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In the latest episode of our ‘Navigating Alliances’ series, we explore the transformative partnership between EY and BlackLine – one of the market leading companies for financial close and accounting automation. Together, these two companies are revolutionizing finance and accounting with innovative AI-driven solutions tailored to the unique needs of businesses in India and globally. Join us as we explore how this alliance is helping CFOs and finance teams achieve operational excellence, enhance accuracy, and embrace digital transformation at scale. Tune in for insightful conversation on how cutting-edge technology is streamlining processes, empowering decision-making, and reshaping the finance function for a future-ready enterprise.
In conversation with:
Rishabh Jain
Partner, Finance Transformation, EY India
Adrian Rusu Regional Vice President, Channels & Alliances, Asia Pacific & Japan, BlackLine
Key takeaways
AI and GenAI are redefining finance by driving automation, improving accuracy, and enabling better decision-making across organizations.
EY and BlackLine’s collaboration leverages technology and expertise to help businesses achieve finance transformation and operational excellence.
Indian businesses are embracing technology and partnerships to navigate challenges, unlock potential, and lead in the evolving finance landscape.
Our focus is to ensure that everything we do, whether in product or technology ensures that our clients are future ready
We have seen strong use cases in record-to-report, order-to-cash, and reporting, delivering instant solutions with AI and GenAI
Rishabh Jain
Partner, Finance Transformation, EY India
For your convenience, a full-text transcript of this podcast is also available below.
Sudhir Ramakrishnan: Welcome to Navigating Alliances - the podcast series that delves into the dynamic world of technology, collaboration and innovation. Here we bring you insights, stories, and perspectives from the EY Partner System and our leadership team. I am your host, Sudhir Ramakrishnan. Today, we are exploring the exciting developments and future plans of EY and Blackline alliance. Joining us are two esteemed speakers - Rishabh Jain, Partner, Finance Transformation Consulting at EY India, and Adrian Rusu, Regional Vice President, Channels & Alliances, Asia Pacific & Japan.
Adrian, Rishabh, it is great to have you with us today.
Adrian Rusu: Thanks for inviting me, Sudhir. I am delighted to be here.
Rishabh Jain: It is a pleasure to be here. Welcome, Adrian. Sudhir, thank you.
Sudhir Ramakrishnan: Thank you so much. Let us dive right into our discussion today. How has the EY and Blackline alliance journey been over the past five years? What are your reflections and some of the standout features of this partnership? Adrian, perhaps you could launch into the same.
Adrian Rusu: Happy to do that, Sudhir. Thank you. Let me just take a quick step back. BlackLine, founded in 2001, is a pioneer in financial close automation software and has been at the forefront of modernizing accounting, and that whole push towards it. We created this space that is now called financial close management. Generally, we have set the standard on enabling the office of the CFO to drive efficiency, accuracy and control through dedicated software.
When we talk about EY, we talk about partners for BlackLine and partners represent a critical function of the way BlackLine goes to market. And therefore, we have a dedicated partnership management team which I represent across the region, who is the interface between EY Black Line and our clients. EY actually, thanks to Rishabh and the efforts of his team, is now considered a global platinum partner of BlackLine, which actually is our highest tier available within BlackLine. In fact, while we have collaborated and probably running for 17 years now, we have an alliance in place in India that has worked for now, more than six years, and if I remember correctly, was the first region globally to sign a formal agreement with our first ever customer many years ago.
So, it really started with the transaction in an interest. Since then, in this alliance, we have weaved in our SAP partnership where BlackLine is a solution extension of SAP S/4HANA, and that shapes up a very nice go-to-market model, which we have coined internally as power of three. We are in a single go to market motion for a client. We get the blackLine expertise. We get the SAP relationship, and we get EY’s knowledge - we call that the power of three. And we think that is a super stand out feature providing tremendous value to the client.
Rishabh Jain: Thank you, Adrian. I fully echo your thoughts. EY India started consulting in finance space almost 20 years back, and we have been working with Indian global houses, also global organizations and transforming their functions. With the advent of RPA almost 11 years back, we incubated an automation practice within our team, which is embedded along with finance. We saw a very significant opportunity six years back in order to offer best of breed solutions to our clients, like BlackLine.
As you may all know that BlackLine is rated top in the analyst ratings, it is market maker, and we decided to see this capability to serve our clients locally, but also global clients through their global capability centers (GCCs). Since then, we have done more than 20 global implementations in India, catering to both global and Indian houses.
However, this is a global alliance for us. It is a strategic partnership and with the combination of power of three - which is us, BlackLine and our clients, we have developed robust implementation capabilities in order to deliver value for our clients. This includes reduction in days to close, more accuracy, high quality of information, providing controllership organization, a really good, transformed finance process.
Additionally, BlackLine and us, we have been investing within the Indian market to further co-develop compelling value proposition for our clients to resolve emerging problems and new areas. It has been a very good, satisfying journey, and I am glad that we are one of the BlackLine implementers, leader partners in India. Thank you. Over to you Sudhir.
Sudhir Ramakrishnan: Generative AI and AI are very topical conversation points across the world at the moment, including in the office of the CFO. How do you observe this impacting an organization's growth strategies, and what trends do you observe which are emerging that you can share? Rishabh, perhaps you can start off.
Rishabh Jain: This is a very pertinent question in front of us, here and now. EY has invested significantly in its own AI platform, EY.ai. We have been investing in this technology largely to transform the way we deliver, but also how we create value for our clients.
Specifically in the finance area, we do see that there is a huge need for finance professionals to further develop the skills. In one of the recent surveys that we did for global capability centers (GCCs) in India, we know that 70% of these centers are investing in generative AI. We are also seeing that more than 35% are piloting certain use cases. Many of our Indian clients are also adopting and experimenting on the GenAI solution in order to optimize the speed of response and quality for their end consumers and customers.
But what it certainly needs is a lot of rehashes into talent development, mitigating new risks in order to achieve those values. Having said that, we have seen significant use cases in the area of record to report, order to cash, reporting, where we would serve our consumers and customers in an instant manner, leveraging the power of AI and GenAI.
Now, there are different customers of finance, and they are now looking for more self-service, analytics insight-as-a-service, which would only be possible with the adoption of new technologies like GenAI. Adrian, would you like to comment on how BlackLine is evolving in order to meet this global macroeconomic trend?
Adrian Rusu: Nowadays, it is not a technology discussion if AI is not part of the discussion these days, isn't it? I would say one of the reasons why I have been in BlackLine for the past four plus years is that we deliver on what we were saying we are going to do, and we do not chase typical use cases that are just not valuable to customers for products. Our focus has always been on solving real problems, and we really got here because of innovation. The I in the AI is one of the things we are talking about; we recognized it early, and I echo the emergence of RPA. We are now expanding into new offerings; we are obviously investing in AI capabilities as driven and asked by the market.
Our approach to AI is to ensure that eventually we deliver trustworthy and accurate AI-powered solutions that put the client in the driver's seat to eventually accelerate their finance transformation. When we think about it, the solutions that come from AI, we are looking at solving the following problems:
We want to help clients to, number one, transform data into information and insights. So, just help them to grow.
Number two, we see still today automated repetitive tasks and we would like with AI to allow finance and accounting teams to focus on more strategic work. It has always been our goal from the very beginning.
Number three, risk management and regulatory compliance. We want businesses to have with AI more agile decision-making.
And number four, eventually better collaboration. We see a lot of our customers struggling to attract and retain top talent. And we think if we leverage AI to make collaboration easier, it will help the human resource problem as well. When it comes to the solutions, I can give you maybe two examples, which of what we are actually doing.
One of the areas, like I said, is of automating repetitive tasks, and getting insights. With capability that is going to be rolled out shortly - we call it the Document Description Summarizer. What we will do is in all the documents that you attach to BlackLine, we will scan the document, whether it is an image or text or PDF. After the scan, we will generate a description of it, of its content on behalf of the user. So, instead of the user going in and saying this is what this document does, please have a look at this here, here and here, we will save time on this repetitive task and ensure that accuracy is in the correct document attached to the right place as evidence. That is one that we see and hear a lot of value for.
The second one is in our cash portfolio. We are looking at, invoice to cash payment forecasting, for example. With this new AI powered feature, we will now be able to forecast with our clients, customer data, which one they are most likely to pay or not at the end of, let us say, this term, for our clients, and that will be from actual payment history data and presented in a very easy to read dashboard.
These are just two examples. You know, there are many more. But we are excited to be part of that journey and do our bit to bring AI capabilities to finance and account.
Sudhir Ramakrishnan: Thank you for that, Adrian. Many global clients are already progressing on the digital finance agenda, but the biggest opportunity and the challenges still remain in the India domestic market. What is your take on the appetite of the Indian industry in adopting digital transformation journey? Rishabh, perhaps you could launch into this.
Rishabh Jain: We are now the number five economy in the world and there has been a lot of significant development in the Indian economy. If you look at the India Digital Stack itself, with the advent of digital adoption, be it in terms of the Aadhar, in terms of UPI, a big part of the Indian population is exposed and has adopted digital means of transactions. This has further fueled significant spend by the middle class and by the consumers within the Indian market.
Also, one of the great contributors is the 1.4 billion plus population that we have, which has led to a very significant growth, both for Indian organizations, which are truly scaling up at a breakneck speed, and also global organizations, for which India is one of the top three markets.
There is a huge shift in terms of growth and consumer spending, which further actually leads the CFO organization to think how can we provide visibility, invest in platforms and processes at the same time to make sure that the growth that we have in our topline and the related margin is not linear. How can we do more with less? How can we still lead to this double-digit growth, while ensuring that we are not increasing our costs for the enabling function. So, there is a very significant opportunity, and we are seeing it in the market from our CFO, CIO controllership organization, who are more and more interested to adopt newer ways of working, better visibility and more and more efficient process.
Having said that, the one challenge which continues to remain in the Indian domestic market is largely around Return on Investments (ROI) – how we can get that ROI within one year, given that the capital is limited, there is always a balance between investing to grow or sink-in versus investing to fix our processes or with not sometimes so direct relation on to the top line. So, the sales cycles have been long; value proposition ROI is not easy, but whenever we have seen large global organizations in India, they are certainly investing in these products/platforms. We have seen significant interest from large Indian houses in the domestic market to cater to these niche products and particular platforms.
This is just the start. We are starting to see some green shoots in adoption of best of breed, focused technologies, including BlackLine and also various GenAI solutions. Adrian, what are your thoughts around it and how BlackLine has catered to this increasing demand?
Adrian Rusu: We are very similar to the story of becoming India as an attractive market. When I first joined, I remember that BlackLine was looking at the India market as managed from overseas, and it was opportunistic. Since then, we have seen demand for our products and capabilities increasing in the market and therefore Black Line as an organization has invested multiple times in India. First, it was just setting up an operations center that covers many functions. But, even as, early as two years ago, we set up a local India go-to-market function as well. We have moved from managing India as a satellite location to now having established India as a hub for the company and recognizing the importance of the Indian domestic market to the firm. I absolutely echo the sentiments.
I have looked at the market myself for many years and have seen many Indian organizations investing in the past decade or decades in ERPs such as SAP, and we now see the market also ready to invest in best and breed digital finance solutions like the ones that we put together.
Our solutions typically surround ERP, SAP or other ERPs alike. We find that the timing now is a good timing for the market. We see the appetite for the India domestic market, primarily driven by the need of scalability and efficiency, primarily because Indian industries have very large volumes.So, with the right timing, you know, with the Indian organizations growing, very fast, we see CFOs in financial control are more than ever ready to adopt digital-ready, best-in-class solutions that are available to them.
Of course, like you said, Rishabh, I echo the challenges. It is not all smooth sailing just yet, but we see a lot of legacy or in-house built finance systems still around; multitudes of data sources that need to be managed, and eventually, we see budget constraints that still remain.
I don't think we have found a perfect solution for that yet, but cost of labor, while still less compared to other global centers due to the business growth that the Indian domestic market companies are experiencing and rising inflation, I would say that this is now a bit more dilutive than it has been in the past. With all this, we are in a great position right now in India for BlackLine to count top local Indian organizations as clients in very diverse industries, ranging from pharma to manufacturing, QSR to fintech or retail, and therefore, we are very confident in any new engagement with clients, we can reference any of these top brands in the country as well as in the world as potential reference clients.
Rishabh Jain: I will further add that many of the Indian headquartered organizations will truly become global brands in the next decade, either by export or opening up their capabilities. This is just the starting; we would definitely see a lot of digitalization, touchless processing, and sites getting generated in a seamless manner, which would warrant them to further invest in their digital platforms over and above other ERPs that they have.
Sudhir Ramakrishnan: Thank you for that, Rishabh. Adrian, I wanted to check in with you. How is BlackLine adapting to the ever-evolving customer needs within the CFO space? And what are some of your product innovations which are lined up?
Adrian Rusu: Our platform is here to really solve real use cases, real problems for our customers and we got here through continuous innovation – that has been at the forefront of the company from the start. What we are looking at is to make sure that whatever we do, whether it is product or technology, is focused to ensure our clients are future ready.
It is absolutely essential for us to continue understanding their needs and adapt to their needs. That has made a shift for us. For example, in the last couple of years, we have moved from our traditional, kind of market-leading role, that of financial close management, for which Blackline is basically the most trusted global tool to execute automated financial flows to newer areas that our clients have demanded, such as streamlining intercompany operations or consolidation and financial analytics to expedite reporting processes, as well as invoice to cash capabilities to improve our clients cash flow in to drive the business forward.
In fact, about a month ago at our customer conference, we have announced our biggest innovation yet of 2024. We have launched this platform that we call Studio360, which is a flexible, comprehensive platform that connects all the data sources, orchestrates and optimizes finance operation in a partnership with Snowflake, which is meant for us effectively to become the finance data layer that surrounds and powers all of our applications.
We still think we are very well connected to the clients. We drive a ‘Voice of the Customer’ initiative across the board for all of our clients and in 2024, based on the stats that we have, we have driven 144 new capabilities released because of the customer demand. Our goal will never change. We will continue to support customers to have a faster or higher quality and accurate and control close and drive effectively to a day zero close, which is the eventual goal where we hope everyone to get there. That is what I think, is, our approach to clients.
Sudhir Ramakrishnan: Thank you very much, Adrian and Rishabh. What I would like to understand is what lies ahead in the future for our alliance? How do we see the focus moving forward and how does that shape our joint offerings this year? Rishabh, perhaps you could shed some light.
Rishabh Jain: We continue to invest in our new solutions basis what we hear from the market, what we hear from customers. With the ever-evolving landscape, with flurry of technology changes, business model, getting involved, mergers and acquisitions, there is always a need for us to invest in new solution offerings. Adrian just highlighted a couple of new innovations which we are privy to, and we do feel that those are the right steps in the direction.
There are two things which we would continue to do in future. They (BlackLine) have the best, state-of-the-art financial closing management solution and are a couple of investments in those. We certainly need to augment our capabilities and stay ahead of the curve, as we transform our clients and continue to invest in these areas.
The second part, which we just touched upon earlier specifically for the Indian market, I believe we need to kind of cater to specific needs by broadening the horizon, not just in financial closing, but also to the global and also to the bouquet of solutions in the office of the CFO. So we will continue to keep investing in our implementation capabilities and keep ourselves honest and bringing the best of solutions to our clients.
The last point which I would make is given that there are close to 1,800 GCCs in India, we all know that there is a lot of demand for global finance function transformation driven by India. We would want to further strengthen, our solution offerings and our go to market to cater to the decision makers, project owners who are sitting in these GCS in India.
So, looking forward, it is quite an interesting space for us. We continue to grow as a team. We continue to learn, on a very regular basis with the advent of new products, new technologies. Adrian, over to you.
Adrian Rusu: We have evolved quite a bit in the past couple of years. We have seen a number of joint wins. This year alone we have completed multiple webinars; done many face-to-face roundtables, the last two of which happened last month in Delhi and Bangalore. So, we have grown the relationship tremendously. We have also realized, and we should give some examples, our complementary values working together. We are now at the beginnings of a new evolution of our partnership; it is moving into a strategic partnership where we combine your expertise in finance transformation with our solutions.
When we look forward, GCC is a no brainer, Rishabh. With the investment going into GCCs in India for the next period of time, we should make this a go-to-market focus and have that almost as a default for any organization that are looking at leveraging this model. We will continue with all the innovation that we mentioned to have EY bringing this innovation and showcasing the commitment, to continuous innovation to our clients. We also thinking about what other models, what are the partnership models we can create that are India-specific for EY. One of them that we're working on right now is to think about a model in which EY partners with SAP BlackLine as well as BlackLine by positioning EY as a unified strategic partner for seamless pre-sales, sales, implementation and customer success – end-to-end execution, ensuring efficient collaboration and maximum value to clients. We hope to bring you more information about this in a future podcast.
Sudhir Ramakrishnan: Thank you very much, Adrian. This was an extremely engaging conversation. You have shared some extremely valuable insights. It has been a pleasure having you both on the Navigating Alliances podcast.
Adrian Rusu: It has been an absolute pleasure sharing my thoughts. I really appreciate, Sudhir and Rishabh for this opportunity.
Rishabh Jain: Thank you, Adrian. It is always a pleasure talking to you. I believe this time it is a good showcase of our partnership to our audience. And thank you, Sudhir, for organizing this. Thank you so much.
Sudhir Ramakrishnan: Thank you once again, Adrian and Rishabh. To our listeners, thank you very much for tuning in. Be sure to join us for the next episode as we continue to navigate the intricacies of partnerships and innovation, until then forging new paths and exploring new horizons.
If you would like to listen to our podcasts on the go:
In the latest episode of our ‘Navigating Alliances’ series, we invite Kush Kumar of HighRadius, a technology-driven finance transformation company and Rishabh Jain, Partner, Finance Transformation, EY India to explore the transformative potential of AI in finance.
In the second episode of our ‘Navigating Alliances’ podcast series, we discuss the convergence of technology, collaboration and innovation between EY and its alliance partners with Jens Boegh-Nielsen, EMEIA Markets & Business Development, EY, and Sibjyoti Basu, EMEIA Microsoft & India Alliances & Ecosystems Leader, EY.
EY India Insights podcast brings a new series, “Navigating Alliances” dedicated to exploring our strategic alliance partners. In the first episode, we are joined by Sameer Prakash, Tax Technology and Transformation Partner, EY India and Nitin Kotian, Regional Vice President – India and Asia South, UiPath. Together, they explore the transformative impact of AI and Generative AI (Gen AI) in the tax ecosystem.
