The Financial Integrity Manifest: Redefining Finance Operations

Financial Integrity is a transformative movement in modern enterprise finance. It sets a new standard that transcends traditional finance operations, helping leaders and their teams:

In this article we will explore why today’s businesses can’t compromise on Financial Integrity, how it redefines finance operations, the indispensable benefits it delivers, and how it empowers CFOs, auditors, and finance teams to redefine financial operations.

Welcome to the Age of Big Finance

This is the age of Big Finance, defined by tremendous speed, complexity, and vast amounts of data that accelerate financial exposure.

Protecting the organization against the fallout of unchecked exposures demands an evolution of finance operations.

The fallout of unchecked exposures

Financial losses

Legal repercussions

Reputational damage

Financial Integrity is at the heart of the evolution. It is the foundational and mission critical framework that enables organizations to eliminate financial exposures.

But it’s even more than that. Financial Integrity is a movement, a call to action to be prioritized above all else in the finance ecosystem, as it is the key to thriving in an increasingly volatile business, operational, and financial landscape.

Why Now?

Enterprise finance leaders today are facing significant challenges in their ability to protect the financial health of the organization – the exponential growth of data, increasingly complex global operations, and rising regulatory demands.

Exponential Data Growth

The amount of data being generated by the enterprise, its clients, suppliers, employees, and global operations is unprecedented, and constantly on the rise.

394 ZB by 2028 The total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is forecast to increase rapidly, reaching more than 394 zettabytes by 2028. (Statista)

This is leaving finance teams overwhelmed as they struggle to overcome the challenges to detecting and mitigating exposures before the damage is done, including:

Increasingly Complex Global Operations

Managing global operations often involves dealing with many disparate financial systems, varying internal controls, and inconsistent processes, making it harder to spot inefficiencies, inaccuracies, breaches, and violations.

Rising Regulatory Demands

In 2025 (and beyond) finance leaders and their teams will continue to face increasing regulatory scrutiny.

The extensive regulatory landscape (a partial list)

Sarbanes-Oxley	IFRS	Dodd-Frank	Basel III	MiFID II
GDPR	CCPA	FATCA	AML	SEC Reporting
ePrivacy Directive	TCJA	HIPAA	NIST	PCI DSS

Two phenomena poised to intensify compliance requirements are new threats to data security that are becoming increasingly sophisticated and the proliferation generative AI-powered fraud.

Top 3 Exposures in Finance 

Exponential growth of data, increasingly complex global operations, and rising regulatory demands are accelerating three key exposures that have long plagued finance organizations – human error, non-compliance, and fraud.

Human Error

Handling vast amounts of data can easily overwhelm teams, resulting in data entry errors, misjudgements in assessments, and flawed decision-making.

This not only compromises the accuracy of financial insights but also hinders the organization’s ability to detect, prevent, and mitigate exposures.

Mistakes happen all the time	The high cost of inevitable errors

Duplicate payments	Over payment	Auditing inaccuracies	Cash flow inconsistencies
Invoice-PO discrepancies	Multiple invoices	Delayed revenue recognition	Reporting discrepencies

Non-Compliance

Employees sometimes knowingly override obligatory process approvals or requirements to get the job done faster. Sometimes, it’s a simple matter of unintended oversight.

Even unintentional deviations from protocols—such as overriding payment approvals—will leave the  organization at risk.

$5.87M is lost due to a single non-compliance event (Ponemon Institute)

$11M or 2% of annual revenue is the starting point for GDPR non-compliance fines (GDPR.eu)

Fraud

Whether committed by employees or criminals from outside the company, fraud is on the rise and costing companies millions.

80% of organizations experience payments fraud attacks or attempts

1.7B breaches reported in the US alone in 2024

5% of revenue is lost every year to fraud

$15M is the cost of insider-driven data exposures and leaks

Common types of fraud

Vendor Advance Payment Fraud The vendor set on defrauding the organization sends an invoice for an advance payment, without intending to deliver. The employee then bypasses policy, sometimes aware, sometimes not, and authorizes payment before the goods or services are received.

Insider Fraud Being deeply familiar with the organization’s policies, processes, and systems, employees are best positioned to exploit and manipulate them. They can elevate access privileges and evade detection, forge invoices, receipts, and other documents, or modify or erase logs and transaction histories.

The Shortcomings of Legacy Approaches

To eliminate the impact of these exposures, organizations need to continuously analyze processes as they unfold, across all operational data, and act in real time.

But today’s approach to finance operations is reactive rather real-time, focusing on post-mortem analysis rather than anticipatory prevention.

Even when analytics tools are deployed, these tools don’t operate themselves. They don’t come with built-in knowledge of each organization’s unique business processes and environment. Rather, they require continuous modelling to understand the financial data.

This is a manual effort that can’t keep up with the current pace of finance and inevitably leads to additional exposures.

Further complicating the situation, is the fact that even if auditors and other finance personnel have all the time in the world (which they don’t), it is impossible for them to gain full visibility into the financial health of the organization.

This is because they can only sample small amounts of data at random, resulting in too many exposure stones left unturned, and the organization highly vulnerable to exposures.

Eliminating Exposures

The Need	Today’s Approach
Continuous analysis	Post-mortem analysis
All operational data	Partial sampling
Real-time prevention	Reactive handling

A reactive, post-mortem, and manual approach, which involves access to only some of the data leads to partial visibility and severe consequences.

These include significant financial loss, eroded stakeholder confidence in the accuracy of financial reports, and potential shareholder pullback.

This is where Financial Integrity comes into play.

Redefining Finance Operations with Financial Integrity

Joining the Financial Integrity movement is the sure path for CFOs, auditors, and the finance team to gain real-time control over finance operations, eliminate exposures, and leave behind the failings of current approaches.

Financial Integrity enables them to gain:

The Three Principles Financial Integrity

Financial Integrity is powered by three guiding principles:

Continuous process analysis: Financial Integrity requires ongoing analysis of finance-related processes as they unfold and a real-time view of events and actions in progress.

Real-time exposure detection: Anomalies and discrepancies across all operational data and within any process must be detected and analyzed in real time. This enables immediate and accurate response to potential threats.

Comprehensive intelligence: On-demand access to a unified view of all financial data, activities, and performance indicators is essential for understanding the organization’s overall financial health, making data-driven decisions, and responding quickly to emerging issues.

Financial Integrity in Action: Segregation of Duties

One use case that can illustrate the power of the Financial Integrity movement is ensuring segregation of duties (SoD).

When the same employee handles more than one step in any process, the risk of error and even fraud is significantly higher. That’s why maintaining compliance with segregation of duties (SoD) is crucial.

Without Financial Integrity, finance teams are limited to using pre-defined rules that miss hidden violations, especially as roles overlap and employees move to new positions. They must also execute manual checks, which is time consuming and error prone.

The result is that they can only identify issues after they’ve occurred, which makes prevention impossible.

With Financial Integrity, however, user activity is continuously monitored, and behaviors that indicate a potential SoD violation are detected in real time. This enables finance personnel to take immediate action to stop non-compliant behavior and prevent SoD related financial loss.

Furthermore, with ongoing process analysis, the team can discover process weaknesses and determine which SoD controls are inefficient and are leading to violations.

Join the Financial Integrity Evolution

The benefits of embracing Financial Integrity cannot be overstated:

This is why Financial Integrity is non-negotiable, shaping the finance operation of today, ahead of tomorrow.

Don’t get left behind. We invite you to join the Financial Integrity movement by taking the first step to learn more. Book a session with an expert at: link.