Moving from Delayed Data to Event-Level Visibility - with Alex Curran of Aptitude Software

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Alex Curran, Chief Executive Officer at Aptitude Software. Aptitude Software provides finance software focused on data management, accounting and automation. Alex joins Daniel Faggella, Emerge CEO and Head of Research to lay out why CFOs are running into operational limits rooted in fragmented systems, delayed data and heavy reconciliation workloads. She explains how event level capture, continuous checks and full lineage are becoming essential to finance teams expected to act in real time and influence outcomes across the business. Today's episode is sponsored by Aptitude Software. In this episode, we cover real time finance and event level data. To go deeper on this topic and learn how financial institutions are digitizing paper-based records to unlock usable data for AI and using alternative data like public web and social signals to enhance risk assessment, download our free pdf report, AI in Financial Services Executive Cheat Sheet, at emerj.com/fcs1.
That's emerj.com/fcs1 to download your copy. Now, the conversation with Alex.

**Daniel Faggella** (1:38)
Well, Alex, welcome to the show.

**Alex Curran** (1:39)
Thank you for having me.

**Daniel Faggella** (1:40)
Absolutely.
We're focusing on the world of finance, which is now vastly more adaptive and interested in artificial intelligence than they were even one year ago, never mind two or three years ago. So I want to open this up with maybe where you would put our attention, having so much focus here with your work. I want to ask, of the kind of financial data and reporting challenges that exist today, what do you see as sort of most top of mind for finance leaders in day-to-day operations? What are the hurdles that are holding people back right now while we're talking?

**Alex Curran** (2:10)
Yeah. Again, thank you for having me on today's podcast. I think as you rightly said, upfront, I think AI is definitely more top of mind for all organizations across lots of different sectors and regions, much more so than it has been, I would say, for many years. But yeah, to obviously answer your question, I would say that it's based on the discussions that we have with prospects, partners, and obviously our existing customers that we have across Aptitude Software. I would say the challenge isn't actually the data. I would say that the challenge is the expectations on finance, I would say, have fundamentally changed. We've definitely seen that shift become more acute over the last 12 to 18 months. I would say that 10 years ago, which I'm sure the audience will relate to, finance was, I would say, more kind of expected to report on the numbers and obviously making sure that the numbers are accurate. And obviously, that's still a pressure today.
But I would say today, finance, the pressures have changed. And what I mean by that is that finance now are absolutely expected to not just explain what's happened, but also to predict what's going to happen next and also then recommend what the business should do about it. And then what compounds that is that they're also expected to try and do that in real time. And I would say then the challenge becomes even harder because they're expected to do that while operating on the technology platforms that originally have been designed for monthly reporting cycles. So I'd say that that tension is what every CFO I speak to is living with right now. That role has dramatically evolved, but the challenge that they have is that the architecture hasn't kept up with that.

**Daniel Faggella** (3:59)
Yeah, so the picture you're painting is one, again, I'm sure is going to resonate with folks. It's like this used to be a periodic business intelligence like exercise. Here's a frozen version of the world that we do every X amount of time. And now it's more of we need to be adapting in real time and supporting decision making in real time, not just as a spreadsheet that maybe we hand to somebody and they can think about it. We need to know where we're drifting, where we're headed, where our risks are, and to be able to stick and move and be part of a nimble process, which is really not a decade old version of finance and sort of the enterprise ecosystem. But to your point, some of what they're standing on top of was built for that frozen lock-in on a monthly basis sort of world, right?

**Alex Curran** (4:38)
Absolutely. And I think, look, for years, organizations before those pressures that I've just described, right, could live with those limitations because literally finance was fundamentally retrospective. The job was, as you said, right, to close the books, explain the past, move on.