This is a YouTube video titled "Inside the mind of ‘The Treasury Whisperer’ with Seth Marlowe" recorded in July 2019. It features a conversation between Mike Richards and Seth Marlowe discussing treasury, payments, and emerging technologies. Seth shares his extensive experience across treasury operations, IT, and banking, and his role in evangelizing new technologies like blockchain and AI in the treasury space. Mike Richards is a participant in this multi-speaker dialogue.
Foreign whisperer, AKA influencer, thought leader, evangelist, content curator. And you're at that intersection, as you say, of treasury payments emerging tech. So, okay, that's lots of, lots of nice, interesting, great buzzwords. What does that mean? What's special about you?
What's special about me is that I've seen Treasury evolve over time. I've seen it from the eyes of an IT professional, I've seen it through the eyes of a Treasury operations or treasurer professional, and now I've seen it through the eyes of a banker. So I've seen it from all the angles. I kind of get it. I love technology, I love the strategy. I truly love working with our customers. And all the experiences I've had have been so consultative to our customers. The idea was to be able to share the insights that we have at Wells that are about payments technology, the things that are changing in the industry. I was drawn to all of this. I was integrating it into the presentations I had been doing to customers and at conferences that were product specific. But I had a nice manner of being able to explain what's changing, what's the impact and bringing those insights out. So the idea, we actually, actually went through a transition. The solution sales team was dispersed. People went into a couple of different directions on the payable side, some on the receivable side, and we created an insights team. Few of us have been tasked with the job of really evangelizing all that's changing in treasury with emerging technology. And again, it goes back to my love of the technology. I'm a Treasury geek at heart. It was very easy for me to start having conversations about blockchain and distributed ledger and artificial intelligence and robotic process automation and big data and how to use it. And that, that became sort of the mantra of the group was to bring these insights to market. I talk about, especially as I'm so much on the conference circuit in this role, I talk about. I have an objective of what I call the three E's. My objective is to enlighten, educate. And I think the reality is I found out when you presented conferences, you've got to do a bit of entertaining. So it's educate, enlighten and entertain. So mixing in all these concepts with the anecdotes of customer stories that I, you know, customers I've worked with, companies that I've been at and things that I've lived and breathed makes for, I think, a more dynamic kind of presentation. And I've come to really love being, you know, being on the stage or in the middle of a conference room and really sharing and getting people to interact, because those are the best. Presentations are ones where you're not literally my manager these days. Steve Mara says, you know, we don't like to show up and throw up. Those are the worst. You want to interact. And trying to pull people in and bring that interactivity into a session really makes it fun for everybody attending and for me as well.
