Businesses managing their money and making sound financial decisions at every juncture has never been easier. With a vast pile of information — like spreadsheets, invoices and deeds — to process, enterprise financial management is a priority toward which companies are rightfully investing increasing amounts of effort.

Nevertheless, the ongoing pandemic has made that task even more difficult for companies worldwide, according to Scott Layton (pictured), senior partner and vice president of global finance transformation at IBM.

“COVID has put a tremendous amount of pressure on businesses, and CFOs in particular, especially when it comes to managing cash, managing logistics. Supply chain has been pushed pretty hard to its limits,” Layton said. “I think cash has always been king, but even more so now in their preservation of cash.”

Layton spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent IBM Think event. They discussed the effects of the pandemic on companies’ finances as they prioritize stringent cash-management policies. (* Disclosure below.)

Digitization leading the way

Modern business has always relied on solutions and tools to scale, expand and provide added value to customers. Today, the enterprise is seeing an increase in the implementation and direction of those tools toward reducing inefficiencies and costs — as well as managing cashflows. Digitization in financial management is the future, according to Layton, and companies have been forced by the pandemic to embrace it rapidly.

“No CFO will tell you that they love manual processes and they want stuff on paper. But there was always this ability to defer the decision and punt it a bit,” he said. “And what’s happened with the pandemic and changing the ways of working, it’s forced that decision to happen. Again, I don’t think it’s created a decision that wouldn’t have happened eventually, but it’s certainly accelerated it and caused them to take to it quicker.”

Layton also spoke about companies leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and enterprise resource planning around their existing stack in a bid to rethink how they work and be more efficient.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE