#57 - David Griffiths, CEO of Fiscal Technologies - On using AI to strengthen financial operations and reduce risk

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the Procure-to-Pay space. My guest is David Griffiths, CEO of FISCAL Technologies, a leading provider of forensic solutions that empower procure-to-pay (P2P) teams across the globe to protect organizational spend.

David has 20 years’ experience in growing technology organizations and has spent the last 15 years working with hundreds of Accounts Payable teams to help protect their corporate spend by preventing fraud and reducing risk. Prior to becoming the CEO of Fiscal Technologies, David was Head of Marketing for Bottomline Technologies and Commercial Director for European Internet Technologies, a supplier of e-business solutions. David holds an MBA and an Honours Degree in Business & Accounting.

What triggered me to invite David to my podcast was his vision to enable the finance function to prevent high-risk transactions from creating reputational damage and become more proactive at the same time in optimizing performance.

We explore the fact that we are living in a world where Risk & Fraud are increasing rather than reducing. We discuss why current solutions on the market appear to be so inadequate. How that results in reputational damage, leakage of working capital and underperforming financial performance. And finally, how technology such as AI can be used to deliver remarkable impact.

Here are some of his quotes:

The whole Procure-to-Pay space is dominated by hundreds of different technology vendors and really sit in two core areas.

Firstly, around procurement and automating the whole procurement process and driving purchase order compliance and POs and three-way matching, and then the other side is about managing invoices and paying those invoices. There's a lot of technologies around automation.

The more feedback we received, and the more research we did, we realized there was nothing to oversee all these different technologies to look at fraud and risk.

We found that three-way matching doesn’t work.

It hasn't evolved over the last 40 years.

So our big idea was to provide oversight to this process, as a lot of organizations now are really exposed to unprecedented levels of risk and fraud.

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. As the velocity of our world increases and our options to get work done enriches as technology evolves, we are creating a new foundation for fraud and risk to grow exponentially. 2. That the value of AI is not only to give insights to identify fraud and risk but possibly more important to also reveal totally new patterns that allow us to prevent these challenges altogether. 3. That a lot of value is destroyed due to inertia in the market – the self-believe that ‘everything is under control’ – and that’s not only in the Procure-to-Pay scene. It’s universal.