ISG to Publish Study Evaluating Finance and Accounting Digital Service Providers

Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm, has launched a research study examining providers of finance and accounting digital services.

The study results will be published in a comprehensive ISG Provider Lens™ report, called Finance and Accounting Digital Outsourcing Services, scheduled to be released in August. The report will cover a range of finance and accounting solutions that leverage automation and other digital technologies to make processes more efficient, increase productivity, improve data accuracy, reduce costs and enhance customer experience.

Enterprise buyers will be able to use information from the report to evaluate their current vendor relationships, potential new engagements and available offerings, while ISG advisors use the information to recommend providers to the firm’s buy-side clients.

The new report will look at ways finance and accounting digital services providers are automating many functions, said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “The nature of these functions not only requires an understanding of the domain, but also relies on effectively leveraging automation and analytics,” he said. “The automation journey is not limited to robotic process automation but goes a step further to enable decision-making and managing enterprise finances more efficiently. Service providers are offering artificial intelligence with natural language processing capabilities and machine learning.”

ISG has distributed surveys to more than 40 finance and accounting digital services providers. Working in collaboration with ISG’s global advisors, the research team will produce four quadrants representing the services the typical enterprise client is buying in the finance and accounting digital services space, based on ISG’s experience working with its clients. The four quadrants that will be covered are:

• Procure-to-Pay Services, assessing providers of services covering the complete range of accounts payable processes, from capturing, processing invoices, vendor queries, master data management and claims management to ensuring on-time payment. The nature of these transactions not only requires an understanding of the domain, but also relies on effectively leveraging automation and analytics. These providers use automation technologies including robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning.

• Order-to-Cash Services, covering services that are repetitive and transactional in nature. This quadrant will assess providers that provide end-to-end O2C services supporting the entire customer-to-cash lifecycle, driving more efficient processing, improving working capital performance and reducing days sales outstanding. O2C services also provide enterprises with more flexibility to price products and services competitively and gain a market advantage.

• Record-to-Report Services, assessing providers that provide end-to-end R2R services such as general ledger accounting and reconciliation, inter-company accounting, fixed assets accounting, regulatory compliance and taxation, treasury and risk management using a mix of automation, intelligent data and workflow solutions, and advanced business analytics. These are aimed at empowering CFOs to focus on the core business and leverage technology to get real-time insights for making decisions quickly and enabling their finance departments to function more effectively and wit