, its strategy might seem like a good idea (the bank can scale up faster than ever on new product lines and pursue new strategies without the slowdowns of quality control), inaccurate data eventually – slowly at first, and then all at once – starts to cause trouble. The bank incurs heavy compliance penalties, which tank its value and cause high-performing employees to jump ship.
Inaccurate data is expensive, both from a financial and reputational standpoint. In 2024, regulators fined Freedom Mortgage $3.95 million due to ‘error-riddled’ lending data. Freedom Mortgage was forced to complete additional audit checks, saddled with greater regulatory scrutiny, and sidetracked from its larger performance indicators and long-term strategic goals. What seemed like a good idea at the time was a massive mistake. That year, regulators also fined Citi $136 million when the bank failed to effectively manage and mitigate risk in its data, after sanctioning a fine of $400 million only four years earlier – again, associated with substandard data.
The competitive advantage of real-time data
As the Citi and Freedom cases show, avoiding problems with data accuracy doesn’t make them go away overnight. Instead, they get worse over time, eventually making the process slower and less effective because of the time lost on audits and legal cases. Employees start to question leadership, and strategy gets harder to set.
In contrast, real-time data helps you make more competitive decisions and accurately predict future quarter’s financial closing rates. But better data isn’t just a better benchmark. It also helps CFOs and financial controllers shift the time they spend on end-of-month closing to more strategic decisions that shape the overall trajectory of the business.
Why does this matter? Centralized, accessible, and real-time data makes it easy for teams to track and report data over time, speed up the process, and gather immediate intelligence on what works and what doesn’t. It also helps teams adapt to new regulations, avoid audit penalties, source and retain high-quality talent, and keep teams satisfied and feeling confident in the quality of their work.
As EY Digital Product Leader Kathleen Calabro explains: “We’re currently in a new era of data-driven insights, and the value for banks lies in the density and richness of their data.” But to achieve their goals, finance leaders have to centralize, automate, and reconcile their financial closing data and intelligence to a single platform. Often, they search the marketplace to find an easier, more efficient solution – one that operates in real-time and provides a more holistic overview of their closing process.
A solution for accurate financial closing data
CFOs and financial controllers who invest in real-time data attract employees, partners, and investors who want to be part of a bank oriented towards the future. But even if you know you need more accurate closing data, it can be difficult to know where to look.
To help finance departments easily and automatically upgrade their end-of-month closing process and shift to a more strategic way of looking at their data, SAP Fioneer built and launched Financial Control, a user-friendly solution tailored specifically to financial institutions (unlike BlackLine and similar solutions).
With Financial Control, CFOs and financial controllers can eliminate manual errors, adapt to market dynamics, substantiate and reconcile their data, and keep closing intelligence sorted in a single, secure platform. Plus, Financial Control directly interacts in real-time with a central S/4HANA integration.
There’s no data transfer, no lengthy manual reporting, and minimal stress at the end of the month. Advanced analytics and workflows help you easily move and monitor data, build more accurate reports, and simplify the month-end closing ritual, and you’ll be using the 30% of the time you gain back to level up your long-term goals.
Spend days, not weeks, closing the books. Chat with us about Financial Control – the solution that helps you streamline closing.