Vasu Reddy explains how technology and automation address treasury management challenges. He discusses digitization's role in modernizing banking processes and how the pandemic shifted operations, emphasizing that financial systems need to adapt to new demands.
A lot of the markets, like I said, they were undeveloped and there were a lot of manual processing and I think with it. So GE had a lot of systems whereby we wanted centralized reporting. So we wanted to know if we had cash in this country at this point in time, how much of cash do we have there and in what currency it was. So we wanted real time reporting. So apart from the global banks, which was much easier to automate the process, it took a little longer time with the regional and the local banks. So we had our banking infrastructure team together with the treasury and the bank IT guys trying to automate the processes and the systems. And so we used a back end system that was owned by ge, but linking to the bank's portals in terms of the electronic funds transfer systems. It took a long time, but eventually and we got there. So I think technology is quite key from a reporting from a payment processing perspective as well as ensuring that we had the right documentation in place, as well as from accounting and recording perspective as well. Many of the local banks, like I say, you know, they suffer from a poor credit rating that makes it difficult to work with from a risk perspective. But also the local bank environment is still generally unsophisticated. With a large under developed technology infrastructure, it seems that the manual processes are quite rife. So the idea is that going forward, banks, I think, understand this and investing more and more in technology trying to automate their processes. Because I think with the pandemic now as well, we realized that a lot of manual processes and where people were working from home, things were taking a longer time to get done. And I think banks understand that and they're investing more and more in that, trying to ensure that they don't lose market share and they keep and they build and maintain those customer relationships. AI is very much important I think going forward because what a lot of corporates are doing is if you look at the current pandemic, it's forced us to work from home. So the automation and digitization is very, very important. And I think the one point that I stress is that the prior chairperson of GE mentioned that Uber built a $50 billion business through digitization with no assets and he wanted to turn GE into a digitized company. So I think from a Treasury perspective, going forward, a lot more processes and reporting and bank transactions are going to be digitized. So once that actually happens, and I think the most important thing is not having many, many systems. I think for GE as a whole, when we did acquisitions, we had many systems, but I think there's more consolidation around the systems and the automation around that. So once you have that fully functional automated system autom treasury management tool that includes your fx, includes your payment process, includes your cash and reporting, includes your exposure management as well as, like your forecasting, then it will minimize, you know, your headcount, it will minimize your resource cost, it will minimize the time and room for error.
