Pandemic accelerates moves to the cloud

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major influence on spending and digital transformation plans in 2020 with many businesses speeding up plans to move to the cloud.

A new study from BillingPlatform of 300 CFOs and senior finance executives shows that this trend is likely to continue into 2021. Respondents named their three top priorities as investing in cloud-based technologies (42 percent), identifying ways to drive higher revenue through new products and services (41 percent) and reducing operating costs or capital investments (36 percent).

There's a general optimism, with 83 percent of respondents believing it's 'likely' there will be an economic upturn in 2021, with 47 percent thinking it's 'very likely.'

Specifically with technology in mind, priorities for finance teams include transitioning legacy IT infrastructure (30 percent) and legacy enterprise applications (16 percent) to the cloud, using AI for predictive analytics (15 percent), consolidating disparate system data for analysis (15 percent) and automating or updating billing systems (14 percent).

When asked what's preventing them from moving to digital payments, respondents list the cost of services (42 percent), fears of cybersecurity attacks and payment fraud (38 percent), customer reluctance (32 percent), systems and infrastructure lacking (31 percent) and international currency complexities (29 percent) as the top issues.

"While it is no surprise that the global pandemic has completely disrupted plans for this year, the survey shows its long-term impact on the business strategies for finance teams. Compared to our last survey, both the number of respondents seeing economic uncertainty as a challenge and moving to the cloud have doubled," says Dennis Wall, BillingPlatform's CEO. "Accelerating a broader industry trend, businesses are recognizing the importance of recurring revenue and the need to offer more flexible products and services with promotional, incentive, recurring or consumption-based models to build loyalty and drive revenue."

The full report is available on the BillingPlatform site.

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