Metaverse, Blockchain and Hyperautomation – How Will They Affect Finance?

One of the most critical tasks for business leaders is to scan the horizon to see where the world is going next. When it comes to technology, the world is moving faster than ever. So while the metaverse, blockchain and hyperautomation may feel like things that won’t enter the mainstream for many years yet, they may be here faster than you think. But what are they – and what are the implications for finance? We’ll explore each of them in this blog.

Meet the Metaverse and Look at Where Finance Will be Involved

If you think the metaverse sounds like something that will only ever be a niche technology, it may be time to reconsider. 

Back in the 1990s, we talked about the Information Superhighway, which the New York Times said would link “everyone at home or office to everything else — movies and television shows, shopping services, electronic mail and huge collections of data.” Fast forward to today, and while we don’t talk about the Information Superhighway, we certainly do all the things it was going to do. 

So while the term ‘metaverse’ may not be around forever, its capabilities might be part of our daily lives.

Certainly, Gartner predicts that in the next four years, one in four people will spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse, performing a range of tasks and activities from shopping and socialising to attending work events and distance learning.

What does this mean for finance? As consultancy Brisk Logic points out, “A massive economic ecosystem is implied by a virtual world in which you can buy and sell houses, products, clothing, land, and avatars just like in the real world.” 

As the metaverse evolves and more companies enter it, it will become more and more critical for finance to be able to manage the transactions within it. And, just like in the real world, underpinning this will be financial data management and financial transaction management processes.  

Blockchain in Finance

Blockchain is the database technology that sits at the heart of cryptocurrencies. These digital currencies are likely to be the way financial exchanges are made in the metaverse. It means finance needs to get to grips with them – and the technology that underpins them – in the same way it would any new form of currency and system. 

But we can go further too, because the future of blockchain looks interesting. Blockchain is hard to hack because it distributes identical copies of a database across an entire network. This means it has much wider potential applications for building trust or ensuring security. Many of these applications are relevant to finance. For example, it could be used to authenticate assets, transactions or contracts.

The Opportunities for Finance in Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation is one of Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022. It’s easy to see why. Hyperautomation takes the benefits of automation to the next level so workers can do even more of the work that matters. It combines robotic process automation, business process animation, artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate everyday tasks and processes and create deeper levels of insight.

For example, SAP Concur solutions already allow enterprises to not only look at what happened but why and where it happened. By considering spend in context, they help business to run better by providing actionable insights and information that can be used to drive positive business outcomes.

Gartner’s advice to enterprises looking at hyperautomation is to: “Establish holistic mapping and prioritization of collective initiatives, rather than islands of task automation, to ensure synergistic and coordinated business outcomes.” In other words, avoid the siloes. 

To help with this, SAP Process Automation is an AI-powered, intuitive and no-code solution for workflow management and RPA. It gives you a simpler and faster way to automate processes across the business.

Working Together

These technologies are here to stay, so getting in on the ground floor puts you in control and gives you the chance to seize competitive advantage by being an early adopter. 

Just one of the ways SAP Concur solutions utilises this technology is with Intelligent Audit. Our Intelligent Audit solution harnesses the power of AI in partnership with our specifically trained and certified human auditors who audit your organisation’s expense claims based on your policies and regulatory requirements. They review based on the facts and evidence to give you a robust audit process.

If you’d like to discuss how SAP Concur solutions could get you on the way, get in touch today.