https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW5z7a4ij0s

So welcome to this our interview with Damian Bell from Signatized. Damien is going to introduce himself in a moment. What we're going to do is talk through why you guys should know about Signatize and what it's about and then we're also if you bit short time we've got a quick fire link as well so you can see in the show notes. So we'll go through this. First of all Damien if you would, can you explain who you are, what your role is and tell us what is Signatized and why should it matter to a treasurer? Over to you sir.

Thanks Mike. Yep. So my name is Damian Bell, I'm an enterprise account director here at Signitize. I've been with the business right from the start and in essence Signatize is a database which companies use treasurers use to manage their authorized signers, their bank signers across bank mandates, multiple bank accounts, usually multi jurisdictional. Why should people consider it? Well you know up until now most of most treasury teams have been managing this very important piece of or set of information on Excel or Word or sometimes even looser than that. And people haven't found that there's actually really been a great solution out there to answer the they might be using lots of other great treasury systems that do a world of good things but this signer management piece tends to get overlooked. And so that's where we fit into it.

And some of them are using this Excel PDF, you know they're saying well hang on, that works for us. Is that enough do you think?

It's understandable it's been enough because there hasn't been anything out there. But more and more the conversations we have is actually when you dig a bit deeper, most heads of treasury, most heads of team will go, I'm not happy with the way this is stored. This is important information that needs to be auditable, needs to be reliable, it needs to be secure with proper access controls. You know an Excel sheet on someone's hard drive floating around somewhere isn't what I'm comfortable with as a top grade treasury professional. So what else is out there? Okay, here's Signatize, let's take a look.

And when, if someone checks out the website you've got on there, you've got blockchain digital mandates actually sounds quite complex and expensive. The nicest way treasurers, you know, they're cost conscious, should we say?

So how many blocks and chains do I get for my money? The answer is it's not expensive. We're at a very Modest price point. We're often seen as a quick win. And that phrase, it can be a bit naff. But what does that mean in reality? It means our boarding times are very quick. So someone coming from an Excel or word based system or something else, even just paper, we're talking usually two days maximum a week. When you have some hundreds of accounts and many multiple bank relationships across the world in multi jurisdiction. The complexity, yes, it's made of blockchain. A lot of people won't know the sort of ones and zeros part of that. But what does that mean in sort of layman's terms? The key feature is it enables you to have an audit trail which is immutable so it can't be overwritten. So from a treasurer's point of view or any of our customers, it's like right here I've got a record where I know exactly what happened when and who did it and I'm team members when they're making changes to this.

When I've talked to, we've got other partners, we've got Fusible for instance and they give visibility across the organization. I know when you and I talked before that it's not just treasury owning this, you know the responsibility for this. Is it, you know, because it. Does it fit within treasury or is it. This is compliance. This is another area, you know who.

Owns cross functional areas. Yeah, you're right. The management or engagement with diners and signatory powers is a cross functional task or process in a business especially at the sort of level of complexity of the people in your network. So yeah, compliance want to have a view on this legal company secretariat. Those are also teams that we deal with and finance teams and the C suite. They want to know who actually is authorised to do X or Y or Z. But if we break it down sort of simply we deal with treasury teams and bank signers and then more broadly corporate authorized signers. So who has permission within a corporate to sign on behalf of the firm in any number of functions Operationally that might be signing high value HR contracts, it might be binding the company into an agreement with another business and or you know, large purchasing responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, many departments have a view or need to use signatory controls and sign a controls and authorities but we sort of break it down separately as a Treasury and then the rest of.

Corporate and have you seen any practical examples? Because obviously bring it to life for us, you know the, any transformations with it because you've got, you've obviously got some you know, some big names on the website as well. But you know, give us a flavor of that if you would.

I mean the sort of, the general effects, sort of some of the success stories are we had corporate whereby before they saw us they were maintaining hundreds of bank accounts on an Excel and then the updates of those and their signers, they had multi jurisdiction, so they had a centralized core of signers and then more local signers in each jurisdiction. It was highly manual. In fact, it was nearly all manual. There was no real audit trail that was reliable. So they kept getting punished on audit points internally. And then there was no centralized, there was no sort of agreed centralized process. So you had all of these different teams updating their signers in different ways with different needs. So by using Signatize we got rid of 95% of the manual effort that the team members were spending the sheer time communicating internally and externally. They got a, you know, a really tight audit trail. Now of all the changes, they've got access controls to all their jurisdictional administrators and they're sending out their authorized signatures digitally to, to their banks. What that means, actually the biggest benefit is, gosh, when someone leaves the same day we can remove them. We've completely collapsed the risk window. Yeah, it's disappeared. So we can update people and say Damian Bell's left the company, get them off the list. All these accounts done. Whereas before it would take weeks and months and then you're just sitting there with this unknown risk out in the.

Cloud sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. And is that one of the ways that people know that current setup's not working? Or is that, you know, how do you, what's the sort of the amber flag or the red warning light for treasurers, would you say?

I think there's a couple that keep popping up. I mean it's, it's audit is always one. You know, they constantly getting bashed saying why, why is this not. Why is this information not accurate? Or when can you prove that this person came onto an account or came off an account? The answer is I can't. Why not? Well, because, you know, we're doing the best we can with our system, but it's not very good. And you know, timestamping, all that sort of. So in signatized you get everything timestamped. You'll see every change. The other side of it is the speed at which people come off and they say we don't have either a decent enough process internally, especially if you're multi jurisdiction, or the tool to match that process. So Signatize is often used in conjunction with a change in the process. They go, okay, now we've got a piece of kit that can enable us to make these real time changes. Central office can oversee different teams, doing stuff, making changes, removing people. When you get those levers, you can take them off immediately. Equally, if someone joins, we can put them on quickly and you can store all the associated documentation with it, signer information, passports, driving licenses and for their legal entities.

And so how would you respond to say a treasurer or, you know, any finance professionals that might be, you know, looking at this and saying, well, we've got by so far without it. Do we really need this sort of thing?

Yeah, treasurers are busy people, they have a lot of things to contend with. But time and time again what I see and what I'm told is, do you know, my job is to make my team life easier. If this is something that can make my team's life easier. And I'm not happy with the current setup or no one. I've not really met many people who are very happy with Excel. They're just not. They know there is inherent risk in the audit and the sort of reliability of it and the stability of it. They don't want to do that. They want something to bit more robust so they can turn around internally facing and going, do you know what, I've got a proper piece of kit now. I feel happy with this. So this is a way to say I've, I take the risks around this seriously and I've remediated them. And so, yeah, that's most people go, yeah, it's now time. Now I know there is something I want to know more. It might be a question of fitting into your timetable of what other projects you've got going on, but once they see it, they're like, okay, something's arrived that can do it. Yeah, let's do this.

And if people want more of, you know, we've got more information on our partner's page, so they just follow the links and they can just have a read.

And often a lot of what I'm doing is I'm not sort of. The first part is education. Yeah. Come and have a look. Let us talk through what are your common challenges, what are your common pain points. We show you the system. Yeah. And then get back in touch when you're ready. Lovely.

Thanks very much, sir.

Thank you. Thanks.