Digital Finance Transformation in the age of x+AI

The 00001 CFO

Digital Finance Transformation
in the age of x+AI

The age of AI is here. Massive investment is flowing in to the further development of AI which continues to get better and cheaper. What does this mean for the future of Finance & Accounting?

Book has released across Amazon, Kindle and Bookstores

Foreword by Professor Ajay Agrawal

Author of “Prediction Machines” & “Power and Prediction”

"We are a long way from zero time to insights, zero time to close, zero touch processing, zero exceptions, and a singular holistic experience. In other words, we're far from full automation… even the idea of handing over the complete end-to-end process of many finance and accounting functions to AIs without a human in the loop is preposterous. Yet that is precisely where we are headed. And Vivek, Vikram, and Lavi have laid out a treasure map on how, where, when, and why to go there."

"I don’t think the team that will be the first to crack the code for zero time to insights, zero time to close, zero touch processing, zero exceptions, and a singular holistic experience will be a technology team. While they may be experts in AI, they won’t have the domain expertise required to understand all the barriers to adoption lurking in the details. The team that cracks this will be domain experts who deeply understand business processes."

"Navigational AIs are awfully close to zero time to insights, zero time to reroute, zero touch processing, zero exceptions, and a singular holistic experience. So, when the AIs described in this book arrive, which companies will be the Ubers of finance and accounting? And which will remain the taxi companies clinging to the regulators to preserve some market share, despite the preferences of their customers?"

"The people who find the central thesis of this book preposterous will largely be the same people who, today, are either scrambling to design and execute a strategy to harness generative AI for their organization because they didn’t believe language generation could be fully automated or who are calling on policy makers to rush to set up regulatory barriers to slow down the implementation of Large Language Models (LLMs)."

Introduction by Tiger TyAgarajan

CEO, Genpact

"Vivek, an exceptional leader, has spearheaded the remarkable growth of F&A at Genpact. Along with his two team members Vikram and Lavi, they have driven an unwavering commitment to innovation, thought leadership, and transformative programs, which has forged this path to success. Their relentless pursuit of process enhancements powered by digital technologies and analytics has resulted in several patented innovations.”

"The vision of the Future of Finance, which unfolds within these pages, has become increasingly prominent, particularly in the wake of the pandemic’s impact. Over the past three years, in my engagements with numerous CFOs, CEOs, and board of directors they have all emphasized challenges related to speed-to-insights, improved user experience, minimizing exceptions, increasing first-pass yield, creating bottom line impact, and fostering instinctiveness and agility within their organizations."

"At Genpact, we firmly believe in the power of augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence alone. It is the harmonious amalgamation of human ingenuity and AI capabilities that will drive future advancements. I am delighted that Vivek, Vikram, and Lavi have authored this book, which seamlessly integrates human potential with AI to envision a reimagined Future of Finance."

CHAPTERS

BUSINESS LEADER PERSPECTIVES

Gaby Deussen

Corporate Vice President Finance, Henkel AG & Co
on Zero Touch Processing

“It is very important to look at a process holistically when approaching it for automation with the aim of making it touchless. The ultimate recipe for it being a failure is automating isolated parts of the process, ignoring interfaces and the final target and main result KPIs.”

Molly Strader Fruit

Senior Vice President and Corporate Controller, ADM
on Zero Exceptions

“The more the contextualisation of the business, the lesser will the exceptions. To drive this understanding and facilitate the team members in becoming good business partners, fostering education around technical accounting and accounting standards is also very important.”

Manmohan Mahajan

Global Controller and Chief Accounting Officer, Walgreens Boots Alliance
on Zero Time to Close

“Integrated system architecture ensures that the finance team has complete visibility into the organisational data flow that is required for accounting as well as for estimation”

Celso Marciniuk

Regional Asia and Pacific CFO, The Heineken Company
on Zero Time to Insights

“Data must be able to flow seamlessly without touch across the organisation for conversion into insights based on defined performance metrics.”

Girish Mehra

Managing Director – Group Finance, Credit Suisse
on One Holistic Experience

“Each pocket of transformation, large or small, entails the power to impact experience. All transformation business case like ERP upgrade, SaaS implementation, operating model design etc. are evaluated not just on the monetary business case, but also on their impact on user/customer experience.”

Maya Ramachandran

Partner & Global Solution Leader, EY
on Risk Management & Controls by Design

“Routine audit procedures should be continuous and automated with auditors attending to exceptions only. Audit tools need to incorporate AI/ML based procedures for a lot of the standard controls that cover the entire population in real-time rather than specific samples tested after a quarter or once in a year.”

Caroline Basyn

Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer- Europe, PepsiCo
on 00001 Operating Model

“A Global Process Manager/ Owner role should surpass functional siloes, be digital-first and match the business lifecycle from beginning to end.”

Gianni Giacomelli

Head of Design Innovation, MIT CCI Lab and Co- Founder Supermind Design
on One Holistic Experience

“The competencies in finance are changing towards being trilingual – a team with an understanding of finance, the financial process, digital, coding language, data, and where data is sourced from.”

David Chalmers

Chief Financial Officer, Insignia Financial Limited
on CFO Verse

“Any technology that makes immersive exchange possible, almost like being there in person, would find business adoption in due course. However, currently, we are at a stage where the technology is still maturing, and it is not yet on the immediate horizon for most businesses.”

Jeff Seabright

Ex-Chief Sustainability Officer, Unilever & Coca-Cola
on Green Accountant

“CFO can be the most essential champion for the ESG journey of the organisation. He/She also becomes a critical champion to operationalise the ESG strategy and integrate it with the overall business strategy for long-term value creation, while embracing new metrics, ways of working, and people skills.”

Praise for the Book

"The digital transformation of Financial Planning & Analysis is long due for organizations. The possibility of decision making on real time will bring tremendous agility for companies and will lay the foundations for the expansion of the CFO role from a controlling and operational function into a strategic and development role. The 00001 CFO book gives the readers a unique perspective on the potential of investing today on the tech capabilities for the FP&A function to be at the leading front of the competitive environment"

Jean-Pierre Serani

CEO Bancolombia Investment Banking

AUTHORS

Vivek Saxena

Vivek Saxena is the Senior Vice President, Finance & Accounting (F&A) and Enterprise Risk & Compliance (ERC) Service Line leader at Genpact. Vivek has over 25 years experience working with Fortune 500 companies for designing and delivering multi-tower business transformation solutions, incorporating data, tech, and AI. In his role as F&A leader, Genpact’s biggest service line has grown revenue by ten times, Vivek’s engagements have created a billion-dollar impact for global clients and market analysts have consistently rated Genpact amongst the top two leaders in F&A space. He also works closely with C-Suite leadership to transform their risk operations with solutions like control digitization, SOX compliance, IT risk management, audit analytics, third-party risk management and ESG compliance.

Vivek has led the development of cutting-edge digital solutions at Genpact, for the office of CFO, leveraging technologies like micro-platforms, robotics automation, process mining and AI. His focus on innovation has resulted in multiple patents filed across F&A and risk management domains. He holds two patent grants in his name from USPTO for process maturity and intelligent automation models. At Oracle, Vivek was responsible for product management of planning and budgeting applications and accredited with development of key functionalities. Earlier in Finance and Accounting, he played various roles responsible for quarterly and annual close, planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

Vivek is a regular blogger and has presented his thought leadership views on the future of finance, process automation, impact of AI on F&A, continuous accounting, and On-Demand close. Vivek is a qualified Chartered Accountant from India, CPA & CISA from the USA and a Harvard Business School alumnus. He is an avid Golfer and has run marathons including international majors across the globe.

Lavi Sharma

Lavi Sharma is a Vice President in the F&A Service Line at Genpact. In her 12-plus years of experience in engaging with clients, she has been at the forefront of recognizing the priorities of the CFO office, addressing their needs in the evaluation of with around technology solutions and new regulatory compliances like Lease accounting. She has played a critical role in identifying new growth avenues and executing strategies through partnerships, rapid prototyping and co-innovation across the strategic priorities of bringing different components like digital, data, and controls together for business transformation.

Lavi is responsible for digital innovation and product development, and designing the future of the F&A function at Genpact impacting the CFO office of clients. She has led teams responsible for IP development and tools leveraging digital technologies like robotic automation, AI, natural language processing, Micro-platforms, and ERP.

Lavi has been a co-inventor of the various patents elaborated in the book and has two patents granted with five more filed with USPTO. She is a qualified Chartered Accountant and Company Secretary and an alumnus of the Senior leadership development program at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM)-Ahmedabad. Lavi likes to travel and explore new terrains off work.

Vikram Jha

Vikram Jha is a Vice President in the F&A Service Line at Genpact. He has two decades of diverse F&A experience ranging from being a Finance Controller to managing accounting services for clients to a management consultant at PwC and F&A subject matter expert at Genpact. Vikram has led large-scale business process transformation for Fortune 2000 clients across industries and geographies—designing solutions for transformation and value maximization.

He is an avid reader and a thought leader in the area of finance transformation powered by technologies of the future. He champions the approach of rapid prototyping with emerging technologies and helping companies maximize their return on investments. He has been a co-inventor of various patents elaborated in the book.

He is a qualified Chartered Accountant and an alumnus of the Senior leadership development program at Indian Institute of Management (IIM)-Ahmedabad. Vikram is passionate about the benefits of data driven decision making models, and uses them routinely outside work for managing his family investments.

The 00001 CFO