2 “A’s” in our Name, 3 “A’s” in our Platform: Engineering the Future of Transfer Pricing

Tapio Pitkäranta, Chief Technical Officer Aibidia

When I was first approached about the CTO Role at Aibidia, I felt here is and transfer pricing industry expert on the path that I have seen in other industries before. As someone without a deep finance background, I knew it was “there” just like other finance areas, but I didn’t realize just how important transfer pricing is to the strategy of every multinational organization. However, my interest was piqued after just a small amount of research revealed the real (and ever-increasing) significance of transfer pricing. When Aibidia CEO and Founder Hannu-Tapani Leppänen shared his vision of radically transforming this space, currently over-burdened with data-entry and document collation, I was ready to start the next day.

As a technology professional, I’ve been energized throughout my career by helping bring meaningful transformation to business processes or industries that are highly inefficient. While there is a lot of “buzz” around the “3 As” of technology today — AI, Automation, and Analytics — my personal experience has shown to me these capabilities really do bring measurable value. Many of us see these capabilities, first, on a personal level, such as your bank alerting you about an unrecognized charge or providing spending pattern updates — this is AI and Analytics in action. I personally find these to be conveniences, but not necessarily transformational.

For every multi-national organization, the transformation that technology can bring to transfer pricing is on another scale. For example, a tax department might have to perform data entry and publishing of more than 3000 documents each year for tax authorities across the world. On top of this, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of transactions must be allocated by tax jurisdiction and integrated into documentation as part of tax filings. The burden of this workload is enormous. At Aibidia, a company founded by transfer pricing professionals, we see not only the workload but also the lost opportunity for tax professionals to spend time looking for new value and insight from all of this data.

With the “three As” — AI, Automation, and Analytics — underpinning our cloud software platform, Aibidia is on a mission to radically improve how transfer pricing is executed. Together with my engineering team, we are looking for ways to automate every step of the process, to bring visual, real-time insights to areas such as the organization’s value chain, and to let AI help spot potential compliance risks. We’re also ferocious about security, building on the robust security architecture of Microsoft’s Cloud platform with additional protocols and technologies. We have hired the industry’s top security auditors as well to regularly evaluate our platform to give customers the greatest assurance their data is safe.

We call our solution a Transfer Pricing Accelerator, reinforcing that our cloud architecture can be utilized instantly without any deployment or IT resources required. Our customers see almost immediate productivity gains. Although we’re just getting started as my team sees limitless possibilities for “the 3 As” of technology to bring new value to transfer pricing professionals.