In today’s Finance Pulse, gain insight into how:

• Finance transformations fail when execution lags, and leaders treat go-live like the finish line instead of building change management, process ownership, and continuous improvement.

• Fintech M&A is concentrating in infrastructure as buyers prioritize battle-tested core banking, payments rails, and compliance depth over front-end polish.

• Cash gets trapped off the P&L through late or disputed invoices, outdated payment terms, and unchecked inventory or subscriptions, making bank balances harder to predict.

Each of these articles is penned by members of Forbes Finance Council, key luminaries shaping the future of finance.

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Finance Transformations Still Fail: It’s Not the ERP, It’s Execution

In 2026, finance teams have AI, cloud enterprise resource planning, and automation at their fingertips, yet transformation programs still miss the value they promised. The problem is rarely the tech itself. It is how organizations manage change, map processes, and sustain ownership after go-live.

Here are the failure points, plus what success looks like:

🧠 Reactive Tech Decisions: Rushing to “new system = better outcomes” often exposes deeper operational cracks instead of fixing them.

🧩 Weak Change Management: Teams resist when leaders skip the why, underinvest in training, and fail to secure stakeholder buy-in.

🗺️ Automating Broken Processes: Lift-and-shift digitizes inefficiency, so problems simply run faster.

🧑‍✈️ Ownership Disappears After Go-Live: Governance fades, KPIs get ignored, and users drift back to old habits.

🏁 What Winning Looks Like: Clear process owners, continuous improvement, adoption measured before deployment, and go-live treated as a milestone, not the finish line.

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Fintech Infrastructure M&A: Correction, or the Market Growing Up?

Consolidation across banking and payments is accelerating, but the biggest clue is where deals are happening. The action is in core banking, payments rails, orchestration, and compliance tooling, which signals a shift toward buying durable infrastructure depth over flashy front ends.

Here’s how to read the wave and what it changes right now:

🧱 M&A Is Clustering In “The Plumbing”: Battle-tested, regulated transaction infrastructure is harder to replicate than a slick interface.

🔍 Capital Is Pricing Depth, Not Polish: Buyers are paying for proven systems that have handled real volume over time.

🌍 GCC Lens Is Different: Regional banks face fewer legacy-core constraints, and local capital can be more patient on long-horizon infrastructure bets.

📝 Procurement Due Diligence Just Got Harder: Vendor viability can’t be assumed; teams need to evaluate likely ownership and roadmap alignment in 3 years.

🧰 Next Phase May Be “Breadth On Top of Depth”: Expect fewer, larger platforms covering more of the stack, forcing clearer decisions about concentration risk versus best-of-breed sprawl.

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Cash Flow Isn’t Missing, It’s Trapped: The P&L Blind Spots

Finance teams can hit revenue and margin targets and still wonder why the bank balance feels tight. The root issue is often cash getting stuck in everyday frictions that never show up clearly on the P&L, from invoicing delays to bloated inventory and forgotten subscriptions.

Watch for these common cash flow leaks:

🧾 Late or Inaccurate Invoices: Internal delays and rekeyed data can pause the payment clock or trigger disputes that reset it.

📅 Stale Payment Terms: Net-60 terms that made sense years ago can quietly drag the cash conversion cycle when nobody revisits them.

📦 Unmonitored Inventory & Spend: Overstock ordered on instinct, plus auto-renewing software and vendor contracts, tie up cash as the business scales.

✅ Approval & Reimbursement Creep: Extra sign-offs and lax policy enforcement create slow, steady leakage that compounds over time.

👀 Waiting for Month-end to See Problems: Faster visibility matters. The author cites a 2026 index where lower-performing firms reduced cash flow unpredictability after adopting AI tools for working capital management.

Read The Full Article >

Wrapping Up

If these articles sparked your interest, we have a network that you will absolutely love: Forbes Finance Council.

This exclusive, vetted community brings together the brightest minds in finance—founders, CEOs, CFOs, and other finance team leaders.

Put yourself at the forefront of innovation with access to publishing opportunities on Forbes.com, a personalized, SEO-friendly Executive Profile, and the chance to network with other respected leaders in the field.

Join Forbes Finance Council today, and become part of a group driving transformation in finance.