Jeff Diorio argues that treasury professionals must embrace automation and technology to become strategic partners in their organizations. He discusses how treasury roles are evolving and what the changing expectations mean for the people doing the work.
At a high level, everybody understands why we need the technology. When you go to implement it, that's where we truly see the oars fall off the boat, the engine drops out the bottom, and the system gets. The technology gets implemented poorly. And a lot of it is natural human resistance. What people need to recognize is there's no value add to their job in a Treasury Department to be gathering data and consolidating data. And an awful lot of people have that as their jobs. And they feel threatened when the technology is going to take that away. And they need to, as you pointed out, they need to embrace the change because that job is going away. There is absolutely no reason to have people gathering data and putting it in spreadsheets and preparing cash positions. You need to embrace how the technology can help you do that. So you're the master of the technology, and now you're able to add the value. Add. Most treasurers say, when I go to the CFO, the CFO says, why did we have to hire all these MBAs? Because they're very, very smart people. They're highly educated. We're paying them a lot of money. How are they adding value to the organization? You need to focus on that. You need to focus on how you can get yourself away from gathering information and presenting it so that you can then analyze it and make really effective decisions with it. At a junior level, you need to understand how to make the machine run. You need to understand what treasury is about and how to use the technology that's presented as efficiently as possible to make that happen in a both efficient and controlled way. In order to move up, you have got to be adept. We when treasurers say to me, do you know people? And that's how we met. Right, Mike, you were looking for some people, and I know a lot of people. So when treasurers say, what am I looking for? Well, at any level within the organization, when you're hiring, they're looking for people that both understand finance and have the ability to adopt the technology. And the organizations that don't have enough of those people are the ones that are just slogging along, and people are wondering why everybody's spending so much time every day doing something and they're not getting anywhere. What do I see changing in Treasury? Well, I think the automation will continue to be there. I also see the treasurer and the treasurer's department taking a larger role within the firm. I can't tell you over the last three years how many treasurers have said, our objective for this year is to become more of a strategic partner throughout the organization to help the organization, because treasury understand things like payments. And if you're structuring a deal for this company, our company, and you are thinking, well, we can do it this way or that way, in a lot of cases, treasury can participate in that conversation and say, make sure that when you get to the payment part of this or some other aspect that treasury has a lot of experience with, that you do this and not that.
