Rivet has a new tagline: Comply. Control. Communicate.
The new tagline reflects two key messages: That Compliance is just the start of a journey towards financial transformation of your business and that Rivet’s Crossfire Reporting Platform will support you on every stage of the journey.
Here at Rivet we like to think that every CFO or Controller can be a financial transformer – someone with both the strategic grasp and tactical grip to change the way an organization manages business performance. We see executing this financial transformation as a journey where the destination is active participation in a global financial ecosystem that benefits all participants.
In the USA, the journey begins with compliance. The SEC mandate for filing financial information in XBRL format can be viewed either as an unwelcome burden or an opportunity. It’s undoubtedly a burden, adding extra effort and cost to the filing process, but it’s also undoubtedly an opportunity to standardize financial reporting, improve transparency and benefit from an expanding universe of like-for-like performance data to compare against.
The ‘big idea’ behind the SEC’s mandating the use of taxonomy-based reporting was not that the journey would stop there – with compliance – but that having done the hard work, business filers will create a new financial ecosystem that they and other stakeholders can benefit from. An ecosystem based on standardized information formats and a new information communication channel.
By control we mean taking control of this new financial information format and communication channel by using it as the means to better analyze your financial performance both internally and against national, and eventually international, industry peer groups. For the first time you will have taxonomy-based financial reports that mean the same thing and can be reliably compared and contrasted with some confidence – not a just a bunch of spreadsheets. So it’s not only easier to compare and contrast against your own previous or projected period reporting but also against the reports filed by your competitors and peers. Control also means having the ability to streamline the financial reporting process utilizing XBRL-GL format and finally be able to unify various data sources under the same reporting framework. Finally, the control belongs to end users, not the IT group.
By communicate we mean making your business more transparent to all your stakeholders – whether they are regulators or investors, partners or customers. The opacity of the financial services sector and the banking industry in particular has precipitated the greatest financial crisis the world has seen in living memory. Transparency is no longer a game or a nice to have it’s something the global economy needs in order to survive, to enable businesses to start and grow, to keep people like you and me in work.
This comply, control, communicate journey won’t take place overnight. As the slide below shows, it involves lots of collaboration and thoughtful effort. And the destination may never be fully realized. But having set foot on it, you might as well put your best foot forward.
Journey Towards Financial Transformation
Tags: crossfire
