A new report by ACCA examines how finance shared service (FSS) and global business services (GBS) organisations continue to transform their operations. It considers current challenges as well as prevailing opportunities for driving future success.

GBS are multifunctional platforms encompassing functions from finance and accounting to HR, procurement, facilities, and even customer care, sales, marketing and engineering.

Based on a survey of over 800 business services professionals, with supporting insights from Everest Group and PwC, the report presents critical data from ACCA members around the world on the state of play within shared services.

Work in progress

While GBS models are increasingly hardwired into business, and more than proved their worth during the pandemic, there’s an opportunity for these services to move up the value chain.

This new research shows that the overwhelming level of activity performed by both FSS and GBS functions is transactional, despite over 70% of respondents surveyed for the report believing they provide higher value services to the business.

While GBS models have evolved, matured and function successfully, they’re falling short of their value-adding potential and, in practice, are not discernibly more evolved than FSS operations. In short, they are still very much a ‘work in progress’.