Professor Alnoor Bhimani delivered an address at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore on 1 March 2023. The theme of his talk was ‘How digitalisation is powering finance’. He discussed broad demographic and work culture changes taking place in India noting the recent high growth of the Indian economy. He explained how this is reflective of a wider global Southward shift in economic value generation in effect presently.
Professor Bhimani highlighted the range of digital technologies including blockchain structures, IoT systems, robotic automation, and the rise of metaverse concerns which are influencing the work of finance professionals. He pointed to examples in India where heavy investments into outsourced accountancy services three decades ago are now giving way to new models of service provision resting on much more sophisticated digitalisation mechanisms. Professor Bhimani warned of the need to develop wider expertise outside the domain of traditional finance fundamentals to ensure finance input aligns with the changing decision-making mix between humans and machines and also with the rise of regulations impacting data access, usage and privacy. Executive intelligence will demand more of finance professionals in ways never seen before and finance executives will need to evolve.
Professor Bhimani provided illustrations of how the reliance on forecasting and extrapolations from past economic transactions that is today part of finance training is becoming less applicable in the face of far more sophisticated prescriptive analytics applications that are reshaping organisational decision making. He pointed also to defunct and emerging managerial issues that finance workers will need to grasp so their insights can continue to feed into enterprises that ride extensively on digitalised processes in pursuit of altered strategic outcomes.