Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you look around, what are the open problems that you see from your vantage point? I ask this question to all the thought leaders that we bring on to this series.

You’re doing one company but when you look around, you see other problems that if you were starting out, that may be something you would be tackling. What are such problems that you see around that you may want to point our community of entrepreneurs towards?

Terrence McCrossan: The biggest white space we’ve seen in this area is the fact that employee spend takes place across different systems. For example, T&E is in a certain set of system. Procurement is in a different set of technologies. Payables takes place elsewhere. ERP technology houses GL data and other things relevant to the corporate spend analysis.

The challenge is not only are all these systems separate, but they also operate under their own paradigms. That makes audit and inspection very difficult. T&E is very much about the expense report. Procurement is about the catalog. Payables is about the invoice. All of those things get processed, approved, and managed in very different ways.

In terms of white spaces out there, an organization that can tackle the multiple ways of managing spend and bring that together is a big opportunity. Make it not only an easier process to manage
internally, but for Oversight, it enhances our ability to provide effective audit on top of that capability.

Sramana Mitra: Anything else?

Terrence McCrossan: One of the questions to tackle as well is what industry trends is Oversight aligning to. There are exciting ones going on in the finance industry that allows us to be very effective in our efforts to help organizations solve real tangible problems. The first is a trend towards integrated risk management.

Gartner identified this as a $7 billion category in 2020 that’s been growing at a double-digit rate for a number of years. The trend has to do with organizations taking more holistic views of risk in order to better manage and leverage controls and technologies that can address this in an enterprise view versus within silos. It’s one that we play very strongly into.

The second is the trend towards the adoption of advanced analytics to improve audit teams’ effectiveness. Gartner estimates that just 5% of global organizations have implemented advanced analytics. They predict that it will be one of the highest growth adoption markets in 2020 and beyond. Our audit capability fits very well into that. 

Sramana Mitra: My question is not so much on what you are doing. My question is where would you point new entrepreneurs to go into.

Terrence McCrossan: My previous answer in terms of where I see white space was towards that. 

Sramana Mitra: All right. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight Systems
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