Part of the SYNAPSE 2026 series | Panel: Jason Abney (Disney), Nandita Narayan (Adyen), Caitroina McCusker (PwC)
Tax transformation is one of the most talked-about topics in indirect tax right now. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Most organisations treat it as a technology project. The companies that have actually done it successfully will tell you it is something else entirely: a data project, a people project, and a change management project that happens to involve technology.
That distinction was at the heart of one of the most candid panels at SYNAPSE 2026, Fonoa's annual conference bringing together the world's leading indirect tax professionals. Moderated by Fonoa, the session brought together a global entertainment company that has largely completed its transformation, Nandita Narayan from Adyen who is currently in the middle of a full infrastructure rebuild, and Caitroina McCusker from PwC who advises organisations through the process every day. Between them, they covered what transformation actually requires, what gets in the way, and what most teams are still getting wrong.
Before the panel began, the moderator asked the audience two questions. How many are still doing manual reconciliation? Nearly every hand went up. How many have a defined tax data owner? A handful. The session answered why that gap exists and what to do about it.
1. You cannot transform what you do not own: why data ownership comes first
The enterprise transformation story in this session is instructive because it shows what the destination actually looks like. The challenge was consolidating thousands of business entities and creating a single repository for every transaction. A project that began with income tax data was extended to indirect tax using the same approach and architecture. Every transaction now passes through one centralised system. New markets can be onboarded in a week.
"Girl please, it's not magical."
— Jason Abney, Disney
The candour matters. Getting there required starting the project six to nine months before the go-live date, managing change across a complex organisation, and making a deliberate decision to record all transactional data even in jurisdictions without an active mandate. When new compliance requirements arrive, the data infrastructure is already in place. That is the advantage that transformation at this level actually delivers.
The data ownership question is where every organisation needs to start. If nobody owns the data, nobody is accountable for what it looks like when an authority asks for it. Defining that ownership, and making it genuinely cross-functional, is the step that most businesses in the audience had not yet taken.
2. The data layer comes before everything else
Adyen is earlier in the journey but applying the same foundational logic. Their guiding principle for the current phase of their rebuild: the data layer has to exist before AI or automation can do anything useful.
Nandita from Adyen was direct about what that means in practice. This year is about cleaning up master data. Not AI. Not automation. Master data. The world is moving toward e-invoicing everywhere, digital reporting, and tax authorities using their own AI to analyse submissions. Adyen does not want to learn something about their data from a tax authority. They want to get ahead of it.
Adyen is also deliberately hiring for strategic work rather than manual processing, because the skills required to run a modern tax function are different from the skills required to run a periodic reconciliation. The rebuild is not just technical. It is a rethinking of what the team is for.
3. Tax transformation only works as a team sport: why cross-functional alignment is critical
Caitroina McCusker from PwC offered the clearest framing of why transformation projects fail when they are led by tax alone: indirect tax compliance works like an orchestra. Every function is an instrument. Tax, product, finance, tech, and operations all have a part to play. When they work together, the outcome is good. When each does its own thing, the result is noise. In a digital compliance environment, noise is risk.
"In the digital world, noise is risk."
— Caitroina McCusker, PwC
The practical implication is significant. When e-invoicing fails, tax authorities can shut down business operations until compliance is restored. That is not a tax team problem to manage in isolation. It is a business risk that requires shared ownership across functions. The companies that handle it best are the ones that have built cross-functional accountability into the structure of their compliance operations, not just into their incident response.
Bottom line: tax transformation is not a technology project, it's a foundations project
The companies that have made real progress on transformation share three things: they defined who owns the data before they bought any tools, they treated clean master data as the prerequisite for everything else, and they built compliance as a cross-functional responsibility rather than a tax team deliverable. The technology decisions came after those foundations were in place, not before. For most organisations, that is the order of operations that still needs to change.
