Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you look at Fortune 500 or Global 2000 customer base, what is the percentage of penetration of this kind of technology?

Terrence McCrossan: Gartner’s data is probably the best proxy for market penetration. They estimate that just 5% of large organizations are using automated analysis tools as part of their audit process. It’s a marketplace that has significant growth.

It’s already taking place, but certainly as we project three or five years into the future, the market sees this as a pretty significant growth opportunity for how organizations can improve scale and efficiency.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about boardrooms and the awareness of these issues. Compliance, audit, risk are all boardroom issues. Do you have a dashboard for board members and audit committees to review stuff like this?

Terrence McCrossan: We do. It’s increasingly becoming a boardroom conversation. That’s one of the more significant trends in the industry. As we look at surveys of CEOs, the data point is saying that 60% of CEOs have some sort of a management initiative in place to make their business more digital, leveraging things like AI and cloud.

For finance teams, many are finding that the lowest risk and highest return starting point is to automate their audit processes. Finance leaders are not typically the hubs of technology deployment and technology forethought.

Certainly the audit practice is one that lends itself to a very high probability of success outcomes leveraging technologies like Oversight. That has been a very close tie-in to what boards and CEOs are trying to drive in terms of transformation within the organization. The audit space has proven to be a good starting ground for many of these teams.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you sell to? Do you sell to the CFO or do you sell to the Chair of the audit committee?

Terrence McCrossan: Certainly, it’s the CFO or leaders within the finance organization. At times, it’s a compliance leader or an internal audit leader. Sometimes, larger organizations have particular executives who are in charge of payables and disbursements and who are responsible for keeping an eye on the proper use of corporate funds.

If it’s not the CFOs themselves, it’s a chief deputy to the CFO who has significant responsibility for driving effectiveness in the space.

Sramana Mitra: What is the penetration of your kind of technology or your technology in the tech industry? Are they all using technology to do their audit and compliance?

Terrence McCrossan: Not in spend analysis and compliance. Larger organizations are highly-automated around most of their key processes, but a lot of times, that is automation relative to workflow and automation relative to financial close.

What we see in most organizations that we walk into is that the actual audit process is still a significantly manual and lengthy operation. It’s one they can’t do in real-time.

The benefit of a technology like Oversight is not only speeding up the ability to do audit analysis but significantly expand the scope so it’s a more reliable and reasonable control process in terms of providing confidence to the CFO that they have proper inspection methods in place for analyzing the use cases for their corporate spend. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems
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