The Connector. Podcast - CxReports

Listen to the podcast with Marko Stijak, CEO at CxReports.

Reporting at scale often breaks where complexity meets volume. Finance teams, pension funds, and SaaS platforms all hit the same wall: millions of pages, intricate tables and charts, strict compliance needs, and impatient customers waiting for statements. The conversation with Marko, CEO of CxReports, zeroes in on the pain beneath the surface—legacy systems that can’t keep up, fragmented toolchains, and the hidden cost of endless IT tickets. What differentiates a modern approach is not only raw throughput, but a platform that fits cleanly into existing stacks, respects data boundaries, and puts ownership back in the hands of business users. When a solution treats reporting as a living part of operations, it stops being a monthly scramble and becomes infrastructure.

The buyer journey often begins with frustration: too many manual steps, brittle templates, and a backlog for tiny changes. Teams discover CxReports while searching for an alternative and split into two tracks. Some jump straight into documentation, videos, and a free trial. Others opt for a guided demo and collaborative rollout. Both paths tend to start with parallel runs. High-risk reports remain in the old system while a subset migrates to the new platform. Over time, confidence grows and the migration widens until the legacy stack can be retired. The result is less risk, faster iterations, and measurable gains in delivery time and accuracy.

Automation and integration are the core levers. Modern companies need cloud-native products with APIs, webhooks, and connectors that plug into billing platforms, banking cores, and SaaS workflows. CxReports serves as a pass-through engine that ingests data, generates output, and immediately discards sensitive inputs. That design helps security teams sleep at night and gives legal teams a clean posture for audits. Features like audit trails and cloud storage for outputs further support compliance and governance. For the most sensitive environments, on-premise deployment remains an option, and many teams reconsider cloud once they understand that operational data never persists in the application.

A pension fund case study makes the impact tangible. Previously, the fund stitched together five tools to gather data, render documents, email recipients, and prep print jobs for older members who prefer postal mail. After adopting CxReports, the team can produce 40,000 multi-page statements in about an hour. Emails go out automatically, while a consolidated print-ready PDF covers postal deliveries. The documents now carry consistent branding—fonts, colors, and logos—without the layout breaks that plagued the old pipeline. Beyond aesthetics, the consolidation eliminates handoffs that introduce errors and delays, producing a smoother experience for both staff and end users.

Hidden costs often live in IT service queues. For institutions that outsource technology, every change becomes a ticket, every ticket a line item, and each delay compounds operational risk. Small edits—adding a column, changing a filter, or launching a new report—can take weeks or months. Shifting report ownership back to the business reduces cost and friction. Teams can iterate on content and structure quickly, while IT focuses on strategy and security. That rebalancing is the real ROI: faster cycles, fewer surprises, and the agility to adjust communication as markets or regulations change.

Looking ahead, AI promises to reshape the workflow from design to delivery. Instead of manually crafting templates or writing complex queries, teams will describe the outcome they want in natural language. An AI-first reporting engine can draft templates, infer data mappings, propose charts, and optimize readability. The vision is self-service: product managers or operations leads define the report goals, while the system handles layout, data joins, and distribution logic. Getting there requires deep integration with the reporting engine, guardrails for compliance, and controls for brand integrity. But the payoff is huge: better reports, created faster, with fewer dependencies.

Pragmatically, the best-fit customers today are organizations that send thousands of PDFs per month—banks, investment funds, healthcare providers, B2B SaaS vendors, and any operation with recurring statements. Whether cloud or on-prem, what matters is delivering accurate, branded documents at scale while minimizing risk. When automation, integration, and ownership come together, reporting transforms from a chore into a competitive advantage. That’s the shift underway: from piecemeal tools and ticket queues to a streamlined, compliant, AI-ready platform that delivers on time, every time.