Digital Transformation for Transfer Pricing: Creating a Common Language for Transfer Pricing

Tapio Pitkäranta, Chief Technical Officer Aibidia

I have been lucky to lead hundreds of cloud software development projects focused on automation across the healthcare and retail industries. When Aibidia CEO and Founder Hannu-Tapani Leppänen shared his vision of radically transforming the transfer pricing space, currently over-burdened with data-entry and document collation, I saw the same data and metadata driven challenges and opportunities that I have previously seen. I was sure that the same kinds of transformation I had driven before would again make a big impact. Given how little digital technology was deployed in support of transfer pricing, I saw Aibidia as one of the hardest but potentially most rewarding scenarios yet.

Now that I’m running the product development team at Aibidia, I’m excited that we’re developing software that offers “continuous compliance,” enabling transfer pricing experts to speak the same language in how transactions, documents, and agreements are all described. Using the “Three As” — AI, Automation, and Analytics capabilities, we fully standardize transfer pricing data as shown below in a depiction of our cloud software application.

Moreover, our approach standardizes the way transfer pricing content is described and adheres to the European Union and OECD Interoperability frameworks. In the same way this kind of standardization has led to efficiencies in banking, retail, healthcare, and other industries, Aibidia now makes this possible for transfer pricing.

Building on this work, it’s clear the next logical step is continuous compliance. It is somewhat simple and, at the same time, not very simple to provide a formal, technical description that cuts through legal, organization, semantic and technical layers. Aibidia is on a path to solve for this, which will lead to the same common internationally recognized language not only for transfer pricing experts but also for machine-to-machine communication API’s.

Together with my team, I’m very energized to bring this transformation to the tax teams of every multi-national organization, and to see the breakthrough gains in efficiency and value generation to come.