Less than a quarter of companies claim to be fully data-driven

Amsterdam - Only nine percent of finance professionals currently report financial data in real-time within their organisation. This is a step down then last year when the number 14 per cent indicated this. So says the FinTech Barometer, a survey of the financial status at Dutch companies conducted by Onguard over the past six years. This year, over three hundred CFOs, financial managers and finance staff were surveyed. Eleven per cent even have to work with data more than a week old while making reports.

Challenges real-time reporting

The biggest challenge to switching to real-time reporting is that the organisational structure has to be adjusted for this, the survey shows. This is currently the case for 26 per cent of organisations. This was also the main stumbling block in previous years. In 2022, for instance, a similar percentage (23%) indicated this. In 2020, however, moving to real-time reporting was more challenging. Then, more than one in three finance professionals (36%) stated that systems needed to be updated for real-time reporting.

Number of data-driven organisations decreasing

The percentage indicating they are currently a data-driven organisation has not increased since 2020. Back then, number 24 per cent indicated this. In 2021, this rose slightly to 26 per cent, but now only 22 per cent can say they are fully data-driven. The companies that feel they are not yet using their data optimally is only increasing. Whereas this was 23 per cent in 2021, it is now 30 per cent of companies.

So the trend seems to be moving in the wrong direction, but fortunately this does not mean that the benefits of data-driven working are not seen. In particular, companies hope it will increase the efficiency of business processes (24 per cent). Interestingly, companies in 2019 and 2020 had a different ambition with data-driven working. In both years, 41 per cent indicated that they mainly wanted to work data-driven, because it allowed them to respond to market developments.

Adriaan Kom, Managing Director at Onguard: "Business is increasingly about collecting, organising, analysing and applying internal and external business data. After all, based on this, informed operational and strategic choices can be made. So it is striking to see that fewer companies seem to be succeeding in being data-driven and working with real-time data. Perhaps we are also setting the bar higher and higher for ourselves with, for instance, the emergence of Chat GPT-4 with all its new applications, and in the past it was easier to say you were data-driven. I do hope that companies continue to see what data-driven working can bring them. Not only is it more efficient and allows them to respond to market developments as companies themselves point out, it also helps them to weigh up every decision carefully and monitor its effects to make an impact."