The Digital Finance Awards at the Pavillon Gabriel in Paris

The Digital Finance Awards were presented on March 3rd at the Pavillon Gabriel in Paris.

This ceremony was organized by Losam and Deloitte which brought together nearly 300 people, including more than 200 CFOs and affiliates of nearly 120 major groups.

Digital Finance Awards – Six prizes:

– Innovation

– Business Partner

– Valuation and Attractiveness of the Function

– Speed

– Shared service center of the Year

– Ambition

At the end of the evening, an additional prize was awarded which allowed those present to designate the “project of the year.”

Axway sponsored the Speed Award. I had the honor of presenting the prize to Hélène Doré of L’Oréal.

Why Axway?

1. Axway is at the heart of digital transformation.

Without giving a lecture on Axway and the importance of middleware, ecosystems urbanization and the rise of API on top of services for successful digital transformation…

Axway’s solutions provide global flow governance, integration and synchronization of applications and data for the world’s most demanding customers to:

– Reduce time, cost and complexity.

– Increase security, traceability, scalability and performance.

– Giving maximum agility over time.

For Axway, giving our customers the ability to change means enabling them to transform themselves every day.

2. Axway has been at the heart of financial information systems for a long time.

AI Suite is the accounting interpretation solution that generates more than five billion accounting entries every day.

3. The evaporation of finance applications to the Cloud.

Finance information system applications have a strong propensity to evaporate towards the Cloud. This creates major disruptions, as the system is scattered in small puzzle-like pieces between different clouds and the remains of the data centers that are now obsolete.

Just like evaporation, moving your GL to the cloud is not a simple migration. It’s a transformation. Based on AI Suite, we will propose in June a solution… Cloud for sure, designed to facilitate, accelerate and secure this transition, ensure traceability, allow time for testing and corrections and manage the synchronization of the new GL with existing back offices.

The Price of Speed

It was a very enriching experience for us.

First of all, the super-concerned jurors, interacting with each other and with the candidates in a spirit of curiosity and benevolence. Congratulations to them… Believe me, deciding between the seven candidates was not an easy task, as the relative speed of the different projects proposed was breathtaking.

Candidates

The candidates then: super-motivated, strong forces of determination, they accomplished wonders while ensuring the daily life. Denouncing no one, if you are looking for champions to carry out your transformation projects… I have names!

CONGRATULATIONS TO EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM

The quality of the projects, finally, they are characterized by the sometimes unknowingly implementation of agile sprint methods and the need to make concrete progress that can be delivered every day.

As the winner says: you have to eat the elephant, but one bite at a time.

We have seen two types of projects: on one hand, very fast and short projects such as achieving in three weeks to set up the monthly closing in three days and to Chinese standards or in a few weeks creating a group financial data warehouse, or digitize the reporting for 1,000 entities in six weeks.

On the other hand, projects over a year such as simultaneously deploying new reporting and cash management solutions or create from scratch a Shared Service Center for Finance, HR and IT,  change the GL, transform the accounting schemas and redo all the interfaces with the back-office, or finally, we arrive at the award-winning project: reformatting the allocation of variable costs on the scale of a world-renowned and world-class Group.