Creating a Team of Champions for Finance Centre of Excellence

May 24, 2022
Agustin Morcillo
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Organizations are fighting against a fragment of imagination, no less than a Hollywood movie, from more agile startups to volatile market trends to a global health crisis. Maybe James Bond is not an actual historical character, but today’s enterprises are grappling with unprecedented pressure, not unlike real-world secret agents.

In a recent PwC survey of over 1,200 companies, 54% of the executives we surveyed go all out to align innovation with business strategy. Major organizations are hyper-focused on driving value in the long term, innovating and adapting to changing conditions faster than their competitors. 61% of the executives believe in embracing open innovation to generate new ideas.

One of the best ways business leaders can help their teams and businesses rise above the changes brought by disruptions is to ensure alignment around a common purpose. A center of excellence (COE) can help companies do just that.

What is the Center of Excellence (CoE)?

Gartner defines a CoE as a physical or virtual center of knowledge concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value. It is a centralized unit of dedicated people with a mission to streamline access to rare, high-demand capabilities for rapid execution across the business.

A CoE helps enhance expertise in a specific subject area through standardized best practices for wide-scale adoption. Effectively providing thought leadership and direction in their domain of expertise.

innovation concept
Source: Adobe Stock

How is CoE changing the finance game?

Any organization that seeks to achieve business transformation adopts and implements a COE. Gartner posits that a COE helps businesses focus and align their current resources and expertise around a specific capability to accomplish and sustain world-class performance and value.

By building a Finance Centre of Excellence (FCoE), the faster payments team moves away from siloed teams while creating super users, also called champions. These people lead the organization towards a more collaborative culture where everybody learns from each other. The FCoE comprises payment champions – product owners, business analysts, & messaging experts, thereby catering to a central payments hub to drive customer product rollout. 

A well-formed and executed FCoE adds value to an organization by building trust with customers, instilling confidence and selfassurance among staff, and establishing a superior reputation among other players in the industry.

Benefits of FCoE:

 Expand the organization’s team-working skills and enable knowledge sharing

 Better communication and a collaborative environment to create more opportunities

 Streamline and decrease the time to execute tasks and achieve objectives

 Increase in speed and efficiency in the execution of projects

 Enhance data culture to solve challenges and the right mindset

 Encourage intelligent automation with intelligent tools

 Provide a great way to display the team’s successes and hard work

centre of excellence team
Source: Adobe Stock

Thereby CoE has led to – A strong data culture, together with a collective commitment to share knowledge and solve challenges through:

 Standardization: Major purpose of a COE is to define and develop standards and best practices, including templates, blueprints, and methodologies for all significant work efforts.

 Leveraging Assets: Identify all the usable assets within the organization and the COE itself, including human assets, program codes, and organizational policies. 

 Performance Measurement: Develop the ability to track, measure, and report on the performance of the team’s initiatives across all areas of its efforts through an established baseline and SLA.

No matter how complex your business challenges are, we have the experience and diverse capabilities to identify and realize endless possibilities. The customer product needs and solutions portfolio is constantly changing due to market disruption in the faster payments industry.

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