Global Fintech Interview with Jim Triandiflou, CEO at insightsoftware

Please tell us how you started with this company. What motivates you the most about it?

Living here in North Carolina, I was familiar with insightsoftware and had known the company’s Chairman of the Board, investors and initial CEO for years. As the company grew through acquisitions and organic growth, it quickly reached an inflection point as it was moving from a smaller company to one operating at scale around the world. I joined as CEO last October as this new phase of growing and expanding distribution and market share globally fits with my experience and passion.

For me personally, it’s also really exciting to come into a company that is already performing incredibly well and is on a strong growth trajectory that hasn’t relented despite the pandemic. The consistency and steadiness across all areas is a strong reflection of the need for the type of solutions that we’re offering and motivates me as we reinvent the set of software and tools for running a world-class financial operation.

How has your role changed through the pandemic months?

Obviously, there was no manual or playbook for how to run a business through a global pandemic – every individual, business and organization has had to be flexible and figure out what works for them. As the CEO, I’ve been focused on how to ensure the mental and physical health and safety of our team while continuing to capitalize on our market opportunities and meet our aggressive business goals.

In the beginning, the challenge was to transition everyone to working from home.  The rise of Zoom gave us all the ability to feel more connected than just doing conference calls.  But after a year of being on Zoom calls all day, the challenge has changed.  Now it’s more about giving employees a break from Zoom, and reminders to step away from your computer, take a real lunch break, and take vacations.  It’s easy to be tethered to your computer all day.  Stepping away and taking breaks helps us all be our best at work and at home.

As a tech company, we are very fortunate to have the technical and physical resources needed to continue to run our business rather seamlessly and keep our team safe. We also have a culture that supports the personal and emotional needs of our staff. This has been critical so our team can stay focused on delivering for our customers and growing the business, especially since many of our solutions were used by our customers to forecast and plan for different scenarios during the pandemic.

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What is the idea behind integrating Logi Analytics with insightsoftware?

We offer financial professionals the software tools they need to maintain rigor and security for critical financial tasks. Whether it is budgeting, planning and forecasting to transfer pricing, taxes or equity management, we are reinventing the speed and simplicity in which finance teams get their work done using more integrated, automated and intelligent software.

While businesses need to collect, analyze and report on financial data, they have the same need for operational data. In fact, the two are complementary and feed each other: financial data is based on operations, and financial analysis guides future operations. With more than 25,000 customers around the world and seeing how they run their businesses, we recognized an emerging and strategic opportunity to combine financial and operational reporting.

Our acquisition of Logi Analytics is the first step in our vision to help customers derive insights from financial and operation data to drive faster, more informed decisions.

How will finance teams benefit from your merger?

As executive teams look to real-time data and analytics to drive informed financial and operational decisions, this acquisition will enable our customers to report on every area of their business.  Operational data from sales, marketing, customer support, production, and every area of the business feeds the financial results.  Customers want data and reporting on their entire business!  With Logi as part of insightsoftware, we will give our customers that capability.

What is the future of embedded analytics?

We believe the first step is recognizing that the future of BI and analytics is embedded. Historically, extracting these operational insights required users to export data and switch to a separate BI or analytics tool, which is time-consuming and often requires users with special knowledge. If they wanted to avoid that and embed something, businesses had to get IT or internal developers to create custom code for their applications.

As the leader in embedded analytics, Logi Analytics eliminates these issues. We can now embed customized analytics seamlessly into any commercial or enterprise application featuring customer-branded user interfaces, reports, dashboards, and KPIs. So whether on the manufacturing floor, a hospital bedside or in the Office of the CFO, our view is that analytics will be embedded in any application being used anywhere.

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Which set of markets are you targeting in the coming months?

First of all, we operate globally.  We have customers in over 100 countries and offices around the world.  Look for us to leverage the Logi Analytics acquisition to capitalize on the operational reporting market globally. Near term, that includes using their technology for a new operational reporting solution we will deliver early next year. In addition, we see embedded analytics as an exciting way to expand our potential market by focusing on commercial software organizations and selling into corporate application development teams so they can embed analytics into their own applications and workflows.

Tell us more about your AI/ML capabilities?

Our customers utilize machine learning in varied forms to solve a wide array of business problems. To support their needs, we build product integrations that consume the data output of various machine learning platforms to deliver supporting analytics tied to their financial data. Our analytics and planning solutions can integrate our customers’ model data with their financial, or planning, data to generate better, more comprehensive results.

Your predictions on the role of fintech in growing economies?

Based on what we’ve seen working with customers around the world – especially in the crucible of the pandemic and needing to react quickly to dynamic market conditions – we think some of the key trends for finance organizations will be more automation, a shift to continuous planning, and the merging of operational and financial reporting.

The automation piece is pretty straightforward – too many finance teams today still cobble together data from various sources, put it into Excel and then analyze and report on it. This is time-consuming, opens the process to errors and results in them analyzing and reporting on old, static data. Excel also opens companies up to huge data security risks. Using better financial technology, the Office of the CFO can integrate their various data sources into reporting and analysis tools for a secure, real-time view of the business.

This ability to view and analyze data in real time finally opens up finance teams to be strategic in the moment in a process we call continuous planning. No longer are books closed on a monthly or quarterly basis and future plans based on that – it can now all be done on a day-to-day basis. Finally, the integration of both operational and financial data, reporting and analysis will give finance teams and other executives the full view of how a business is doing and what changes, investments or other decisions need to be made to accelerate growth.

As more individual companies begin to operate that way, you can quickly see the force multiplier impact it has on the broader economy.

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