Optimizing Financial Processes

A broker told a 165-person company they were "too small" for self-funding. That broker made $72,000 annually keeping them fully-insured. The company switched anyway and saved $340,000 in Year 1. Here's what "too small" actually meant. Fully-insured premium: $1.44 million annually. Renewal at 8.9%. The CFO asked about self-funding. Broker's response: "Companies your size can't handle catastrophic claims. One $500K cancer case could sink you. Fully-insured is safer." What he didn't say: His $72K commission was the same either way. But self-funded meant actual work—managing claims data, vendor relationships, quarterly reviews. Fully-insured meant forwarding emails and collecting checks. They brought in a second advisor. Level-funded structure: $103,000 monthly fixed payment covering admin, stop-loss, and expected claims. Total: $1.236M annually. Year-end actual claims: $847,000. Surplus refund: $73,000. Effective cost: $1.163M vs. $1.57M renewal. Savings: $407,000. The real win? Visibility. They discovered 6 employees with chronic conditions weren't getting proper care management. Added health coaching and medication monitoring. Year 2 claims for those employees: down 34%. Better health outcomes, lower costs. Also found their PBM charging undisclosed $180-per-claim admin fees. Renegotiated them out. Another $94,000 saved annually. Two-year savings vs. staying fully-insured: $763,000. "Too small for self-funded" means "I don't want to do the work." Most 50-250 employee companies can self-fund successfully with proper structure and stop-loss coverage. The question isn't size. It's whether your advisor will actually work. You're not too small for transparency. You're not too small for control. You're not too small to deserve an advisor who earns their commission.

Nobody tells you film financing is actually  a stack of different deals. You imagine raising a budget means finding  one investor with a big check. I wish it worked that way. In reality, you rarely raise "the budget." You build a puzzle where every piece comes  from a different source, and every piece  has strings attached. Here are some of the most common ways films  get financed: 1. Presales A distributor pays upfront for release rights in  their territory. That contract can then be used as collateral  for a bank loan. 🟢 Pros: Money arrives early. 🔴 Cons: Those distribution rights are gone permanently. 2. Co-Productions Two or more producers from different countries  combine budgets, talent, and resources. Each partner can unlock funding opportunities  in their own territory. 🟢 Pros: Access to more financing. 🔴 Cons: Shared creative control and complex legal  structures. 3. Government Funds A public body invests directly through grants, soft loans,  or equity participation. 🟢 Pros: This is actual cash, not a tax mechanism. 🔴 Cons: Cultural requirements and, in some cases,  approval rights over elements of the project. 4. Tax Incentives Governments rebate a percentage of qualifying  production spend to attract projects. 🟢 Pros: Real money back. 🔴 Cons: It usually arrives after production,  not when cash flow is tight. 5. Gap Financing A lender advances money against territories that  haven't been sold yet. If presales cover 70% of the budget, a gap  lender may finance part of the remaining 30%. 🟢 Pros: Helps close the final financing gap. 🔴 Cons: It's usually the most expensive money in the  capital stack, often carrying interest rates of 8–15%. The key is to look at your project and ask:  Where does it fit? Sometimes it's the subject matter that makes it  eligible for a fund. Sometimes it's shooting in a location with strong  tax incentives. Sometimes it's finding the right co-production partner. Every film is a different puzzle. The job isn't finding one source of money. It's figuring out which pieces your project can  realistically unlock, and how they fit together. ♻️ Find this interesting? Repost for your network.   📌 Follow for more insights that spark big ideas.

Payments are undergoing their most significant transformation in decades. But the biggest impact may come from the part we talk about the least.   First, we need to look at the evolution:   1. The Legacy Era • Cross-border payments depended on correspondent banking • Investigations were slow, fragmented, and highly manual    2. Data Standardization • ISO 20022 introduced a common language for payment data • Richer payment context enabled automation and traceability   3. The Real-Time Revolution • Faster rails changed customer expectations • Payments became real time, but investigations did not   4. Intelligent Payments • The challenge now is making investigations move as fast as payments • Banks need to see what happened, where, and who needs to act 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻? For operations, servicing, transaction banking, SWIFT teams, and COO functions, the pressure is increasing. When payments fail, are delayed, or flagged for fraud, customers want immediate answers, while banks still have to check systems and contact other banks.   𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗮𝗽: payments can move in seconds, but answers can still take days. At the same time, payment volumes, new rails, and richer payment data are making investigations far more complex. 𝗛𝗼𝘄𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿, 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗻𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲, not the opportunity.   They are treating ISO 20022 mainly as a regulatory and technical migration milestone, focusing on system readiness, message formats, and deadline compliance.   All of that is necessary.   But the real opportunity is acting intelligently on richer data, faster than competitors. Investigation capabilities are becoming a strategic differentiator.   Banks that have realized this still face one problem:   Payment investigations span multiple banks, rails, currencies, and jurisdictions, meaning no institution has the full picture. Without a shared intelligence layer, banks investigate in isolation, duplicate effort, and miss network-level connections. This is where the industry is heading: toward shared investigation intelligence and network-level visibility across institutions and rails. And here is where specialist infrastructure comes in.    TracEI of EvonSys provides that layer, turning ISO 20022's richer data into faster, smarter investigations across the entire domestic and correspondent chain:   • It connects investigation data across banks, rails, currencies, and jurisdictions   • It helps teams see where the issue sits, who needs to act, and what information is missing   In November 2027, ISO 20022 reaches payment investigations. Banks will need to move beyond message readiness and build workflows that turn investigation data into faster case handling.   𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 is how a previously under-invested operational function is becoming one of banks’ biggest competitive edges.   Opinions and graphics: my own   Subscribe to my newsletter: https://lnkd.in/dkqhnxdg

The cross-border payments ecosystem is undergoing a transformation, and at the heart of this evolution lies ISO 20022—enabling seamless trade and innovation across borders. Here’s how it addresses the key pain points: 🔹 Structured Data for Enhanced Transparency: Rich, structured payment messages capture every detail—payment purpose, beneficiary information, and settlement data—minimizing errors, simplifying reconciliation, and fostering trust. 🔹 Faster Payments with Real-Time Processing: With real-time payment rails and ISO 20022’s standardized framework, settlement delays are shrinking. Businesses gain quicker access to funds, driving better cash flow and efficiency. 🔹 Strengthened Fraud Detection and Security: ISO 20022 data feeds advanced fraud detection systems, enabling real-time monitoring and immediate action on suspicious activities. Coupled with encryption, it ensures robust data security. 🔹 Smarter FX Management: Integrating real-time FX rates into payment workflows allows businesses to secure favorable rates and manage currency costs effectively, bringing predictability to cross-border transactions. 🔹 Data-Driven Insights for Strategic Decisions: The richness of ISO 20022 data enables financial institutions to offer powerful analytics and reporting tools, empowering businesses to spot trends, refine payment strategies, and gain a competitive edge. The key to unlocking ISO 20022’s full potential lies in collaboration—between financial institutions, fintech innovators, and regulators. Together, we can redefine the future of cross-border payments. 💡 How is your organization preparing for ISO 20022? Are there specific challenges or opportunities you're navigating on this journey? Image:https://lnkd.in/grAHxuHi? Nth Exception #payments #trade #iso20022 #innovation #banking #financialservices

The 3.5-Day Workweek Isn't Science Fiction It's Already Being Built Jamie Dimon just made it official JPMorgan's CEO predicts the developed world shifts to 3.5-day workweeks within 10-20 years. But here's what most people miss → This isn't about working less. It's about AI executing work differently. The math is already visible: ↳ JPMorgan deployed 2,000 AI engineers + 150,000 staff on LLMs weekly ↳ $2B annual AI investment = $2B in cost savings (Dimon: "tip of the iceberg") ↳ McKinsey & Company data: Generative AI could automate 30% of U.S. work hours by 2030 ↳ Microsoft Japan saw 40% productivity gains in their 4-day trial ↳ 93% of leaders at high-AI companies are open to a 4-day workweek (vs <50% elsewhere) Why this actually happens (not hype): → Autonomous agents now chain reasoning across multi-step processes → Legacy systems finally getting APIs + orchestration layers built → Fortune 500 already running hybrid teams (humans + AI workers) → 92% of enterprises expect agentic AI ROI within 2 years Insurance is the canary in the coal mine. Insurance workflows are perfectly built for autonomous agents: ↳ Claim adjudication (rule-based, high-volume, repetitive) ↳ Underwriting decision trees (documented logic, clear criteria) ↳ Policy administration (deterministic processes, audit trails required) Companies like SimplAI are already deploying agentic systems into insurance workflows. The result? Claims processed in hours instead of days. Underwriting capacity without headcount increases. Desk time per claim drops 60-70%. This means insurance staffing models compress dramatically. Not elimination—repositioning. Your claims team moves from processing to exception handling + relationship management. The catch: This only works if you're "agent-ready"—and most orgs aren't. Yet. The productivity gap is K-shaped Large enterprises gaining 72% ROI on AI. SMBs? Only 55%. That gap widens every quarter. But insurance? Different math. Even mid-market carriers can deploy SimplAI-style agents because the ROI math is so clear + regulatory requirements create urgency. Who moves first wins. The carriers redesigning workflows around autonomous agents (not bolting AI onto existing processes) will capture the 3.5-day advantage + cut FTE bloat. Everyone else compresses 5 days of work into 5 days. The question isn't if this happens in insurance. It's when your team starts building for it. Want to check your AI readiness, hit me up (email in comments)

There are two non-negotiables in accounting: the books must be correct, and they must be ready on time. For decades, companies have satisfied those constraints through an extraordinary amount of manual effort. Highly trained professionals code transactions, re-approve familiar expenses, reconcile mismatches after the fact, and compress all of it into the ritual of month-end close. It works. But it is fundamentally retrospective. Today, Ramp introduced an Accounting Agent designed around a different premise: what if bookkeeping happened as the business operated, rather than after it? The agent captures, codes, reviews, validates, accrues, and reconciles spend continuously. It learns directly from the people who understand the nuances best, the accounting team itself, and applies that context in real time. At Perplexity, where velocity is core to the company’s identity, this allowed their team to stop choosing between speed and accuracy. The majority of transactions are now coded automatically and audit-ready, enabling close to start on day one instead of day thirty. What’s been most striking is how the system learns the subtle, company-specific logic that historically lived only in human judgment. As Jim Romano, CFO at Stateside Brands, described it, the agent is already identifying patterns like when spend belongs in samples rather than travel and entertainment — the kinds of decisions that typically require institutional memory. As he put it, the goal is simple: finance teams should focus on exceptions, not the easy stuff. We’re also seeing the second-order effects emerge quickly. Teams report spending dramatically less time reviewing transactions and substantially more time on planning, analysis, and growth. As one CFO told us, “What used to take hours of manual review now happens. I’m spending nearly all of my time thinking about where the business should go, not retracing where it’s already been.” There is a broader shift underway in accounting. The central question is moving from “what parts of close can be automated?” to “should close even be an event at all?” One belief that guides our work at Ramp is that information latency inside companies is an invisible tax. When financial truth lags behind operational reality, organizations make slower and often worse decisions. As transaction data becomes inherently digital and systems become capable of learning institutional context, continuous close stops being aspirational and starts becoming inevitable. One thing that surprised us while building this: accounting isn’t constrained by a lack of rules — it’s constrained by how many of those rules are unwritten. Seeing software begin to absorb and apply that tacit knowledge has been a clear signal that accounting is entering a new phase. Accounting has always been the record for business reality. Our goal is to help it become closer to real-time truth. Proud of the team, and grateful to the customers building this alongside us.

I became an auditor to discover financial truth. An audit is a mirror to a company's reality. I learned this early in my career. Transactions are not just debits and credits. They are about people and their choices. Audits surface what culture tries to hide. Late reconciliations, rushed reviews, brittle controls. Behind each symptom is a habit. If we treat an audit like a fight, we lose the lesson. If we treat it like an opportunity, the company grows. Here are my 7 tips to help you prepare for an audit: 1. Close cadence: ➞ Every task has an owner, a deadline, and reviewer. ➞ Have a clear plan so the audit starts on time. 2. Reconciliations: ➞ Bank, ledgers, intercompany, inventory, payroll.  ➞ Verify, explain, clear or escalate. 3. Evidence on first click: ➞ Policies, contracts, approvals, and calculations. ➞ Saved with transactions for easy access. 4. Cutoff discipline: ➞ Shipments, revenue, accruals, and provisions ➞ Completed promptly with clear timestamps. 5. Segregation of duties: ➞ Nobody does everything. ➞ Share tasks to lower collusion or fraud risks. 6. Open door policy: ➞ Staff can flag pressure or errors without fear. ➞ Encourage proactive disclosure. 7. Review within 72 hours: ➞ After close, capture errors and fix root causes. ➞ Prompt improvements save you time. When leaders do this, their audit costs reduce and trust increases. Run this ritual for your next audit and let me know how it goes. How do you keep better financial records? ------- ➕ Follow Jonathan Maharaj FCPA for finance‑leadership clarity. 🔄 Share this insight with a decision‑maker. 📰 Get deeper breakdowns in Financial Freedom, my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gYHdNYzj 📆 Ready to work together? Book your Clarity Session: https://lnkd.in/gyiqCWV2

#FinTech | #Payments : Project Keystone, an initiative by the BIS Innovation Hub London Centre and the Bank of England, focuses on unlocking the analytical potential of ISO 20022 payment messages through a new prototype. This prototype features a data transformation and storage platform and analytics modules for economic, financial, and #compliance analysis. The project highlights the benefits of ISO 20022's enhanced data structure and additional data elements, such as the "purpose of payment" field, for improved analytical capabilities. Keystone is designed to assist Payment System Operators (PSOs) and central banks in navigating the complexities of ISO 20022 data and generating valuable insights, particularly for wholesale payment system data. The initiative aims to harmonize the use of ISO 20022 data across jurisdictions, supporting the G20's cross-border payments program and advancing financial system stability and efficiency. Its open-source components and configurable nature ensure flexibility and scalability, laying a foundation for future analytical use cases.

Ant International, Standard Chartered and Swift trial global Bank-to-Wallet payments A major step forward in cross-border #fintech is underway as #Ant International, #Standard Chartered, and #Swift have begun live production trials of a bank-to-wallet payment system leveraging ISO 20022 standards and Swift’s global infrastructure. The first transactions successfully moved funds from a Standard Chartered customer account to a partner e-wallet via Alipay+, Ant’s global #wallet gateway. This initiative is significant: once live, it could connect banks worldwide to 1.7 billion user accounts across 36 digital wallets in the Alipay+ ecosystem. For emerging markets in particular, where mobile wallets often outpace traditional banking penetration, this integration promises faster, more secure, and inclusive access to financial services. For Standard Chartered, the move is a commitment to driving innovation in transaction banking, while Swift further positions itself at the center of next-generation cross-border payment flows. The adoption of ISO 20022, already set to become the global standard, adds transparency, richer data, and greater interoperability across financial institutions and wallet providers. This collaboration could reshape how individuals and SMEs move money globally, bridging traditional banking and mobile-first ecosystems. If widely adopted, could this model finally deliver the long-promised efficiency and inclusivity in cross-border payments? The article on Finextra in the first comment.

A business can hit its numbers and still lose strength. Many leadership teams notice that too late. Revenue may rise while margins quietly weaken. Sales may accelerate while forecast credibility starts slipping. Expansion may look successful while capital is being deployed without enough discipline. That is why finance cannot remain a reporting layer. It has to function as an early decision system. The value of FP&A does not come from explaining last month’s performance. It comes from spotting when commercial momentum is no longer supported by economic quality. It arises from identifying profitable markets, challenging optimistic assumptions, and exposing pressure in pricing, mix, cost, or working capital before performance suffers. That shifts the role of finance leadership. Finance becomes part of strategy. Section of operating decisions. Part of the choices that shape margin quality, forecast accuracy, and the company’s ability to scale without losing control. When this discipline is embedded across the business, leadership does not wait for surprises in the numbers. Pressure is identified earlier. Resources are reallocated faster. Planning becomes sharper and more credible. The companies that scale successfully over the next decade will not stand out only for growth. They will stand out for the financial discipline behind that growth and for the speed at which finance helps leadership make smarter decisions. #FPandA #FinanceLeadership #BusinessStrategy #FinancialPlanning #GrowthStrategy