Corporate resilience tested by the butterfly effect across global markets.
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There was a time not long ago when the operating models of most major businesses resembled an Athenian temple — a series of vertical support functions working largely independently to uphold the superstructure. Accounting handled receivables, payables and tax compliance. Legal managed risk. Compliance ensured all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed in line with regulatory requirements.
Today, the lines between corporate functions are blurring as businesses expand globally, facing complex and constantly changing legal, regulatory and economic landscapes. In this new reality, a small disruption in any one function can have far-reaching effects across the organization.
This raises the question: How are businesses breaking down legacy silos to address increased interconnectedness? And as they do, can modern departments still maintain the independence and autonomy needed to get things done?
Volatility Rising
Take a modern tax department, for example. Whether navigating the effects of tariffs, complying with new real-time reporting mandates sweeping across Europe or forecasting future liabilities in an uncertain economy, the list of fast-changing variables a typical corporate tax professional faces each day keeps growing. Tax and accounting professionals now juggle forecasting, compliance and technology tasks that were not part of their responsibilities a decade ago, and the grim reality for many corporate tax departments is that they are not set up to meet today’s demands.
In fact, our recent Future of Professionals Report found that 54% of respondents said their organizations lack the context needed to complete tasks tied to cross-functional corporate governance and compliance workflows. Nearly half, 49%, said they lacked a continuous, cross-functional view of data, insights and governance for workflows. Those shortcomings leave a trail of loose ends and dead-end processes that firms must find a way to navigate.
Shifting Compliance To Strategic Advantage
These inefficiencies often cascade throughout an organization. They create operational challenges when teams must redo work to retrace colleagues’ steps in other departments or add new manual handoffs between parts of the business. They also create blind spots where, for example, the tax team may assume the global trade team is current on tariff schedules, only for both to be caught off guard by new restrictions on a key supplier. Most importantly, this siloed approach to compliance leads to missed opportunities for growth. Whether identifying a growth market from patterns in real-time tax receipts or anticipating a shift in supply routes due to geopolitical volatility, corporate tax, legal, trade and risk functions are on the front lines of critical changes that can have major effects on the business. Without a connected view, however, these insights are often lost.
Perhaps that’s why only 17% of C-suite leaders said their compliance functions “significantly contribute” to overall business objectives, according to a recent Thomson Reuters survey. Despite the critical role these compliance functions play in modern corporations, senior leaders too often view them as administrative players.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Forward-thinking corporations are already using artificial intelligence to deliver faster, more robust insights and automation tools that save time and connect information across their businesses. Firms can unlock even more when they integrate these insights into enterprise workflows, giving employees access to a single hub of information that enables collaboration while sparing executives from manual searches and toggling between multiple solutions.
Embracing The Change
The game has changed. The modern corporate operating model has shifted from relying on retrospective analysis and reporting across separate business functions to an agile, forward-looking stance built on connected insights. Now the solutions companies use must rise to meet these challenges.
Firms that continue with business as usual risk volatility in the form of regulatory fines, forecasting errors and employee burnout. Those that embrace this new order will be better positioned to anticipate risk and seize opportunities. Executives need to chart the right path forward and identify weaknesses in workflows that can be strengthened by multidimensional solutions. As 2026 approaches, that self-examination should be near the top of every corporate priority list.
