The more things change...
You know the rest of the quote, don’t you?
You may not know the originator of the quote (but I’m sure your quick googling revealed the name “Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr”), but you know the second half of this lyric-like phrase the same as you can automatically finish “It’s a long way to the top...” or “Stop, in the name of love...”
In other words, college basketball’s March Madness hasn’t really changed in quite a while, has it?
Let me explain.
If I may boast for a moment, CFO’s parent company, Industry Dive, was recently named as one of the most innovative companies in 2024 by Fast Company, and near the top of the list in the media category. And yet, in the opening sentence of the acknowledgment, the word “boring” showed up. So, are we at CFO innovative, or are we boring?
March Madness, according to the NCAA, was officially born in 1939 and featured only eight teams. Over the next 50 years or so, it tinkered, experimented, and expanded to something much closer to what we see today, with 64 teams (and a few extras added along the way), three consecutive weekends of hoops overindulgence for the men’s and women’s brackets, and an official theme song that was introduced in 1987 that, given I grew up in central New York, still triggers me to this day.
The more March Madness has changed over the years, the more it has established and reestablished a consistency of participation and engagement. There’s a reason why many companies, regardless of shape or size, will set up a TV lounge in the afternoons so employees can walk in and out to cheer on their alma maters. And why there’s at least 10,548,725 people currently participating in ESPN’s men’s tournament brackets (I know this for a fact because I am currently ranked #10,548,725).
When we think about innovation within the finance function, top of mind is of course the transformative effect of AI. Sarah Spoja, CFO of fintech company Tipalti, believes it will only be a matter of time before we’re as comfortable with AI tools as we are with Excel. But, she says, finance teams can’t just sit back and wait for it.
“We’re in this mode with new technologies where if you don’t experiment, you’ll never get any results... I’m telling my team that we have to go experiment. Not everything’s going to work. But if we see an interesting use case or implementation of AI, let’s go try it.”
But the interesting thing is that a newness of experimentation still operates within the established rules of finance. Innovation happens, but still sits within a familiar framework. And, if you look at Fast Company’s ranking of most innovative companies in the finance space, these companies are still largely doing the same things we always think about, but in superior iterations: faster payments, better forecasting, global connectedness, and building capital. Spoja says that a great application will be to accelerate cash flow comprehension.
Maybe a smaller company can sit back and, as Spoja implies, wait for others to bring the new tools to the doorstep and hope innovation just kind of happens. And, it might. But it’s also a great way to end up #10,548,725 in the rankings.