Fintech, Cloud, and Finding Ways to Bridge the Skills Gap

How can companies take advantage of innovation in fintech if they do not have the skills in-house or tools to exploit the latest such resources? They might tap into third-party solutions providers such as Prophix or look to education providers such as Skillsoft to tighten up those gaps. There is a growing expectation among organizations to process and leverage their financial data and operations, which might require seeking out additional expertise or technology.

Scoular, for example, turned to third-party solutions to address its needs in this area. Andrew Kenny, CFO at Scoular, says his 130-year-old company is going through a growth phase that includes international growth and makes use of Prophix to address its need for a corporate performance management tool. “As we were entering a growth environment, and we needed people to be able to see the right level of information and insights for their business,” he says. “We needed a more efficient way than Excel spreadsheets to plan for our future.”

Scoular, which generated $6 billion in its last fiscal year, is a provider of agricultural supply chain solutions. Prophix is a provider of cloud-based solutions for budgeting and financial planning, workflow automation, and virtual financial analysis.

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Kenny says Scoular uses Prophix for analysis of its results, actuals, budgeting, and five-year, long-term financial planning. At the time Kenny joined Scoular, the company had about five financial planning and analysis leaders on a team, he says, organized across different divisions. As a new team to the organization with diverse skillsets, there were certain places in financial planning and analysis that still needed addressing, Kenny says. “We needed speed,” he says. “We needed something that we could get stood up fairly quickly.”

The talent needs of fintech are driving demand for professionals, either new hires or upskilled, with expertise in such areas as agile, security for cloud and data, and data skills, says Mike Hendrickson, vice president of tech and dev products with Skillsoft.

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