Business Intelligence
Although business intelligence does not sound like a new technology, the author argues the industry, after a period of consolidation and commoditization, is expected to grow by 20% to 25% in 2004. Business intelligence includes financial reporting and analysis, business modeling and forecasting. But the most exciting development in the BI-arena is the notion of real time, up-to-the-minute, zero latency data analysis. Monitoring relevant financial data in real-time allows financial companies to send alerts, as soon as key metrics (such as risk exposures and prime lending rates) veered from the norm, possibly averting a disaster.

Data Visualization
The finance departments must often deduce patterns and trends from rows and columns of numbers. As the volume and complexity of the data grows, companies have been looking for new tools to automatically chart the data for easier analysis. New graphical user interfaces allow users today to click their way through large amounts of data, and sub-data. Data visualization has automated popular management tools such as executive dashboards, balanced scorecards, and enterprise portals. New visualization algorithms and techniques are now being developed with corporate users in mind.

Risk Management
While understanding, preparing for, and responding to risk have always been part of the financial duties, risk management has become nearly synonymous with compliance, or, more accurately, the internal controls that satisfy compliance requirements. Driven by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, new systems are being developed to help firms document, monitor, test, and report on all internal financial controls and control activities. They can proactively remind individuals of every regulatory task they're required to perform and alert them to any time schedules they must adhere to.

Electronic Payments
Mainly due to a lack of system compatibility between businesses, electronic procurement, invoicing and payment over the Internet has been slow taking off. But companies, such as PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP have started to develop new integrated software systems automating all aspects around the financial supply chain (FSC), such as procurement, pricing negotiation, price management and post-sale evaluation. The broad adoption of certain technical standards will facilitate the automated exchange of integrated payment and remittance. A focus on security will also continue to be important.

XBRL
XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is a proposed standard protocol that uses XML data tags to describe financial information for public and private companies and other organizations. It allows businesses to prepare, exchange, and analyze financial statements and the information they contain. In theory, XBRL should provide cost savings for both companies preparing financial reports and companies analyzing them.

But XBRL has had difficulties taking off, partly due to diverging views on how to implement the standard, and partly to the luke-warm reception by government agencies. While the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) has announced that all future call reports are to be filed in XBRL, the SEC is still in the evaluation phase and the IRS developed its own XML-based standard.

The author maintains that XBRL may yet take off in 2004, as a U.S. version of the XBRL standard is being rolled out and 14 of the top 21 financial-software makers today already have XBRL-enabled applications or plan to have them by December 2004.