Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems (Part 1)

The audit function at enterprises is ripe for automation. Read on to learn what’s happening.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning by introducing yourself as well as Oversight Systems.

Terrence McCrossan: I’m the CEO of Oversight Systems. Oversight is an Atlanta, Georgia-based company that is a leader in AI-based process automation and transaction analysis.

In particular, Oversight helps organizations to mitigate and manage risks across their corporate spend programs. For most organizations, this means providing an audit lens into their procurement spend and payable spend.

We use technology to better analyze the patterns, the trends, wastes, and risks within that to identify better ways of driving either compliance or behavioral change that results in more responsible spend.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Let’s double-click down a little bit on this and let’s do some use cases. What I would like you to walk us through is, pick three of your live customers and talk about actionable insights you were able to extract and implement in those customers that really made an impact using your technology.

Terrence McCrossan: In general, our customers are usually looking to solve one of three problems. The first is to address the cost of doing audit within the organization. Audit, for most financial teams, tends to be a people-intensive and manual process. It’s very costly from a controls perspective.

I’ll give you a good example of a use case there from a real-life customer. We have one customer that’s a large multinational that has 60 people dedicated to doing sample audits of their travel and expense reports. That’s a large use of human capital. The interesting part is that with those 60 people, they were only analyzing 5% of their expense reports.

With our technology, they were able to analyze 100% of transactions using just 10 people. We’re able to significantly impact the cost of actually performing that audit and make a hard material savings. That’s one example. The second use case is just driving the overall effectiveness of audit.

Typically, teams are doing audit reviews using eyeballs. It becomes very hard to assess impact, and more importantly, to assess patterns of risk over periods of time. Leveraging Oversight, we’ve had a number of organizations report up to 70% improvement in their audit outcomes in terms of identifying risk, fraud, or misuse within their organization. It’s a great example of one of the very tangible benefits we provide.

A third use case is just expanding the completeness of their audit. Based on the source systems or the variety of technologies that are deployed in the financial ecosystem, it becomes very difficult to extract data out of each system and to audit it in a comprehensive way.

What Oversight does is blur the lines of those silos. We can act as a system of record. We extract data from multiple source systems and paint a complete picture of risk across a lot of different spend categories.

It might be their procurement platforms. It might be their ERP’s that ordinarily have a component of risk aligned to them. We’re able to extract that risk view and provide a complete view for the organization at a higher level.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems
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