New innovations in payments, enterprise performance management, and AI automation help finance teams move quickly from insight to execution while maintaining governance and control.
SAP Connect in 2026: Advancing the Autonomous Enterprise
Finance leaders today are expected to do far more than report results. They’re expected to shape business outcomes, guide decisions, and respond quickly to change. Yet many finance processes still operate in isolation rather than in concert. Invoice approval and payment execution happen in separate places.
Planning, consolidation, and reporting often rely on separate systems and workflows. And governance often misses critical information by operating in a silo. The result is delays between identifying an issue, making a decision, and taking action.
This year at SAP Connect, SAP announced new capabilities designed to help close those gaps. These include SAP Pay, a new payment service embedded in SAP Cloud ERP; SAP Enterprise Financial Consolidation, a new addition to SAP’s enterprise performance management portfolio; and an expanded set of Joule Assistants that bring AI-powered support to finance, governance, and compliance processes.
While each innovation addresses a different challenge, they share a common objective. Finance teams should spend less time moving information between systems and more time acting on insights.
Embedding payments into finance operations
One of the most persistent sources of friction in finance is the payment process itself.
An invoice may be approved in the ERP system, but completing the payment often still involves banking portals, payment files, middleware, and reconciliation activities. Each additional handoff introduces complexity and can slow execution.
SAP Pay is designed to simplify that process by embedding payment execution directly into SAP Cloud ERP. When an invoice is approved, payment and reconciliation can occur within the same workflow and the same business context.
The launch also marks SAP’s entry into payment services through Tereina, a wholly owned SAP subsidiary established earlier this year. As a regulated payment-service provider, Tereina enables SAP to deliver services natively within finance workflows rather than relying solely on third-party providers. This helps keep payment execution, reconciliation, controls, and auditability connected to the underlying business transaction.
The service supports EFT, wire transfers, checks, and stablecoin-based settlement for cross-border transactions. More broadly, SAP offers customers a wide range of payment options, spanning bank API integrations, connectivity to more than 10,000 financial institutions through SWIFT, digital-currency payments, and now natively embedded payment services.
For finance organizations, the opportunity is not simply faster payment execution. It is reducing the effort required to connect systems, manage exceptions, and reconcile information after the fact while keeping payment processing, reconciliation, controls, and auditability within a single workflow.
SAP Pay is now generally available in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Connecting performance management across the enterprise
The same challenge appears across enterprise performance management.
Planning, consolidation, close processes, and external reporting all rely on the same financial reality. Yet they are often managed through separate tools, data models, and processes. Maintaining a consistent view of performance can become increasingly difficult as organizations grow and business conditions change.
At SAP Connect, we announced SAP Enterprise Financial Consolidation to help address that challenge.
Built on SAP Business Data Cloud, the solution brings together statutory and management consolidation with close and disclosure capabilities on a common governed data foundation. By connecting these activities more closely, finance teams can spend less time reconciling information and more time understanding performance and responding to change.
The solution also includes new Joule Assistants for consolidation and disclosure processes. These assistants help identify anomalies, resolve exceptions, and support disclosure preparation while maintaining auditability and human oversight.
For organizations operating mixed environments–some SAP, some non-SAP environments–SAP Enterprise Financial Consolidation provides flexibility by supporting data from multiple sources. It also offers a path forward for customers looking to modernize existing consolidation environments and adopt a more AI-enabled approach to performance management.
SAP Early Adopter Care is planned for the first quarter of 2027.
Expanding AI across finance and governance
AI’s potential in finance extends beyond answering questions or generating summaries. The larger opportunity is helping teams complete work that has traditionally required significant manual effort, specialist knowledge, and cross-functional coordination.
At SAP Connect, SAP expanded its portfolio of Joule Assistants to address these opportunities.
The new assistants support areas including accounting, revenue recognition, pricing, disclosure management, project operations, governance, and trade compliance. Embedded directly into existing workflows, they are designed to help teams complete tasks more efficiently while preserving review processes and accountability.
Some focus on helping finance professionals understand complex calculations and reporting requirements. Others support pricing decisions, disclosure preparation, project execution, and continuous monitoring of risks and controls.
Just as important is governance.
As organizations deploy more AI agents across business functions, they need assurance that those agents operate within the same boundaries that govern human users. New governance, security, and compliance assistants are designed to extend existing controls, access management, and monitoring capabilities to AI-driven activities, helping organizations apply consistent oversight across both human and digital actors.
General availability for the Governance Assistant and International Trade Assistant is planned for Q4 2026.
From financial insight to immediate action
Finance has always played a central role in helping organizations understand performance. Increasingly, it is also expected to help organizations respond in real time.
That makes speed, visibility, and execution just as important as reporting accuracy.
The innovations SAP announced at SAP Connect reflect that shift. Whether simplifying payments, connecting performance management processes, or embedding AI directly into everyday finance work, each reduces the operational distance between identifying an issue and acting on it.
For finance teams, the ultimate goal is not simply faster processes or faster reports. It is making better decisions with greater confidence and executing those decisions with less friction.
Learn more about how SAP is helping organizations modernize finance operations across ERP, planning, treasury, payments, and accounting here.
Lawrence Martin is general manager and chief product officer for SAP Finance & Spend.
David Imbert is chief marketing officer for SAP Financial Management.
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