The Next Chapter of Shared Services: From Efficiency Engine to Strategic Business Partner

Shared Services and Global Business Services (GBS) organisations have built their reputations on efficiency. Both groups centralise activities, standardise processes, improve service levels, and reduce the cost of delivery.

But efficiency is no longer enough.

Today, GBS leaders are also expected to do more. They must strengthen controls, support enterprise transformation, responsibly introduce artificial intelligence (AI), and provide the insight needed for better business decisions. To meet the moment, Shared Services is evolving from a back-office delivery model into a strategic enterprise capability.

This shift is reflected in the theme of the Deloitte Shared Services Conference 2026, ‘Progress Beyond Boundaries’. At the conference, topics will explore how GBS organisations can achieve the following:

• Harness AI
• Future-proof their operating footprint
• Develop the next generation of talent
• Establish a more strategic role within the enterprise

Realising that ambition, however, is difficult when Finance still depends on fragmented systems, point solutions, and spreadsheets.

Close and consolidation may run in one application, account reconciliations in another, and planning in a third. Teams facing this fragmentation must then move, validate, and reconcile data between systems, creating more administration precisely when Shared Services is trying to simplify and scale.

To move beyond efficiency, GBS needs a technology foundation that brings processes, data, and insight together.

Bringing finance processes together on a governed data foundation enables organisations to streamline close and reporting, improve planning accuracy, and strengthen confidence in decision-making.

For Shared Services, that standardisation helps establish common processes across entities, regions, and business units without introducing a separate application or silo for every requirement. Finance teams can work from consistent data and controls while retaining the flexibility needed to support different operating models.

OneStream unifies financial close and consolidation, journals, account reconciliations, transaction matching, reporting, planning, and forecasting on a single platform and governed data model.

The value of this approach is measurable. Nucleus Research measured the OneStream deployments it studied. Here’s the outcomes the research revealed:

• Achieved an average 65% reduction in monthly close time
• Retired an average of two point-solutions
• Recovered approximately $500,000 to $600,000 annually in software and managed-services costs

Broader OneStream customer-value research revealed the following outcomes:

• 54% reduction in close and consolidation time
• 58% improvement in time spent on account reconciliations
• 72% reduction in data-management cycle time
• 57% improvement in reporting, planning and budgeting time

For GBS leaders, these outcomes connect platform consolidation directly to the measures that matter (e.g., cycle time, cost to serve, consistency, control, and workforce capacity).

For Shared Services transformation, the financial close is a natural starting point. It involves multiple teams, systems, and deadlines, yet often continues to rely on emails, spreadsheets, and manual hand-offs.

OneStream brings consolidations, journals, reconciliations, intercompany activity, transaction matching, task management, and reporting into a common environment. While shared workflows provide greater visibility across the process, responsibilities can still be distributed to the appropriate regional or business-unit teams.

A global manufacturer featured in OneStream’s value-realisation research used Task Manager to eliminate back-and-forth email communication from the monthly close and budget cycle. In addition, the manufacturer automated a previously manual, Excel-based cash-flow model, accelerated the close, and released resources to focus on financial risk.

That distinction matters. A modern close isn’t simply a faster close. Rather, a modern close is a more visible, controlled, and scalable process where teams can focus on exceptions and risk rather than chasing status updates.

GBS leaders don’t need to transform every process at once. Instead, there’s a more practical path:

1. Begin with a high-friction area (e.g., close, reconciliations, or management reporting)
2. Establish common data and controls
3. Extend the same governed foundation into planning, forecasting, analytics, and AI

This phased approach allows Shared Services to demonstrate value early while building towards a broader operating-model transformation.

Account reconciliation is another potential starting point and a process commonly centralised within Shared Services. Not to mention, account reconciliation is also an area where specialist point solutions can create additional integration, licensing, and administration requirements.

OneStream Account Reconciliations uses financial data already imported and validated within the platform, helping to keep reconciliations aligned with financial statements. In fact, OneStream supports standardised templates, workflows, multi-currency reconciliations, notifications, and the ability to drill from financial reports into reconciliation details.

One customer replaced BlackLine with OneStream Account Reconciliations, accelerated the reconciliation process by 75%, and saved approximately $100,000 per year in software licence costs.

For Shared Services, those outcomes illustrate the wider value of unification: improving a process while reducing how many applications Finance must integrate, govern, and support.

While essential to Shared Services, standardisation shouldn’t force every business unit into an inflexible, lowest-common-denominator process.

Fruit of the Loom moved beyond a narrow legacy-system replacement by bringing consolidation, planning, reporting, and cash-flow processes together on OneStream. The result? More streamlined consolidation, stronger auditability, easier data mapping, and greater visibility across locations, brands, and products.

Fruit of the Loom also increased the level of information managed within the platform by 2.9 billion data points, representing approximately 100 times more detail than the previous HFM environment.

For the Shared Services audience, Liberty Global provides a particularly relevant example. The company’s Finance services organisation, Liberty Blume, provides services to entities owned by Liberty Global and beyond. Notably, that directly illustrates OneStream being considered within a shared-services operating model. OneStream was selected due to its agility and alignment with Liberty Global's long-term Finance transformation roadmap, including AI and automation.

Collectively, these examples show that GBS organisations can establish common standards without losing the detail and adaptability required by individual businesses.

The longer-term opportunity is to extend Shared Services beyond transaction processing and retrospective reporting.

Because OneStream connects actuals, plans, forecasts, and operational information, teams can use the same platform for financial reporting, planning, scenario analysis, and performance management. Shared Services can therefore provide not only reliable processing, but also more consistent management information and forward-looking insight.

The Carlyle Group selected OneStream to unify consolidation, legal-entity planning, project forecasting, and people planning. Reported outcomes included reducing consolidation time by more than 50%, cutting revenue and expense budget updates from 1 week to 5 to 10 minutes, and reducing headcount-assumption updates from one week to 20 minutes.

The broader lesson for GBS is clear. When trusted actuals and planning processes share the same platform, Finance can respond more quickly to change and spend less time assembling information.

AI will be a defining topic at the Deloitte Shared Services Conference 2026. However, successful adoption depends on the quality, context, and governance of the underlying data. Finance teams rely on financial information that is accurate and dependable. In that context, AI that’s only 80% accurate is effectively 100% unusable. That’s why OneStream extends the same standards of trust, governance, and auditability embedded in its platform to the development and delivery of AI.

OneStream puts governed AI to work across close, reconciliations, and forecasting — using trusted financial and operational data to flag risks, prioritise exceptions, and accelerate decisions. Teams can draw on trusted agentic analysis and deep research natively or through these paths:

• MCP connections to AI Agents of choice
• Purpose-built solutions (e.g., AI-powered account reconciliations and SensibleAI Forecast), without adding another disconnected tool
• Configurable AI resources to enable customers to deploy AI throughout their processes

For GBS organisations, the objective shouldn’t be automation for its own sake. AI should help teams identify anomalies, prioritise exceptions, improve forecasting ,and redirect capacity from repetitive work towards analysis, control, and business partnership.

AI's role in Shared Services isn’t simply to automate tasks. AI should also help Finance teams shift their focus from processing transactions and chasing exceptions to delivering insight, improving controls, and driving better business outcomes.

The next generation of Shared Services will still be expected to deliver efficiency. But efficiency will be the foundation, not the destination.

Leading GBS organisations will need to do the following to progress beyond traditional boundaries:

• Standardise processes while supporting business diversity
• Strengthen control without slowing execution
• Scale services without multiplying applications
• Apply AI within trusted, governed processes

OneStream provides a foundation for that evolution by bringing core Finance processes, planning, reporting, analytics, and AI together on one extensible platform.

The evidence from customers goes beyond the unification of technology:

• Shortened close cycles
• Accelerated reconciliations
• Reduced point-solution costs
• Management of greater operational detail
• Planning updates measured in minutes, not days

The most successful Shared Services organisations of the next decade will do more than process transactions efficiently. They’ll also provide trusted information, automate intelligently, support enterprise transformation, and help the business make better decisions.

That future requires more than process change. A modern finance platform designed to unify data, processes, insights, and AI is needed.

OneStream will be joining Finance, Shared Services, and GBS leaders at the Deloitte Shared Services Conference in Brussels on 6 and 7 October 2026. There, we look forward to discussing how organisations can move beyond traditional service delivery and make Shared Services a more strategic driver of enterprise performance.

Ready to transform Shared Services from an efficiency engine into a strategic business partner? Meet us at the event, or visit OneStream.com. We’ll show you how we help Finance and GBS leaders unify close, reconciliations, planning, reporting, and AI on a single platform. That standardisation will help you reduce complexity, improve visibility, and create greater enterprise value.