Stripe, Strategy & Scale: AICD’s Finance Transformation

The Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) is the nation’s most respected governance body, and just like many organisations across the country, continues to modernise their core technology platforms. By partnering with financial services platform Stripe, the AICD embarked on a digital finance transformation that has allowed the organisation to concentrate on long term strategy, provide better customer service and gain richer data insights.

The AICD’s CFO & Company Secretary Helen Wild and CIO/COO Vince Di Chiara share with CFO Magazine A/NZ’s Kate Jones, their insights into the planning and execution of a large-scale digital transformation, leveraging data intel and harnessing finance technology to create smoother billing and customer offerings, plus candid advice on managing relations between finance and technology.      

Joining forces to digitalise

With more than 53,000 members right across the country and offices in all Australian states and territories, the AICD is an organisation relied upon by company directors, senior executives and decision makers and runs hundreds of courses and events on corporate governance each year.

Both Wild and Di Chiara arrived at the AICD in 2020 during the COVID 19 pandemic. But the organisation was grappling with more than just lockdowns and work from home protocols. There were also a number of internal processes in urgent need of upgrades.

“We had legacy systems that were really limiting our ability to provide the services our members expected,” explained Wild.

“The tipping point wasn’t one single issue. It was a recognition that complexity and a lack of digital integration was affecting our ability to make price adjustments, execute our billing and have visibility on our reporting procedures.”

Wild and Di Chiara’s teams joined forces to automate and streamline the AICD’s processes. This started by focusing on simplifying core functions such as billing to improve data quality and reduce manual work.

“That then gave us the confidence to re-think how we designed our products, our packages and more broadly our member interactions as well,” said Di Chiara.

Large-scale projects followed including digitalising the AICD’s learning products and introducing auto-renewal on membership fees.

“We’ve had some really good success in the auto-renewal (of memberships) functionality and there’s opportunities to continue to make it easier for customers to engage with the AICD” said Di Chiara.

“We’ve also started looking at being able to bundle our products and deliver subscription-based services.”

While it wasn’t always easy to merge the competing priorities of the finance and IT teams, Wild and Di Chiara said the work always came down to understanding each other’s constraints and responsibilities.

“There were certainly, in that five-year period, lots of robust challenges between Vince and myself such as cost versus scope, but it was very respectful,” she said.

“There were times when we weren’t agreeing on certain things, but we worked through it and we came together, and we agreed on a path forward that satisfied the requirements of both our teams and established a solid foundation for us all to work together seamlessly,” Wild said.

Choosing the right transformation partner

Trusting a third party with company-wide changes hinges on a careful selection process. The AICD was searching for a partner to not only pave the way forward, but to share its business and customer goals throughout the journey.

“Straight from the get-go, we considered Stripe because it had a robust and reliable infrastructure with built-in flexibility,” said Di Chiara.

“We also recognised that wasn’t just about the technology, that was secondary, it was about partnering strategically.

“And the pleasing thing was that we saw that Stripe was prepared to grow with us. In doing so, they helped us to evolve our thinking.”

The results of the partnership quickly began to make major impacts on the AICD’s move towards digital integration, particularly for the finance team.

“It reduced the friction points and manual processing, and increased the team’s confidence,” Wild said.

“It gave us a solution that’s flexible and scalable to manage our billing and payment systems while improving reliability and transparency.”

Automation gave the team time and space to work on analysis and insights. Equipped with data they could rely on, the finance function became more future-focused.

“Up until then, they were so busy just trying to get transactions processed that they didn’t have time to sit back and think, ‘OK, what are the insights and what’s the analysis that’s coming out of this data, and how can we improve things?” Wild said.

More flexible, agile and in control

The digital switch has allowed the AICD to break new ground on several fronts. Data insights allow new product features and pricing strategies to be tested with more certainty.

“There’s a saying that you fail fast to learn fast and we’re certainly doing that,” Di Chiara said.

“That helps us better design our offerings and communicate value to our customers. It’s moved us from using assumptions or gut feel, to making evidence-based decisions.”

For the finance team, the successful digitalisation is the first step in a longer journey towards a more vital role of enabling the company’s strategic goals.

“We’re in a phase of embedding and consolidation,” Wild said.

“Our finance team is embracing the new processes and we’re giving them enough time to adjust to new ways of working.

“We know that we need to continually look for further improvements in how we support our customers, while still remaining efficient and effective.”

For companies about to embark on their own digital transformations, Wild said it’s important to foster respect, accountability and collaboration between internal teams.

“We now have really strong alignment – between our finance team and the technology teams” Wild said.“When those functions are thriving together, change becomes faster and more sustainable.“