This is a YouTube video titled "video 5 How have you seen Treasury evolve over the years?" containing a multi-speaker discussion from November 2020 about the evolution of treasury functions, automation, and the future role of treasury professionals. The conversation features Mike Richards, Winky, and Beryl sharing their insights on technological advancements and strategic shifts in treasury management.
Looking at the panel here. And as a group, we combine sort of 60, 70 years worth of treasury experience, expertise and like, mostly from them.
Add the numbers up. No, no, no.
They'Re not that old. It's all right. Careful again. But we can just take it. You've. You joined PayPal way back, you know, in 2004, and you've seen obviously treasury evolve a lot in that time. But also you've worked for blue chip corporates who are at the forefront of that a little bit as well. You know, some of the things that they're doing. How have you seen treasury evolve over that time, you know, since you first walked in the door? You know, sometimes I talk to people on the podcast as well. And so, yeah, I remember picking up a fax and sending off and then you say to kids, they go, what's the fax? You know, through to now, straight through processing now it's everything. Is it all of that? Are we all going to be replaced by robots or is that what's happening?
Well, I think we're certainly heading that way. It's less of what we think about ourselves as how our business partner and the business think, see us. I think in the past, I think most of the companies or I'm sorry, the departments will look at treasury is you go to them if you need funding, you need bank account opening or any issues that they might have about payment. But what they now start to see, and maybe just this is our job as a treasurer, is that we are business partners. Benoit has mentioned their strategy. We need to be in the front of it, including the M and A. So. So I think they have forgotten. Treasury actually play an important role. The technology piece is given, its automation is given. What we see today is if you're still using the manual process, that might continue for a while, but we certainly are moving towards AI. There's a lot of machine learning that we are doing now. We do have our service center in India, but I don't see that's going to be permanent. Anything can be done manually, can be replaced. It's just a matter of time. So we need mentally, we need to be prepared for that stage to come through in our lifetime. And then we will really take a step back and take this more strategic role when it comes to business development, expansion.
Beryl, what do you think about the future?
Look, I think I completely agree with Winky on this manual task, which still remains for certainly will be automated in the near future. In Apparam, we had to do this transition pretty quickly when we exited ArcelorMittal. So we made that at that time in 2012, this challenging choice of going for a pure Cloud based system, SaaS as a service, it's been kind of a challenging choice at that time, and implementation has been pretty tough. But what we see where we are today, basically, we could be only happy of that it works. We might not be happy every day, but globally it works fine. And when I see what we do with such a limited number of people, I mean, we, we are more efficient, if I can say, as we used to be in the old organization. And I think this trend will continue for certainly, and we will push for it at least to have not less people, but at least the same number of people, focusing more on more intellectual analysis, more things that will drive the business more efficiently, rather than only doing manual tasks.
