Tag: company

How Your Company Can Harness FinTech

On July 2, 2021

Covid-19 may have slowed down business, but Fintech has achieved double-digit growth in volumes and transaction numbers in the same period. In addition, many companies required employees to work remotely during the pandemic and needed to develop new working methods.

The fintech industry became the choice for businesses that needed to implement digital tools for working at home. Companies found out that Fintech has more uses beyond sorting disruption of traditional business practices. Some teams in accounting and finance found fintech tools can streamline operations, improve productivity and cut costs in these ways.

Simplifying complex processes

Corporations became less productive during the pandemic. Spend reconciliation was one way that finance teams could create efficiencies, but innovation in the area has been slow, and it consumes a lot of labor-intensive time.

Fintech reduces that challenge with tools to automate most of the processes such as:

Three-way matching to approve incoming supplier invoices
Complex and fragmented area travel and expense spend

Fintech tools can automatically link expenditures to individual employees and functions. As a result, they simplify and hasten budget allocations that are ordinarily time-consuming.

A company can harness fintech to provide greater visibility into:

Employee spending
Delivering control
Flagging out of policy expenditures real time
Automated analytics

Another upside is the chat AI that interprets customer questions. Requests increase efficiency by automating financial tasks that involve answering questions about expense processing and invoice payment.

Solution to Fraud

An ACFE survey found that organizations lose 5% of annual revenue to fraud, and detection can take 14 months. A third of all fraud cases occur because organizations lack internal controls.

The pandemic created a perfect environment for fraud as it thrives during recessions and economic instability. Fintech AI and machine learning algorithms in its software control fraud mastering standard patterns of company finance and flag anything unusual or new. The team in charge will notice and review. A/ML has a higher level of sophistication to root out fraud than the rule-based approach. The tools can search and compare data to sense questionable correlations or other irregularities.

The payoff for shifting to newer processes is transformation. Finance practices in an organization will gain the same benefits that the financial sector has gained by adopting Fintech tools. It only requires collaborating with a reliable Fintech provider.

FinTech 101: What is a Green Bank?

By Jacob Parker-Bowles

On February 8, 2021

In FinTech, Jacob Parker-Bowles

What Is a Green Bank?

You may have heard the term “Green Bank” and wondered what it meant. This short article will explain the term and concept behind it.

Green Banks in a Nutshell
A green bank is a bank that exists for the sole purpose of battling earth climate change by funding projects that may be able to decrease the global carbon emissions and increase the use of alternative and renewable fuels and energy. They tend to support infrastructure spending in wind, solar, and other renewable energy space.

Green Banks: Functional Model
Green banks are not climate charities. Their funding is expected to be paid back with a profit for the bank. Currently, they are supported by some states in the U.S. and also by private funding. Green Banks utilize philanthropic and public funds. They generally fund energy projects that beyond the research stage and “good to go”. The Coalition for Green Capital (CGC) is a nonprofit agency that is deeply involved in advocating for green banks’ continued development.

Where Did the Idea for Green Banks Originate?
The idea for green banks started in 2008 when two entrepreneurial-minded, Ken Berlin and Reed Hundt, came up with the concept as part of the Obama transition team’s plans for promoting cleaner energy changes in US society. A proposal to enact federally supported green banks was attached to the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The concept never made it as legislation at the federal level. Green bank supporters were not daunted. Consequently, green bank advocates persuaded some states to take up the cause.

Green Banks: Some Statics
Currently, there are at least ten states that have at least one green bank. In addition, they are in the early stages of catching on globally as well. They also exist in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Malaysia. Within the U.S., green banks have already been involved in the funneling of some $3 billion in funds for clean-energy projects.

Green Banks: Their Future Development
With the advent of the Biden presidency, green banks may again find a firmer footing at the federal level. Indeed, in December 2020, Mr. Biden proposed the idea of a national green bank. They appear sure to gain more traction internationally as the desire to dampen climate change takes hold.

The Skill-Learning Bias

By Jacob Parker-Bowles

On January 26, 2018

In Jacob Parker-Bowles

Our brains are complex and require significant effort to rewire. After all, our brains manage dozens of detailed operations throughout our body at any given time, so it tries to take shortcuts where it can. As a result, learning new skills — whether it be a foreign language or coding — becomes more difficult each day. Don’t believe me? Watch this video, where the man before SmarterEveryDay tries to learn a backward bicycle for months, and his son crushes it in a few minutes.

Why is it so difficult to learn new skills?

As said in the video, knowledge is not the same as understanding. We may read a book that gives us information, but that doesn’t mean we know what that information means. This is because of biases in our brain. Think of it like predictive text; the software uses your normal sentence patterns to predict what you will type next. This is nearly the same process our brain takes multiple times every day. By predicting our surroundings, what we read, what we hear, and what we will do, our brain makes it incredibly difficult to deviate from the pattern.

When is the best time to learn skills?

As a result, the older we get, the more difficult it becomes for us to learn new skills. It makes sense, as we have more experience detecting patterns each day. There is a scientific term to describe how structured your brain is: neuroplasticity. As children, we have more neuroplasticity, because our brains are able to take in and interpret more information without biases. As we learn, we create biases naturally. This is actually the basis for many psychological phenomena. Therefore, the best time to learn skills is as soon as you are able.

How should you learn a new skill?

The way you should learn a new skill may technically vary depending on the skill, but the best way is to practice regularly. Practicing for even 5 minutes every day is better than practicing for an hour every week. The skill needs to stay fresh in your mind and become a habit in order to stick. This is why many people lose the ability to speak a foreign language after they leave school, and why it is possible to forget how to do just about anything.

What are some skills you should learn?

Now that you understand why it is so difficult to learn a skill, you may be wondering which skills to learn. This will, for the most part, depend on your field and your interests. For example, a web design freelancer may also want to learn about ethical hacking. If there is nothing of interest in your field, you could always try learning a difficult foreign language (such as Arabic or Mandarin), improve your writing skills, or public speaking. No company will criticise you for practicing one of these.

Whether you are a manager or a low-level employee, you should keep this information in the back of your mind. Every year, our ability to learn decreases at a constant rate, and that can make training and retraining more difficult. However, it is also important to remember that while learning new skills is challenging, it is ultimately not impossible.