5 CFOTech Trends Every Investor & Entrepreneur Should Know About In 2022

We identified a number of relevant trends in the CFOTech market.

The main drivers for these trends are:

• AI technology is maturing and is in a completely different state than a couple of years ago.
• Enterprise Software features are quickly becoming available for Mid-market and even SMB, this is driven by new business models based on self service implementations and online sales.

Here are 5 CFOTech trends every Investor & Entrepreneur should know about in 2022

1. Blockchain solutions for the office of the CFO : Blockchain creates an honest ledger recording every detail in a way that is transparent, trusted, and unchangeable. CFO’s are specialists on Ledgers, but what kind of CFOTech applications do we expect to use Blockchain? Probably the supply chain systems are the best candidate, tracking every single element in the supply chain down to the source materials, has a lot of value for the whole supply chain and even consumers.

2. Verticalization : CFOTech solutions, specifically FP&A and close software companies, have been operating horizontally in the market. The new generation of CFOTech tools are more and more specializing on specific verticals. For example, Born Capital portfolio company Synder adds a lot of value to their accounting platform by specializing in E-Commerce. The similar accounting activities and data sources for this vertical allow them to quickly integrate and robotize most of the activities.

The verticalization of software providers targeting mid-market companies/customers is very interesting. We’ve traditionally seen that level of focus / targeted goto-market and development at the enterprise level but not at the mid-market level. It points to increasing sophistication and requirements of mid-market companies — much of it driven by adoption of cloud based technologies. Verticalization / focus on a specific segment of the market also has the benefits that these add-on tools are better able to seamlessly integrate, provide better value to customers, achieve greater market share, have less churn and ultimately have higher growth numbers and be more profitable.

3. NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI to bridge quantitative and qualitative data. In financial reporting there is a blend of metrics and narratives, both are very relevant to understand the full picture. The challenge is that there are a lot of metrics and narratives that are hard to quickly analyze. AI and specifically NLP is getting mature enough to embed this in financial analytics solutions. A front runner of this is our portfolio company Bedrock.AI. They scan 300 page SEC reports within 30 seconds and list all potential red flags that an analyst should take a look at.

4. ESG Reporting solutions : ESG reporting has been a trend for years, but now it is getting more relevant than ever. More and more investors have an impact strategy and there are whole ecosystems around sustainability. This non-financial reporting is typically still the responsibility of the CFO and we expect to see more and more tech solutions focusing on this type of reporting.

5. Collaborative solutions to support remote teams : COVID will likely have a permanent impact on how teams work together. Teams are working from different locations and in different time zones. CFOTech solutions will need to adapt to these new technologies and in some cases rethink their product strategies. Workflow functionality allowing teams to collaborate (either embedded or supported through API’s) will become a new standard in many CFOTech solutions.

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Originally published at https://borncapital.vc on January 26, 2022.