New technologies : threats vs. opportunities for the accounting profession

Abstract

The present research was inspired by Farrar’s white paper: Re-inventing finance for a digital world. (CGMA, 2019) which was a global research with more than 5,500 finance professionals from over 2,000 organizations in over 150 countries. Focusing on Brazilian accountants, the objective of this research was to measure if new technologies were generally perceived to be a threat or an opportunity. Moreover, the aim was to examine if technology readiness, business partner roles, career adaptability, and age had significant correlations with the sense of opportunity and threat. Through Google docs and using personal contacts and Linkedin connections a questionnaire was conducted with 473 respondents. The findings indicated that the Brazilian accountants’ knowledge about new technologies was above 56% and their sense of new technologies being critical to transform organizations was above 29%. However, when we examined the accountants’ usage of a range of new technologies such as cloud computing, process robotics, visualization, advanced analytics cognitive computing, in-memory computing and blockchain, we found that usage was limited. Specifically, only cloud computing was used by more than 13% of the accountants surveyed. Also, as predicted, technology readiness, and career adaptability were significantly positively correlated with the sense of opportunity, and significantly negatively correlated with the sense of job insecurity, while business partner was only significantly correlated (positively) with opportunity, and age was only significantly correlated (positively) with the sense of stress. In sum, Brazilian accountants still have a way to go before being considered integrated with the new technological reality.