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Very few professionals can say they sit as close to the intersection of finance, technology and regulation as Wendy Walker. With more than 15 years of experience leading tax operations and compliance teams, today she’s working as VP of Regulatory Affairs at Sovos, where she’s been working closely with tax authorities, policymakers and regulators to build the future of tax reporting and compliance.
As these financial processes become more automated, regulatory pressures also intensify. Wendy highlights that regulatory regimes are “moving much closer to the point of transaction, with many regimes shifting toward near real-time or continuous reporting”. Within this shift, however, finance teams must ensure that controls are embedded directly within those automated workflows, allowing systems to handle great scale whilst still producing “defensible audit trails” and flagging anomalies for individual human review.
With finance becoming ever more intertwined with technology, skillsets must also evolve. Wendy believes that, at this point, “technology fluency has become a core finance competency”, with teams needing a clearer understanding of how data moves across systems to properly take advantage of this new set of tools. In this new environment, it’s vital that finance professionals are able to interpret technology’s impact on regulatory exposure, whilst still applying strong technical expertise and judgement.
Having clearly set out the pace of this technological and regulatory change, we first asked Wendy to reflect on how the finance function has already transformed in recent years – and where organisations may still be overlooking the scale of that shift.
Over the last three to five years, finance has evolved from a backward-looking reporting function into a real-time risk, control, and decision function. Automation and AI are finally bringing sustained investment into finance and accounting, which historically carried enormous regulatory responsibility without the same level of technology support as other parts of the business.
What many organizations still underestimate is that this shift is not simply about efficiency. It fundamentally changes the role of finance. When repetitive, high-volume processes are automated, short-staffed teams can redirect their time toward analytics, controls, and advising the business. The missed opportunity is that many companies automate individual tasks without redesigning processes or repositioning finance as a strategic partner.
Accounts payable and receivable remain far more manual than they should be in many organizations, particularly around exception handling, data validation, and reconciliation. Even in modern ERP environments, these workflows are often supported by spreadsheets, email, and manual review cycles.
The biggest obstacles are fragmented data across systems, legacy integrations, and concerns about maintaining regulatory control. In reality, well-designed automation improves control by standardizing processes, strengthening audit trails, and identifying errors earlier. Organizations that overcome these barriers free their teams to focus on higher-value regulatory and tax work rather than transactional cleanup.
Regulators are moving much closer to the point of transaction, with many regimes shifting toward near real-time or continuous reporting. That forces finance teams to operate faster while meeting increasingly complex compliance obligations.
The balance comes from embedding controls directly into automated workflows.
Automation should handle scale and consistency, flag anomalies, and produce defensible audit trails. Human expertise then focuses on judgment, regulatory interpretation, and complex exceptions. The objective is not to remove oversight, but to elevate it so people spend their time where it has the greatest impact on risk and compliance.
Technology fluency has become a core finance competency. Today’s professionals need to understand how data flows across systems, how controls are implemented in automated processes, and how technology decisions affect regulatory exposure.
Equally important is the ability to work across disciplines. Finance increasingly serves as a bridge between accounting, IT, operations, and compliance. The most effective professionals combine deep technical expertise with systems thinking and strong communication skills, allowing them to shape both processes and platforms.
Collaboration between finance, IT, and operations has improved significantly around core systems and reporting. The greatest friction still occurs at the front end of the customer lifecycle, particularly during onboarding and account opening.
Too often, organizations accept incomplete or non-compliant data in order to avoid losing a customer, then rely on finance to resolve the issues later. That creates manual work, regulatory risk, and poor customer experiences. The solution is shared ownership of compliance at the point of transaction, with automated identity and regulatory checks built directly into front-end workflows. When these teams design processes together, compliance becomes a competitive advantage rather than a bottleneck.
Leading finance teams are focusing on two priorities: regulatory intelligence and proactive controls.
On the intelligence side, AI-assisted research and regulatory monitoring allow teams to track evolving rules, surface relevant guidance, and reduce the risk of missing critical changes. This is becoming essential as reporting regimes grow more complex and global.
On the controls side, organizations are strengthening checkpoints across their processes to identify manual risk and regulatory blind spots early. In emerging areas such as digital assets and unclaimed property, audits are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. Success increasingly depends on combining strong internal controls with trusted technology partners who can translate evolving regulations into operational systems.
