What Do You See As The Future Of Treasury?

I think what we call digitalization or straight through processing has started already 10 years ago in Treasury. I mean starting with like automatic gathering of account statements and then booking it through or360t with the, the platform for Avex trading and the whole process of confirmation matching and then also booking. This has started quite a while ago. And so I think this kind of more technical processing of things will further continue. But the treasurer will have a certainly different role. We heard yesterday in the conference a lot about managing the uncertainty. So thinking in scenarios is I think the treasurer's task for the future. So maybe there's going to be a shift towards being maybe the risk manager. And secondly also I see the treasurer's role as a connector, as a communicator in the internal world through the functions, through the. Because you need to be involved, whether you have a cash rich company or company which has financing needs and you communicate also with the external world. This is something about the function which is more or less unique within an organization.

Well, I think it's. Obviously we've got a lot of challenges ahead, right? So some of them geopolitical, some of them are the threats of technology. Still fundamentally think that treasury and what I would call judgment in treasury will always be there. And I think a lot of these things like rpa, you know, how machines can help us sort of automate and do a lot of the stuff that we don't particularly want to do that's always been there in terms of like automation. So even in my, you know, sort of like 14, 15 years working in the treasury area, we've always tried to automate things. But ultimately decision making, strategy and gut instinct, I think that will always be there in Treasury. Now whether or not the number of people that are managing treasury remains the same or not is a different question. But I just think the focus should be on the value add and that comes from luck, experience and all the nuts and bolts in the operations that will just get automated.

I think we're going to be obviously automating a lot. We've automated a lot more this year. We did last year, we're going to next year. But we are going to have to focus a lot on the regulatory environment and problem solving won't go away. We've got different problems, but they won't go away. Just problem solving.

I see lots of challenges if you're not careful. I'll be talking for the next five hours about it. But I think the two biggest challenges though, if I had to put them in order, is firstly, all of the stuff around Brexit and the tariff wars that the United States is setting off. Because when you take a look, all the progress that we've made in treasury over the past few years has been centralization, standardization, that's based on the cross border movement of goods, people, money. The minute you start playing with that, you start going backwards back to the kind of structure that we had when I first joined finance a very long time ago. And I think that's going to be a huge challenge. The other thing I think is, I think we are on the verge of a major change in the banking industry because I think when you take a look at the combination of fintech together with all the regulations, the three pillars of banking which are borrowing money and lending it FX and payment processing, these are all things that other people can do better and cheaper and where the regulators are making it very hard for the banks to actually do it. So I think as you move forward we could see a massive change in the landscape where a lot of things that we've traditionally done with banks will be done with other providers. Absolutely. And I think that's going to lead to a huge change in how treasurers work.

I think a lot of things are going to be automated at the end of the day, but still the treasurer, the function of the treasurer as a supervisor will still be needed. Even if you automate everything, you'll be able to see, as I said, it's a problem solver. A machine for me cannot solve at the time being all the problems and the issues that come. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think technological disruption will play a big role. I think all the buzzwords around blockchain, fintech, payment systems, the, you know, the challenge I think for credit cards going forward being replaced with other technology. I think those things we'll see happening over the next few years and obviously more automation and potentially the use of robotics for the more transactional, repeatable processes. But I still think there will be a need for the more strategic part of treasury and a certain skill set. So I don't think our jobs will be replaced by robots after all. So I think there's still a future for Treasury.

Yeah, I think that the main challenge for treasury in a broader context, not just only for the company I work, is to be in front in the things that we can contribute with for a company which is control of cash, capital structure and funding, making sure that the business is supported financially with the things that we do and not so much worry about commercial or political factors because we cannot influence that we can Align the Treasury things we do with the strategy that the board of directors and management tell us to do and then we can shout out if we, if we see that they do something that doesn't. Isn't supported in the capital structure. So all these discussion about what the Brexit will mean and commercial uncertainty in different industries, that's external factors for me. I can't control it, so it's pretty much out of my hand. I just, you know, go with the flow. But what, what I do control is that we take the right technology in, we listen to what the fintech industry has to offer, we look at the bank structure and how they finance us, we look at our financial cost structure, we look at how we use our cash flows. Can we become better? Can we improve working capital? These kind of things. Those are important for me.

I think there's so much technology out there, you know, we get sort of get bombarded as treasurers. You've got to buy this product, you've got to buy that product. And we probably all know we need to do more automation. I think from network round with a large shared service function and have been, you know, that's automated and started using robots. But I think in the core treasury team, yeah, we still use too many Excel spreadsheets and probably need to automate, but it's finding the time and the resources to dedicate. Yeah, dedicate to it because it's a distraction from the day job.