As per Forbes.com
Finance and accounting (F&A) was one of the first processes that companies outsourced, and the practice continues to boom: Ed Thomas, an analyst for Ovum research, found the number of F&A outsourcing projects valued at $1 million or more increased in 2012 compared to the year before.
As the market matures, companies contracting for outcomes are exploring fresh ideas and seeking new answers to streamline F&A processes. They are expanding outsourcing to new areas of finance and accounting, new industries, and new sizes of companies than in the past.
Driving efficiency is a high priority for CFOs who want to outsource F&A processes, according to an Ovum study of 150 large companies in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Most survey respondents saw the main strategic aim of the accounting department as delivering efficiencies, whether that is within the department itself or across the company as a whole.
“This is a wider trend in outsourcing as a whole,” Thomas explains. “Cost reductions are the table stakes, and companies want to know what else their outsourcers can do to make their processes and technology run more efficiently.”
As per Cima Global
The use of finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO) continues to rise throughout the world.The FAO market,as measured by the number of contracts signed for large FAO agreements (those that include five or more processes and/or have a contract value of at least $50 million) has increased steadily since
2000, and by more than 45 percent since 2005 (Fersht). A March 2007 IDC (Interactive Data Corporation) report forecasts that the global FAO market will exceed $47.6 billion in 2008. Although the United States will remain the largest segment of the FAO market, the fastest- growing region includes Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
(EMEA) (Bingham).In the past 18 months, several large outsourcing agreements covering multiple finance and accounting processes were finalized. Earlier this year, the world’s top personal paper products manufacturer,Texas-based Kimberly-Clark Corporation,entered into a five-year contract with FAO provider Genpact. Genpact will operate Kimberly-Clark’s global accounts payable, travel and entertainment expense management, pricing administration, accounting-to-reporting, and supply-chain accounting processes. Late last year, Aktiebolaget SKF hired outsourcing provider Capgemini to manage multiple finance and accounting processes for several of the Swedish ball bearings