This is a YouTube video titled "The role of Tech in Treasury with Royston Da Costa" containing a monologue or talk from May 14, 2019, where Royston Da Costa discusses the impact of technology, especially cloud solutions and data, on treasury functions. He emphasizes how technology replaces processes rather than people and supports business growth and partnership within a decentralized business culture. The content is a single-speaker presentation focused on treasury technology and its benefits.
Today's world, with the amount of regulation that's come up and will come up and the risks that we run in terms of cybercrime, I don't think you can afford not to look at a ideally cloud based solution. And the reason I say cloud is because I believe the clouds are offering a lot more security, frankly, than other potential solutions I've looked at. This is the big area I feel that we're looking at next in terms of treasury, it's whether you want to use the different terms that are banded out there like big data or AI, etc. Etc. My view is that data is, and they do say data is a new currency, but my view is that data is the key to helping us in terms of treasury, manage sort of and improve cash flow forecasting. It's just in terms of how do we get that technology and the right solution to harness osd. Harness, but to collate that information in a simple and efficient way, usable fashion. Yeah, that's what we're doing with our US colleagues. Technology does not, in my view, certainly when it comes to treasury, replace people or role, it replaces processes. I think that's the key to remember, I mean, look at my career and what I did when I first started off and frankly, a lot of the companies I worked for, apart from the sequel situation where there were two companies being merged, the average size of teams have always been around five. That's what we are here at Ferguson. Treasury is always certainly generally, most companies that have treasury functions have generally been around five, six, maybe 10. The point I'm trying to make is that we've always had to manage the responsibilities that we've had within treasury almost all, regardless of how sort of big or small the company was in that respect. We got some more work, we just had to kind of take that flex. What's different now in my views for this, that where we've had processes like downloading statements and downloading market data and the very manual process and you're requiring someone to press a button to download that information, you've got technology that does that for you. My view is that in terms of what we've done at Ferguson since I've been here, we've not lost, we've not made anyone redundant because of technology. And part of that reason is because as the company's grown, because of the fact that technology we've had is future proofed us, it's enabled us to actually deal with the growth the company is experiencing. But more importantly than that, in my view, it also then allows us to go into the business. And that's the bit where I think we really add value or potentially add value, because we're then partners with our business. And this is talking about Ferxen being a fairly decentralized type of business culture to stand by them, offer the expertise we have, but also then offer them the support that they require when it comes to either looking at a new technology or implementing something that they feel they would they need.
