CFOs on AI: Brian Wenzel Of Synchrony On The Top 5 Ways To Use AI In Your Finance Department

Artificial Intelligence is not just a technological marvel; it’s a transformative tool reshaping various industry functions, including finance. From automating mundane tasks to generating insights through predictive analytics, AI offers a plethora of applications that can empower the finance department to be more efficient, accurate, and strategic. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Wenzel.

Brian Wenzel is the Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for Synchrony. As CFO he oversees accounting and controllership, financial planning and analysis, tax, investor relations and treasury. He has more than 30 years of experience in financial and strategic management, including 21 years at Synchrony (including the time prior to its separation from GE in 2014).

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?

As CFO, I ensure the continued execution of Synchrony’s financial and growth objectives. I am also the executive sponsor of Synchrony’s Veteran’s network and champion of those who have served our country. Outside of work, I enjoy golf, movies, reading and most importantly family time. I am a loving dad of two daughters and one son. I enjoy going to sporting events with my family, especially college sporting events.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Every day I am inspired by the resiliency of my son, B.J. He has been living with Crohn’s disease for the last decade, and his condition is severe. He has been in and out of the hospital so often that he missed the entire seventh grade. I watch him work harder than everyone else to stay on track with his education despite the challenges of his illness. He gets up every day, whether he’s feeling good or bad, and continues to push forward. He inspires me to work hard regardless of the challenge.

Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?

Throughout my career, I have focused on curiosity, problem solving and being a team player. The first step in actively building these traits is to recognize that they are the keys to success. Curiosity fosters lifelong learning. Problem-solving skills will help you take on big challenges. Teamwork not only creates community among colleagues, it is a force multiplier in getting things done. Any good mentor will help you develop these qualities into real assets.

Which skills are you still trying to grow now?

Active listening, which requires more than just hearing what people are saying, is essential as we look at a multi-generational and hybrid workforce. The essence of active listening is offering a safe space for employees to share their ideas. This skill is very important as you become more senior in a role.

I find active listening so helpful, because I developed as a leader in a very different world. Back then, you would travel with your boss, or talk with them in between meetings or in the cafe. That was how you learned hard and soft skills. Now, I have to be very intentional in making sure I am having those conversations across my team as we have shifted to a new hybrid way of working. Active listening is a big part of that.

Let’s now move to the main topic of our interview. Can you share a specific example where AI was introduced in your finance department and led to significant operational efficiency?

Synchrony’s AI tools improve the efficiency of the finance team by reducing the time spent on data preparation (ingestion and hygiene) and increasing their capacity to focus on data analysis and strategy. Our initial efforts were centered around automating various tasks within the finance department including generating reports, reconciliations, compliance-related surveillance activities, streamlining new product implementation, and much more. One specific example is the automation of invoices, which previously required manual adjustments and modifications based on each specific agreement. This initiative resulted in thousands of hours of time savings, reduced errors, and allowed our teams to prioritize value-added activities rather than repetitive, manual tasks.

How did you address the skill gap in your team when building AI-powered finance models?

We are always evaluating what work we do and how we do it. That means upskilling our existing talent or bringing in new talent as needed. We also take great care to retain the business expertise that is vital to our company. We’ve focused on ensuring a strong partnership between our technical experts and our core finance talent, which helps with adoption as the finance professionals are able to view AI as a tool for them to leverage rather than something designed to replace them.

We’ve also made a concerted effort to stay up to date on novel tools and best practices through external research and consultants and then relaying that information to our employees through training and education to help them become more familiar and help with the transition.

In fact, Synchrony has one of the most robust tuition reimbursement and skills building programs. The company provides reimbursement up to $20,000 a year for full-time employees and $5,000 a year for part-time employees. We also help to offset some of the industry training that is required for our employees, including technical certifications.

Additionally, we have Technology Centers at UIUC & UCONN with undergraduate to PhD interns working embedded in our teams to help identify opportunities and build new capabilities.

How has AI enabled your finance team to make more data-driven strategic decisions?

It starts with the cultural transformation required for embracing a new technology, especially one as groundbreaking as AI. We’ve started to train our people — first to not be afraid of AI — and then on ways to use new tools to look at our data differently.

We’ve focused on creating the capacity for our finance team to spend more of their time and effort on driving business strategy by automating many of the mundane and repetitive tasks that previously pulled them away. Additionally, the ability to leverage large amounts of internal and external data has helped us make better decisions in areas such as underwriting which has helped us navigate these uncertain economic times.

What is your stance on custom-built AI tools versus off-the-shelf solutions?

At Synchrony we believe there is value in both approaches. Cost, time, customization and maintenance needs, and usage are all variables that we consider when deciding whether to build or buy. Ultimately there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.

We’re firm believers that there won’t be a single AI solution that’s right — there will be solutions that are great generalists, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside solutions that are highly trained on understanding specific areas of a business such as finance, credit, code generation, or procedures. Having an ability to orchestrate is what’s going to produce the most value for us.

What are some evolving AI trends that you believe CFOs should prepare for to stay ahead of the curve?

I see four major trends. First, a shift toward real-time data will allow for more dynamic decision-making. The rate of change in the market has never been faster, and being able to quickly ingest, evaluate and manipulate large data and adjust strategies will be a massive competitive advantage.

Second, the workforce needed to succeed in the future will look very different than our past. Ensuring you have the right talent in place to navigate a much more digital and technology-focused future will be vital to continued success. Also, it is imperative to being able to invest in technology now even if at a small-scale to avoid falling too far behind the competition.

Third, AI cannot be a “black box”. So, the trend toward explainable AI will be very important. When AI is explainable via a set of tools, you can understand and interpret predictions made by your machine learning models. This allows users to better understand your models’ behavior and debug and improve model performance. This will significantly improve user trust and adoption as well as help mitigate regulatory and other risks that may arise as you depend more heavily on model-based outputs.

Finally, Generative AI technology is likely to change the everyday ways we do our work. Instead of spending time in spreadsheets, we may eventually just be conversing with a generative AI that creates the spreadsheets for us. The possibilities are vast and may fundamentally change just the way people go about their jobs.

What are your “Top 5 Ways to Use AI in Your Finance Department?”

We are using AI in a number of interesting ways. For example:

• Digital Automation — AI automates repetitive tasks and streamlines processes. This saves time and allows finance professionals to focus on more complex problems that require human expertise. For example, AI lets us employ hyper-automation techniques to integrate data from diverse platforms, which is extremely helpful in generating invoices, making account reconciliations, transferring data, performing surveillance and much more.
• Controls and Risk Management — AI automates compliance-related activities and ensures the accurate reflection of compliance across the organization. It also identifies anomalies within financial datasets, helping to detect potential errors. By employing AI, we can identify deviations in large datasets, such as missing or misclassified data, as well as metrics that surpass certain thresholds. Business owners are then notified of any potential dataset errors for resolution.
• Financial & Management Reporting — AI in conjunction with our data visualization tools produces recurring financial reports and management dashboards and automatically generates insights and commentary for the business covering a wide range of activities, from tracking transactional metrics to identifying potential areas of concern.

For the future, we are looking at other functions, including:

• Driving Deeper Insights — AI tools can gather and analyze vast amounts of data in real-time, enabling them to quickly identify trends, risks, and anomalies and make informed strategic decisions. AI and machine learning can help synthesize complex data and more meaningfully merge financial, commercial and market data to produce deeper insights and recommendations.
• Forecasting & Budgeting — The ability to evaluate large datasets allows AI to capture complex patterns and relationships that were previously unknown, enabling them to provide predictive analytics about customer performance and market trends as well as highlight potential risks and opportunities.
• Putting Data to Work — The use of generative AI can make it easier to interface with data. One of the most exciting possibilities is the ability to empower business leaders who have unique expertise in their specialty but are not finance experts to leverage this technology. We envision a world where our leaders can use natural language to request the data, forecasts, and scenarios they want to explore and have a well-controlled AI return clear guidance.

Can you share a story about a challenge you faced while integrating AI into your finance department, and how you overcame it?

One of the primary obstacles we faced during the integration of AI was the misconception surrounding job loss. We took proactive measures to demonstrate the goal of our initiative was to enhance productivity and enable our teams to focus on analysis and strategy rather than manual repetitive tasks. We believe that AI is only successful if there is some human integration. Additionally, we made sure the business owners were a partner in the automation journey, so they felt joint ownership of the solution which helped address their concerns.

Given the rapid advancements in AI technology, where do you see the finance department in the next five years in terms of AI integration?

As AI advances, more digital and technical skills will be required to operate finance departments effectively. Other areas of the business will rely on finance departments for insights and decision-making as opposed to the data processing and reporting they handle now. Reporting will likely shift to a self-service portal, allowing finance teams to focus on strategic thinking.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Our country is divided along economic, gender, ethnic, political and many other lines. If we could take that energy and channel it into something positive, we could change the world. The younger generations bear the costs of this division more than any other group. At the same time, they have lived through so many tragic world events, amplified by 24x7 social media. While I worry about the impact all of this has on younger generations, I also know their strength and resiliency, and I am hopeful that they will be successful in healing the divisions that hold us all back.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.