Ep. 54: Efrain Rivera - How Have Tech Trends Affected Accounting Services and HR?

Mar 9, 2020

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)

Welcome back to Count Me In. I'm your host Mitch Roshong and I will be bringing you episode 54 of IMA's podcast. Today's expert guests is CFO and treasurer of Paychex. Efrain Rivera. He joined my cohost, Adam to explain how technology trends have impacted paychecks and the services they provide for their clients. He also talks about how clients expectations of their services have changed. Listen and now to hear how this executive of a highly reputable outsourcing firm has realized the changes in our accounting and finance world.

Adam: (00:35)

So Paychex is a provider of human resource, payroll and benefits outsourcing services. And so with the broad scope of traditional services, how have technology trends impacted the job you and your team are required to do?

Efrain: (00:54)

Yeah, I think it's impacted it in two ways. So the first is with respect to the platform itself that we use to deliver those services. And then I think the second which we'll talk about is the way those services are actually delivered. So first, let me talk about, the technology of the platform itself. I'd say starting about nine, 10 years ago, you saw an evolution of service providers, moving to the cloud, on platforms that were multitenant and SAS, meaning, you moved away from on premise software, we moved into the cloud and your systems were available to all of the participants, in that were using the product all at once. And you had to have a robust system that was capable of addressing the needs of all of those, those clients. What that meant was, you needed to be able to deliver updates to that platform seamlessly across all of your client base and you needed to do that in real times. So, your systems had to become more, high availability and, they, they needed to, participate or be available for frequent updating instead of an update that occurred maybe once or twice a year or three times a year. If you were doing it more frequently, you now have the evolution of systems which frequently were updated on weekly and monthly bases based on, the needs of both users. And requirements of the system. When you put that all together, it put a lot more demand, on the technology. and it fundamentally impacted the way, the technology was delivered and now what was a trend 10 years ago has become the dominant way in which technology is delivered, particularly in the human capital management space, which is what we talk about when we talk about HR, payroll and benefits. So it's changed very dramatically over that period of time and impacted the way that we do our job and the way that we make investments to sustain that platform. That's the first part of the, equation. The second part is more recent and that's how the services that, technology enabled service providers deliver have changed and those services have changed because what used to be primarily a service provider function has now shifted to become a mix of both technology and service provider. What I mean by that is this many things that in the past, could only have been done directly with a phone contact or chat contact with a service provider, an actual service provider can now be done through technology itself. So, for example, the use of technologies such as intelligent chat bots, artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, all of these things have revolutionized the way service is delivered. So while we used to think about this clear divide between technology and service delivery, those lines became blurred. And what used to be a service is now increasingly delivered through technology. In our case, we have, intelligent chatbots that, that can answer many, many questions that clients, pose. And our systems are becoming more and more intelligent so that when we see that a customer is lingering in one part of the, application, chat, a chat window will pop up, giving them some indication around what to do next. So systems are becoming more intelligent, service is becoming more blurred with technology, and all of that puts a premium on making the right kinds of investments in technology. So that, the customer can get the service that, that they want and deserve.

Adam: (05:54)

So you just mentioned a lot of different software applications, the, the evolution of all those and there's also the evolution of cloud accounting technology, which all those things have to talk together. Do you, what found, what challenges do you face in providing those services?

Efrain: (06:11)

So I would say with respect to the evolution of cloud accounting services, um, that's not an area that, that we provide, but a cloud accounting services interface with the technology that we do provide. And so for us, the biggest challenge there is, or one of the bigger challenges is to ensure that our systems and our software, particularly our, our software interface seamlessly with the kinds of accounting software that major providers, delivered, to customers. So there's a number of packages that, that are prevalent in the marketplace. There's one dominant package. And, for us as we design our systems, particularly on the payroll side, but in other areas too, on, on, human resources administration and also in our time and attendance systems, our time tracking systems, they need to seamlessly integrate with those, accounting packages so that the information that's being, captured in the system is transmitted, into the accounting systems and the correct information flows both ways and increasingly if not just good enough to do it, on some sort of file transfer basis. Increasingly what's going on is that that information is exchanged real time or, or we're being asked to exchange that information real time, with third party vendors. And so configuring our systems to be able to do that becomes an important challenge. and, one of the, one of the things that, that our it group, works on.

Adam: (08:02)

How have you handled a security, with those systems talking together in real time now?

Efrain: (08:08)

Yeah, security, I would say in the last decade, the amount of, the amount of investment that we have made in security has increased significantly. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is because we transmit so much, money, we have to ensure that the perimeter of our, our systems is hardened, to prevent intrusion. So we're constantly on the lookout for that. But the second point, which you just mentioned is we also need to be, um, we also need to look at how our systems interface with other, other providers to ensure that there are no vulnerabilities when information is exchanged. And so we have made a lot of investments and things like encryption of information ensuring that, when there are handoffs, in information, there's no, there's no security issues around that. And also, um, we have made significant investments in monitoring activity in and out of our systems to ensure that, data is protected and there intrusions are not minimized, but basically prevented. so we, we spent a lot of time, thinking about that and working on that and investing to make sure that those issues will not occur.

Adam: (09:44)

Now, I'm sure your clien...