Treasury Strategies in the Consultancy Market with Tony Carfang

When we started, and this predates you, Mike, just a corporate treasurer was in a career terminal position. People didn't get promoted into anything else. You were appointed treasurer kind of as a reward for being a loyal employee for 30 years. So you had all the institutional history of the firm before you can go out and have dinners with your banker and do all the relationship kinds of things. And that's your reward until the day you retire. The treasurer wasn't somebody who necessarily came up through finance. No one else in that treasurer's department could see any light at the end of the tunnel for promotion until the treasurer retired.

Over the past 10 years, is it technology that you've seen as the biggest driver of change within Treasury? I sometimes talk. People spoke last week, a couple of weeks ago in the Windy City Summit and people say treasury technology, is it going to replace people? And that's one of the key things. The key findings we found through the podcast is treasury technology replaces process, not people. And it frees up people to do more interesting jobs and actually leverage the technology. So actually it means you don't have to just stand there turning the handle, it does it itself and you get onto the interesting stuff. Is that the thing that you've noticed through your consulting career certainly in the past 20, 15, 10 years as we come up to date sort of thing?

Let me say, yes, okay, go for it. Yes. So actually going back 20 or 25 years, technology really began to impact the business and it impacts at an accelerating rate and at a operates on more dimensions now. So technology to allow you to manipulate your balances and meet your short term liquidity then evolves into technology that will also help you manage your risk. That transforms into technology that will also inform marketing decisions or credit decisions. So the technology not only lets you do the traditional things better or more efficiently, but it lets you do more things. The thing I find most exciting about consulting is every problem is a little bit different. Every company circumstances, every bank circumstances a little bit different. So you're never doing the exact same thing twice. There's always a new challenge, a different angle that needs to be solved. So every day you're at the cutting edge of something. I'm excited about getting up in the morning and thinking about, well, what's Brexit going to do to the relationship between the euro and the yen? You know, and you know, somebody's got to figure that out. And if it's us, do a lot.

Of consultants and you get paid for it as well. You get paid to problem solve and actually have fun whilst doing it.