Why Treasury Technology Needs More Than Just AI to Deliver Value

In this episode, I am rejoined by my good friend Felix Meyer, the Treasury Technology and IS head at ABB Capital AG. This is Felix's third time on the show because he really loves AI technology, and obviously this is front and center for everybody. So we talk about why, despite all the attention around AI, treasury teams still need to get the fundamentals right first. We talk about data quality, fit-for-purpose systems, and having the right specialist knowledge. He also shares his thoughts on AI traceability and resilience. It's a practical conversation about separating genuine opportunity from technology and the hype and what treasury teams should actually be prioritizing today. So let's get into the episode, Why Treasury Technology Needs More Than Just AI to Deliver Value.

In this week's show, I'm joined by Felix Meyer, the Business IT Manager and Treasury Technology Expert at ABB Capital. Now Felix is based out of Switzerland, but ABB itself is a global treasury technology leader. They've been going for over 130 years, 4 main customer-focused businesses, but operating globally over 100 countries, 147,000 employees, so truly a global multinational. Felix has a passion for technology and financial systems, which we're going to dig into today, but not make it just an IT geek out, but actually where practically intersects with treasury. Going back a couple of years ago now, perhaps we'll get Felix to talk through his career today, how he first started in finance, discovered treasury technology, and whether that's an interest. Felix, over to you, sir.

Thank you, Mike Richards. I think that the journey starts before I got my first job in university. I was feeling in between a little bit lost, but my background was really always stay hungry, Stay hungry, stay energetic, be interested in many topics. I really had a liberal arts background. I came to Switzerland in 1994, was looking for a job, saw that really in Switzerland mostly finance, finance interest me. I had some economics background, but I said, this is an area I'd like to get involved in. And they had a 2-year trainee program where then they hired me on after that. They showed me the different parts of the bank and they got me hungry on the finance side. Deepening my knowledge on the asset liability management side. It was a time when technology started picking up in the finance sector. This was an area that I was like, ah, this is a nice mix between the finance area and the technology area. And that was a start of my career path at a small private bank, which later got bought up by Credit Suisse.

And with that sort of that shift, if you like, and I noticed this as well, that you were liberal arts, Master of Arts and everything else, and then A number of years later, 20-odd years later, you've got this real IT treasury path. There might be someone listening today going, actually, oh, I like that IT side, but actually, oh, this financial engineering and things. How did that attract you? What was it that sat in your brain, as it were?

I think the big reasoning behind that is just seeing the potential of automation and seeing how, you know, looking at some things and seeing waste and seeing how people are suffering because they're having to do the valuations of these bonds with their HP calculator. Saying that, wait a second guys, there's all better ways to do this. I'm not the super geek, but I see the potential in some of the process automation. For example, back to the middle '90s when we were doing asset liability management, I was working for a group of people and they claimed one of the first groups that have a mark-to-mark valuation of the balance sheet of all the bonds and all the loans and deposits. Only possible through a couple smart people.

Mm-hmm.

I wasn't one of them. I was more of a user, but I appreciate the work that was done saying, yeah, this is great. This is really cool stuff that can be done by the efficient use of technology. And it gives you a new insight. It gives you quickness. Okay, quickness there was letting things run overnight, which now we'd laugh at, but that sparked and said, yeah, I like this. I like that people can then benefit from this instead of having to do meaningless tasks.

From that automation bug, you went into a more systems-focused role, or was that a natural progression, or how did that work?

Yeah, it was a natural progression because when I went to work for Tramo, which became Wall Street Systems, you're sitting as a consultant in front of the customer and the customer wants to have certain processes. You know, a big system like that, like a treasury management system, can offer you tons of possibilities. It's great when you can go to the customer and say, well, you guys used to be doing this with the paper, but if we implement this tool or certain steps in this tool and get some super geeky guys, which I'm not one of them, do a little bit of coding, you can do in a fraction of the time what it took you to do in the past. It's nice to get that feedback, also feedback from the customer who then actually was happy seeing the value that you're bringing in. And so that was kind of an additional driver for me. And I shifted then also a little bit of the roles, starting first more on the financial side, then also as a consultant. I saw myself, I don't want to have to type in these thousand pieces of static data. Talking to the techie guys and say, hey, how can we do this better? And just making my life easier. That's also part of it.

You're with a systems provider, Tremor, that became Wall Street, then the move to ABB. And describe for the listeners who you guys are and then your role at ABB.

When I first joined, I joined in a position as an analyst and I was pulled on to the company by a techie that worked here. It was inspirational because he was a driver of technology within the company. He was like automation, automation, automation in a time when things weren't automated at all. Joining then as an analyst, it was interesting back then at the time that we still are a mix between a decentralized company in some areas and a centralized company in other areas. But when I joined, Treasury was super decentralized. We had country Treasury centers around the world. We also had systems around the world. So almost every country had its own Treasury management system. And one of the first projects that I got was shutting down some of these country regional Treasury centers and asset to ABB to bring in this automation to show that through the configuration of the system itself, we can cover these other guys just with this one tool, bringing in the value on that side. ABB is a big company. We're 147,000 people, electrification, industrial automation, motion, robotics, discrete automation, power grids. It's a conglomerate, various different areas that we cover. My focus in moving to the treasury organization was then to work on projects that would bring value in the automation area within treasury itself.

And why bother? Treasury technology? We, I joked with Felix before the show, cause I'd asked this on another show to one of my friends who's very highly into his technology. And it threw him a little bit cause I just said, look, treasury technology, why bother? You know, and it was more about there's a lot of investment, return on investment, your time and everything else. Now there are some obvious benefits. You've got compliance, you've got automation, but why go through a lot of this effort? Maybe perhaps you've been through a 20-year journey and seen it from start to finish, you know, maybe a again, for the listeners, why have you seen it evolve? Maybe describe that if you would.

I think you can see it from various angles. One of the key reasons is shareholder value. There's pressure on the treasury organization. There's pressure to reduce costs, to increase efficiency, to be compliant with SOX. There's pressure that says we need to deliver with less people. That's kind of a general theme. I know very few companies that are saying, oh, we need to deliver with— let's hire a lot more people so we can deliver the same amount. I never hear that. There's a pressure from above that the automation and the technology piece is really just an integrated piece in so much of what we do, but also particular in Treasury. A big part of what I'm doing now is taking a look at the different systems we have at local level, regional level, country level, group level, and figuring out how can we put these pieces together, what pieces can we pieces can we integrate into existing solutions? Cost saving also a big part of this, and just to drive a more efficient treasury. And I can tell you another area where this whole automation piece comes into play is that companies aren't just companies these days. There's so much dynamic in the company itself. And when all of a sudden, company like Hitachi comes and buys a quarter of our company, you have to have technology around to enable even a divestment like that. So there's technology everywhere we look. I don't go as far as, and this was really interesting at the conference that we are both at, I don't go that far in propagating the newest technology like bots, and people are always asking about bots and artificial intelligence. I'm not that geeky of a person. I'm more hands-on. It's about rationalization. It's about finding out what pieces fit nicely together, what pieces on the market bring value where we've had our eyes closed. We haven't I didn't realize it's out there, but hey, it's great, this opportunity. Let's jump on it. Let's make the move. I can make an example. A project that I pushed through very quickly was for me almost a no-brainer. We have in-house a netting solution from a recognized netting provider. We had this hosted in-house since 10 years. They offer a software as a service solution. We as a company are under pressure. Wouldn't it be clever if we took this existing solution, moved it to the specialist who are doing this 24/7, get a software-as-a-service solution. The risks are still there, but a lot of the risks are mitigated because they're taken by this specialized service provider. At the same time, we save on hosting costs. So this is kind of a no-brainer. And for this, you don't have to be a technology geek. You have to have your eyes open and say, this makes sense. This is a great idea. Let's grab the opportunity that is here.

A lot of the time I've seen that company will bring in a new system. They will integrate it. They might be given budget to bring in a consultant to do some of the heavy lifting, get some of the integration work done. They start to roll it out and they said, well, that's great. You've replaced those 2 people, so you need to lose headcount. And the people are like, hang on, I've done all this hard work and we were a team of 8 and that was great with a team of 8 because it meant that by bringing in the system, it freed up and gave us some slack time to do the other projects, to do the other value-adding things as well. This isn't to say that people are being replaced by robots. I think that's a fallacy. You still need intelligent people, and the work of Treasury has gone up in intellectual capacity to interpret the big data. Have you seen sometimes bringing a system, switch it on, and then maybe you could get by with 6 people rather than 8? Do you see that yourself? Have you seen that around?

Yeah, it's a very good point, and I haven't seen it on my side, especially when you bring in new systems. Almost the opposite. When you implement a new solution, As you said, you have these experts that are providing the advice. You're almost blindly accepting their advice, but you're working together with them. But the reality is that until the system, especially bigger systems, treasury management systems, until the system gets up and going, you will actually sometimes need more people to run this thing than you initially envisioned. And then it starts to drop off after you realize the efficiency gains out of this implementation. To answer your question that actually jobs are being replaced by putting in new technology, I'm of your opinion as well. I would say not when those systems reach a certain level of maturity. You can take those users and put them in other areas, like you said, put them on data analytics or fraud prevention. Because again, technology is an investment. You invest in the next generation of this tool. Maybe there's the next module's already coming out. You can get more insight, more gains. So a basic component is that people are super important. The intellectual capacity, as you mentioned, is at a very high level in treasury. And I think the technology part of that intellectual capacity. It's got to be there, the appreciation for technology, and that's what brings you forward. On the job front, I wouldn't say necessarily that jobs are going. If anything, jobs will be transferred. That's definitely a topic. You maybe you won't have them onshore, you'll have them offshore. There, I think that's definitely a tendency, but that you'll get rid of people because of technology, I see that's less of a— I haven't witnessed that.

And you recently posted an article, a Pulse piece up on LinkedIn, where many treasurers hesitant to become early adopters because they've got lots of other stuff on their plate and looking for other people that have done the hard yards and great. Can we see how did that work for you? What was your discovery from talking to lots of people in the room? What did you find?

Yeah, I saw that treasurers by definition are a fairly conservative crowd. It's by their nature. They're not the risk takers. It's not their mandate to be taking the risk. And because of that, when applied to technology, They want to invest in things that work. They don't want to be the first to jump on the bandwagon. We've heard a lot about fintechs, bitcoins, good heavens, the word blockchain. You hardly hear it these days anymore, strangely enough. And you hear other words like bots and AI, and a lot of these fly by the treasurers. I remember distinctly in a room full of treasurers last year, there was only one person that raised their hand that said their company is actually doing investment in AI and robotics. The rest are cautious, waiting. They're waiting for a certain level of maturity. They're waiting for others to take the first lead, which is quite okay in risk aversion. So I don't feel that treasurers are missing the show by not investing in this emerging technology. I would say they're missing the show if they're not investing in basis technology, automation pieces, things that are the norm, the standard. If they're not on that level, I'd say they're behind the wave. If they're already on the next generation, I'd say they're ahead of the wave. I don't know how much value add it's going to bring because a lot of those projects are laced with a bit of risk.

Why do you enjoy it so much? We've talked about how you like the idea that you came in the next day and then that's changed and evolved with your role. You're driving the strategy and sitting between business, IT, treasury. But on a personal level, you mentioned that at the beginning, you came from this different background. You weren't always an engineer. So what gets you up in the morning? Why do you think actually this is great? I can make a real difference today.

Because I see that it comes back to strategy, understanding what's out there in the market and knowing that there's opportunities you can grab with not all that much risk and fairly large savings. And those are the types of things that, with feedback from the people and seeing that the people are happy with the decisions that you've made on this technology front, that's the stuff that gets me up in the morning. I also like drawing pictures. Coming back from London on the plane, I drew almost like a kid's picture with 3 containers saying that These are the pieces that are still outstanding where we could work on. These are things that we're working on, and these are the things that have already been accomplished. Saying that there's so much work out there that it's nice seeing pieces move from the one box to the next box, and the piece of my satisfaction knowing that things are moving. It's not static, there's action.

And looking at that, where do you see it moving towards? You touched on there that a year or so ago one person was talking about the bots and all that stuff, and don't worry, they're not taking over the world. But where do you see that? I've sometimes to some of the treasury professionals I saw, the CFO seems to be pushing them out to the forefront, said, look, you be the pathfinder for me, and then just filter it through and tell me the good bits. But is that what you're seeing? What are you seeing from the role of treasury? What's the future that you can see where it's going to add value?

Yeah, realistically, as we mentioned at the beginning, we dream a lot about this technology and innovation, but we're stuck in a lot of day-to-day tasks. I look in the priorities of what ABB is working on, we're carving out a quarter of the business. You can only imagine That is a big exercise and Treasury also plays a big role in that. So a large part of the resources are focused on that. They're not focused on these really fun, sexy things. They're focused on day-to-day activities. Another parallel topic, we're focused on internal control stuff, resolving IT-related internal control issues. We're working day and night and we don't even have time to enjoy the light at the end of the tunnel that some of this technology might offer us. I'm not sure if I answered your question, but that's a reality we see within and the treasures that we don't have time to explore, to make that big leap. We're trying to get through day to day, and we hope at the 8th hour, the 9th hour of the day, that we have a little bit of time to think about what could help us out more tomorrow.

Let's take a snapshot of the past 20 years. What mistakes have you made in that time? Because it'd be too personal question there, but if you look back over that time, which of those initiatives would you say, do you know what, that was a waste of time? Afterwards, the value add. Do you see it repeating itself? Or when people are listening, you're saying, right guys, you need to be thinking about this top priority. That might be something that comes up, but we'll see. Have you seen that at all?

I can tell you one of the areas where I feel like I've wasted my time is doing upgrades, treasury management system upgrades. We have a business model. The business model doesn't change. We're required by our supplier to move from version A to version B. Business doesn't really give you the buy-in because they're like, why are we doing this? And so you're stuck with them on the topic. You need their engagement. And at the time I was acting as project manager and it's difficult. I mean, it's hard to be positive in the morning when you get up because, you know, your stakeholders aren't behind you. They're asking, what is the value added of this? Technology isn't all rosy. There's mandatory stuff. And this is the type of thing where the market is slowly adapting, especially when you go more and more direction of software as a service. It's a topic that you less and less have to worry about than these physical upgrades or your end of life. You've got to move on. That's kind of the dredge work. That's not fun. They're expensive. It requires a lot of resources and effort, and the value gained at the end of the tunnel isn't all that massive.

If someone is being told they have to do this or this is a pressing issue, how should they approach it?

The reality, if you're using a technology that has some value, And you can try to negotiate with a vendor, but at the end of the day, your software runs out and you have to do an update. Your hands are tied. I think they say software is a drug, right? You see the flip side to it. So there's nothing much you can do except push ahead. Clearly you can say, do we want to go with this vendor? Are there other options? However, it's easier to do an update on your iPhone than it is to switch software vendors for your treasury management system.

One of the other things that we've seen is consolidation, a couple of larger names coming in and sweeping up these different companies and providers. Do you Do you think that's been positive, negative, or what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I'm neutral on it. I've seen some bad things and some okay things come out of it. My advice for the treasurers on a periodic basis, especially if you know that such a painful upgrade is nearing you, take the time to do an analysis or get an external to help you out with analysis, because it could be that your technology doesn't fit what you need. Could be that your business case has changed. You used to be a huge treasury and now you're a small one, but you're still sitting on a bad system. Could be that there's a misalignment there, take the time and do the investment in a study like that to see that you're implementing the best fit. The best fit is so important these days. If it's not a good fit, you'll have unnecessary number of people doing things. You'll have a system that's over the top. It's very important to make sure that you're using technology that's fit for your purpose.

And works for you as a group. So, again, we're approaching, again, later on in the show. We're not quite at the end yet, but But when people are looking back over the things you've done, what would you say is next? What's the next evolution? We talked there about treasury technology, why bother? And that's a key thing with yourself. But where do you see it going to? What's the sort of the next— you're certainly sitting in the middle of that triangle balancing all the needs. Is that where you see other treasurers? Without harking too much into that article, we said not being early adopters a lot of the time because they don't have the time. But with yourself, what are you seeing coming down the road?

I'd say from my side as well, when my time gets freed up a little bit, when I move from instead of the 9th hour thinking about treasury technology, more to the 6th or the 5th hour, then I see more adoption of these newer technologies. Using these tools that are out there, like advanced analytics, I see already benefits. I can start to think about these benefits now, but it's not the right time to be implementing it. Again, you're working with people. People are overloaded. They're in X different projects. You can automate automate things quite a bit. And then at a certain level, you see that there's actually more potential if you do things on top of it. That's, for example, where the solutions out there which could bring us a lot of value, we simply don't have the time right now to work on it. But we can at least think about what these things are and plan then for the future when we can implement it. And I can tell you, looking at the roadmap that I have for the next 2 years, I don't have advanced analytics on there. Ensuring that business continuity is number one. That's the Bob piece. But I know at some point in time, the time will free up, and then I time to implement some other technology. And here at Montpellier also, I mentioned this, Pete's about talking about technology the whole time, but there's also derivatives coming out of the technology, like everything related to Bitcoin or Ripple, which should be adopted by the treasury community because I see the benefits of doing same-day settlements, which is obviously possible in many currencies, but cross-day, same-day settlements, you'd think you'd be seeing this a lot more. But maybe it's symptomatic that treasurers don't have time to think about how are we going to work with this?

Why is that important? I mean, same to us, what impact does that make?

I would say a big piece is staying ahead of the curve. If you as a treasurer can, for example, on the cash management side, really square out all your books instantaneously, I'd say that's a big gain. You're not sitting on cash unnecessarily. You're able to provide a full overview of your liquidity. On the other side of the coin is what happens on the consumer side. Is that when you start to get in these discussions about same-day settlements, that's also something that's super interesting to your suppliers and your consumers as well, that you can introduce new, new value propositions, or maybe not new value propositions, they already exist, but you can adapt these value propositions into treasury and then treasury becomes an advisor. They become the partner to your business. And that's our goal also at ABB, to become the partner to business. And we're partnering in many areas, but we're missing some pieces on the whole chain.

The key to your success, Felix's success, what's your ethos? As we wrap up today's show, the tips you would give people if they say, I like his background, I want to follow in those footsteps. What are the key tips, the core of your success? What would you draw out if someone's listening thinking, that sounds like a sort of career path I'd like to be similar to? What would you say?

Yeah, I would say in my area, it's about staying open for new ideas, staying hungry. You know, again, my background, I didn't go into really a specific area of finance. I was a very generalist. Maybe on the one side someone say, well, Felix, you're waffling around. You're not focusing on any particular area. I think, however, that has a lot of benefits and those benefits, I can prove my depth through specialized coursework. And I think that's super important regardless what you studied 20 years ago or so, ensuring that your knowledge is up to date before for last year, I did this cybersecurity certification. What does that have to do with Treasury? That has a lot to do with Treasury if you think about the money that's sitting around. That gave me a new insight into, wow, this is something in my job right now. I should see about how I can implement this. Another type of certification I did was related to databases. Coming out of liberal arts, databases is kind of off the wall. My point simply is that super important staying up to date with education. Even if your time is limited, now the opportunities they have with online learning are amazing. You don't always have to physically go to class all over the place. And you stay hungry, you stay adaptable. And when someone comes say, Felix, what do you think about this topic? You, regardless if it's from a technical or business side, you already have a basic understanding. You have a level of respect with your counterparty, and that's what keeps the ball rolling.

Would that be your summary of today? Being open and hungry to learning, or any other areas that you think, yeah, that's the other thing you need to think about?

Yeah, no, I think that's super important. Hungry, being open, hungry learning. There's a people skills side. At the end of the day, we're only as good as the people that we work with. You can implement whatever system you want, but if you don't have the capable people around you, if you as a manager don't have the skills to invite your guys out near end of year, taking your guys out for lunch if you haven't gone out with them, just having open discussions. I feel people skills get so lost in our business. People are assets of our company, and by keeping people motivated, you stay motivated yourself. So I think that's a super important element. Bring in the people skills.

People skills. Stay open and hungry to learning. We'll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes, Felix. Guys, look out for Felix. We'll put also links to the Treasury Leaders Summit that we did this year and some of the others there. Again, we talk about learning. They're great places to sort of expand your knowledge. Felix, really engaging when I've seen his speeches and some of the questions he asks people. I think that's a big key thing that a lot of people can learn. So Felix, it's been great to talk to you, and thanks for your time today.

Great to be on the show.

Welcome back. We didn't go anywhere, actually, although we did a little bit in the 2 years since I last spoke to Felix Meyer. We were just talking before that it's lovely to catch up with him since we published the episode back in February 2020. Obviously, the world has changed, and I wanted to bring you guys up to date. One of the most popular episodes with Felix is about embracing that technology side of things. We were just talking about how that affected the world of Project Management and Treasury and everything else. So we bring in Felix back on the show, bring us up to date about what's been happening. Over to you.

Thank you so much, Mike Richards, for having me back. We got older in the meantime, but I still stayed at number 86 on my podcast. So some things do stay the same. Really happy to be back and happy to give you an update of what's happened during the past 2 years. I get this question every once in a while. Things stay the same during the last 2 years as far the projects that I'm working on and the items in Treasury technology that I look into. The answer is no. And I'm really happy to say that, at least from our side, quite a few initiatives were ongoing within the Treasury space, even within a broader finance space, which confirms the investment and the importance that the company invests in on the technology side to increase the automation and ability for us to move forward as a company as a whole. Maybe home in on two projects that we started a year and a half ago. We started an RFP beginning of 2022 in two areas because we saw the need to reevaluate the solutions that are serving us in two key areas. One in the export trade finance area, and one is the core treasury management area. So we started an RFP beginning of last year, and we ran this through full of last year, making the decision. Now we've made our decision with what providers we're going with, and so So now the journey continues and now we hit implementation phase and it's gonna be really exciting. This is gonna be taking us into the next year and a half. We'll be implementing new systems and this is a critical process. Where are we? What systems are we using? Does our treasury processes match? Those are basic questions that you need to look like. You look at your car, you say, hey, is my car up to date? Do I need to take to the mechanic or do I need to buy a new one because the mechanic can't do anything with it, can't find the spare parts. Those are questions that have to be asked. And so I would like to say that happy that at least in my area that we've had a commitment from management to push ahead on these projects. And so that's something that I'm happy to be a part of.

Felix, you and I were talking about the impact of COVID on working styles. When you and I spoke about this in our pre-record the other day, you were talking about how it hasn't affected you per se in terms of productivity, but back in the office sometimes now you're having the coffee with people, you're engaging with people once again. What's the transition been?

I think for many of us, we probably didn't realize how important soft skills actually were as part of the work environment. It's more than just the social side. It's things related to networking and exchanging ideas and a quick catch-up where it takes a lot more to schedule a meeting compared to just going to the coffee machine, having a drink, and running into people. That got lost, and you can extend that beyond the coffee machine to things like conferences as well, exchanging ideas. Sure, you can sit in front of your laptop and do virtual meetings, but it's somehow more stiffer than sitting in and meeting people and seeing the— I forget the statistics, what do they say, 60% of all interaction is non-verbal interaction, right? Seeing that whole piece got left out during the last 2 years, and I think many of us are missing that. And that's a value that I'm happy to say is still around. It's worthwhile coming to the office and picking up on that, even if it means the productivity— you're not reading as many emails because you're doing other things. So it's a shift, but it's going the right direction, finding the right balance between being productive and getting all your mails and the balance against having this other part of work, which is absolutely important as well.

When you reflect back on this time that everyone's had a lot of thinking, sat back, been working independently, but then working virtually and now starting to get back. If you were to take some of the key learnings from this, this is before that, this is What would you— your personal takeaways? You talk there about the work side of things. If you sort of sit back and look at it, what are the— we've talked about this, but it's not just about that. Treasury is quite a social enterprise. But what are you seeing as key in that regard?

The key learning about the last 2 years is this whole topic of work-life balance, that it's important. And I think it's kind of a pendulum that we see is maybe before we were just too long in the office. Now we went to a phase where we are very much at home and saw some of the benefits of having the coffee machine just 2 meters away instead of 20 meters away. The pendulum swings back towards the office and we're seeing that what we had in the office before wasn't all that bad. In the end of the day, no one dictates what the optimal mixture is, the secret sauce to having productive employees and have a productive environment. But part of it is being able to experiment. And it's going the right direction that companies can offer their employee an optimal mix of possibilities.

We're going to rewrap up. I've done this once before. It's only 2 years ago. But your LinkedIn details in the show notes. Reflecting on all of this, what are the key tips you would take away for people? It sounds like there's a balance in there. I think that's something that you and I both talked about. What are the takeaways for the guys listening today? They're going to get amazing value bombs all the way through this. But what are your thoughts?

I think key points I made last time was the importance of automation of certain processes, how much value that can bring. That link to staying hungry on technology, that it's worthwhile on a periodic basis taking a look at what kind of systems you have and solutions that are supporting your treasury processes. Take a look at that. Maybe you can do this yourself. Take a look at that, reevaluate, and if necessary, retool, because it's a long journey ahead and it's a worthwhile investment. Maybe during reevaluation process you see that you don't need to do anything, but it could be that there's bigger opportunities out there and that this investment is definitely worthwhile. That's how you stay ahead of the curve, is always making sure that you're on top of things.

That's a sense of being grounded and review. But I think what this has given both of us, or everyone actually, sense of time to reflect. A lot of the time you couldn't do things throughout pandemic that you could before when everyone was there, but also not to go the opposite way. So it's that balance, isn't it? That exactly Felix, incredible to talk to you, sir. Great takeaways. Connect to Felix. Thank you once again, sir. You've been a star.

Thank you so, so much, Mike.

It's always a pleasure talking and exchanging ideas, and I hope this was of use to your listeners.

Thank you.

So in this week's show, delighted to welcome back my good friend Felix Meyer, the Corporate Treasury Business IT Manager, ABB Capital. ABB Capital is wholly owned subsidiary of the ABB Group that acts as the primary in-house treasury and corporate finance center for for the multinational conglomerate. Now, the fact is that Felix and I, you've heard us before, we're tagging this onto, well, this is my third catch-up with Felix.

We're mates.

We've been swimming at midnight in Barcelona, but that, we'll tell you about that separately to the show. But in actual fact, Felix was just telling me before the show that things have evolved a little bit. He's added, bolted in some extra bits with his title. And well, Felix, if you can bring us up to date briefly and what else have they given you to, as if you weren't doing enough, over to you.

Absolutely. Well, they've given me a lot of opportunities. I'm really thankful for this and thankful for the support. Actually, my title is Treasury Technology and IS. So I look after a team that also looks after key applications within Treasury. Also then plays the role in reviewing the landscapes that we have internally, as well as looking externally for what opportunities are on the market from systems, from ideas, and that's really the starting place that I have in my career.

So that's got an internal and external focus. Why is that so important?

Yeah, the internal focus in is to know really what you have to be able to review. What processes do you have? What are the demands that are coming from the internal stakeholders? Because those are the ones in the end whose process you're trying to automate. Plus the external view is extremely focused and important to know what's out there. What's even implementable? Is it something just just here today, gone tomorrow, or is there something with substance really you can say, I think that's exactly a solution or an opportunity that we should be able to consider, take, and implement this within our organization? In our business, things rarely stop, right? We go through a lot of cycles, and definitely one of the bigger topics that cannot be ignored is the AI. AI topic has come up very strong during end of 2024, 2025, all 2026 now as well. So what's I would say that definitely was a very strong wave that's hit us, and many treasuries or treasurers are now also being asked questions. How can we optimize? How can we leverage this whole AI wave that we're on right now? This coming off of a wave earlier, kind of the tail end of the blockchain topic, like where is that gonna go? Where is that gonna take us? Everything related to really money, the speed of money was also a wave that kind of was picking up pace, I would say 2023, 2024. 2024. So a lot of interesting topics, developments, I would say, moved by technology, moved by regulators as well, by banks, by other parties. And that's where we are in this big ecosystem. And my role in as Treasury Technology and ISIT, what I'm doing is to keep an eye on these things and see which of these elements make the most sense for us in Treasury and also from a technology perspective, actually then to grasp and take the move to actually implement in terms Definitely.

And have you seen that relationship has evolved or changed certainly in the past, I dunno, 12 to 18 months? Because I'm at these conferences talking about it and people are going, oh yeah, oh my God, IT, I've gotta get this. But then we did our round tables recently and everyone's like, this is great over here, but what about today? You know? And like people were a bit more about, okay, what impact do we need to think about today in today's business?

How do you see that as a relationship between the two?

Yeah, I mean, I think when we put our foot on the ground, there are always continuous topics that we have to be concerned about, also on the technology space. And one of them is just asking yourself, are we fit for purpose, what we have right now? In other words, we're sitting in a landscape of systems. Are these systems actually still adapted or designed to actually what we intended them to do when we implemented them maybe 5 to 10 years ago, for example? That's one key question you've gotta take a look at. Another key question is to look at, for example, the data that you're sitting on. Is the data that you're sitting on, because this obviously is a foundation for a lot of other these kind of these more topics that are further out, like AI, is the data that we're having and sitting on right now, is it up to date? Can we harmonize this data across systems? Can we make something useful out of it? Are we all kind of sitting in our little silos and this system is doing this, this system doing that, and not really pulling things together. So I'd say that's another piece that's already now on the plate. Another topic is, as we discussed previously, topics like cybersecurity. You can say, is this a treasury topic? Is it not a treasury topic? Is this something for the information security guys? I would say it's definitely a topic that's absolutely relevant for treasurers and the treasury community because I would say those who hold or sit on the cash are those the ones who are most likely at risk. So I'd say those are a couple of points where I'd I'd say those are topics kind of to be addressed now that aren't really future. They're out there in the future as well, but they definitely are topics that need to be looked at today.

And you and I were just talking, you're chairman of the SWIFT Corporate Group in Switzerland. You meet twice a year. You're just saying that get a cyber guy in there giving you advice. What pieces of advice would you give to treasurers about the cyber threat, if you like?

Yeah, I'd say just very important also kind of My last comment, as I said, is that it is a real threat. It is a complete marketplace. This is an organized setup, right? They are there to hit a return on investment just as we are as corporates as well, trying to hit a return on investment. So they're looking for weaknesses. Unfortunately, it's a reality that your employees within treasury are targets. And so that was definitely one area that we focused on. Another is that that sure, there's a limit to what you as a corporate treasury can cover, and at a certain point in time that if indeed there are certain events that take place, there are professionals out there who can also assist in this process to negotiate with the criminals, do further investigations. But I'd say most importantly, also assistance to make sure that your people are trained and ready to prevent that because I think that's really a key pillar in the whole cyber discussion is the strength that you have in numbers within your organization. And if it comes down to things like organizing training, or as we did recently in ABB as well, organizing training, sending out targeted phishing mails, those are the types of activities which I think bring a lot of value to the organization, which we're all to discuss then at this forum.

Yeah.

And when you and I caught up the other day, which triggered this catch-up call, if you like, you were just on the back of a massive project and then you've got another one coming along, you know, without, you know, going into too much detail, we know 'cause it's ABB and things like that, public company. But you can still talk about that. Talk us through what's been going on.

Absolutely. So really exciting. I mean, April last year, as you know, I mean, we're a large corporate, it's normal M&A activities, buying and selling. April last year, we announced that the sale, or at the time, a spin-off of a division, Robotics, fairly kind of forward-looking, I'd say, and exciting division to be working in. And kind of riding off of that as well was the need for them to become independent, also independent from a technology point of view when it comes to treasury management. Management system. So this is really exciting. So my work on this, in this area, got started beginning of July, and it was super exciting because it was extremely fast-paced. We started in July at ground zero. We didn't know what TMS provider we were gonna go with. We didn't know who was gonna implement this. And it is really about building up the momentum between July to end of September. And by that time, we knew who was gonna do it, who our implementation partners were gonna be, what system we were gonna be running with. And from that period on, October until May, we're really going through the cycles of the implementation phase, the requirements, design, implementation, testing, and rolling out. And this is what I think is, is especially cool, rolling out a full-fledged, I would say mid-tier TMS solution to this robotics division that has presence in 40 countries, 45 countries. So we're doing salaries, global salaries over this solution. And integration with 4 banks. So it really was a very nice solution that enabled this division, this robotics division, which now in the final stages before it'll be actually, has been actually bought by SoftBank before it'll actually be separated from the ABP Group. And so just kind of nice and nice being involved in such a project that touches all the points from the banking world to everything required in the TMS to everything that's required downstream, B2P, O2C, R2R. All these different process owners had to be involved. So it was a big project, but really a lot of fun.

And what are the top 2 or 3 takeaways for someone listening today that if you look back across that, what were the dos and the don'ts?

We did this, it worked really well.

We did this, it didn't go quite so well. Or, you know, someone listening is going, actually, I should have a checklist, the Felix checklist of do this for your TMS or don't do this for your TMS. What are you thinking?

Yeah, very good questions because actually kind of now that we're at the tail end of this project, this lessons learned piece comes in and kicks in. And so just off of those discussions, so I can tell you just a couple of the key winners on this. And I think a couple of the key winners are that really have your key stakeholders on board from the beginning. And I know this sounds very generic, everyone is telling us this, but what was really special about this project is that our key stakeholders joined 2 months before we went live. So you can imagine it's kind of like moving into a house and, or you're buying a house just kind of blindly and then you move into the house and you're like, ooh, really? I don't like these shaggy carpets, or I don't like these walls. I don't like pink walls, green walls, whatever. And it really, the structure, structure was there, but we got into then quite intensive discussions 2 months before go-live, kind of in a period where things should be set in stone. The concrete should have been really frozen, which had then quite a few impacts on the ability then to deliver and I'd say the tension in the project just shortly before go-live. Now we're a month, month and a half, 2 months after the 1st of May. Things are settled, but I'd say that definitely was one piece, stakeholders' involvement really, really early. We did our best bet, best guess, I would say, based on having, working with qualified people within ABB, took that as a template, but still one key takeaway, really make sure that you have your key stakeholders on board. Another key element I thought coming out of this project, which was key is, as always, make sure you work with experienced partners. Technology comes always down to the same thing. It's like, do you have people that understand the system and the processes, can provide input as well on the processes to kind of maybe reshape the processes and reshape and have that dialogue on the processes so that also your system can adapt to it if possible, and having the competent people who then can actually do the implementation. And so I I think those are really key elements as well. Competent partners to work with. Try and think 2 or 3.

Time.

Time is always wonderful. In this instance that we had right now, unfortunately, this implementation, we didn't have time on our sides. It started, as I said, being in July. We knew the fixed deadline was 1st of May that we set for this project. So for the scope that we had, the number of banks, the fact that we integrated some 45 countries also on the HR system side and having a global treasury that was being built here, the scope was significant and time was just small. Yeah, I mean, normally you don't think you do a project like this probably in a 12 to 15 month period. So, but it just put additional pressure on the team to work, get the job done, and I'm happy where we are right now.

And you're talking there about treasury professionals implementing IT and, you know, the system and everything else. For those, you know, when I meet the lots of the treasury professionals at conferences now and things, they're going, you know, what skills do I need to build? What should I be doing? How should I be doing this? What are you telling your teams or what advice are you giving someone when you bump into a conference and they're saying, oh, you know, should I get to know AI? Can it be ChatGPT? Can it be Claude or can it be this or are there other areas or what should treasury professionals be thinking about?

Yeah, I think it's a very valid question. And I know we had the discussion last time, I was kind of getting on topics about really education, continuous education. Seeing that your team stays hungry. And I'd say some of the skill sets are definitely on the technical side. I think we're seeing this shift more and more. I mean, we've seen this over the, probably the past 10 years, just the need for treasurers to step up their technology knowledge and interest, for example. The AI piece is one, but around that, as I mentioned as well, topics like cybersecurity, just at least getting it on the plate. They don't have to become the professionals and specialist in this area, but seeing that it's on the agenda, and I think those are some skills that kind of should be slowly built up. Another one, which I think is absolutely important, is project management. And even if you can say it's kind of a soft skill, but it takes a lot to bring people together from various departments, internals, externals, and motivate them to deliver, you know, an end product. Out of, and we've got our day job, you can say. We don't always have dedicated people working on these projects. A lot of them are specialists. They're working in their day-to-day work, but in a normal situation, and here you're coming in as a project manager and you've got to orchestrate the whole thing, communicate, all these other soft skills like that, because that's in the end what delivers value. Having people that can, the individual, sure, he's a specialist, he can drive you to value to some extent, but I think getting the people together to deliver something bigger Really takes a project manager who has that skill set to be able to do that. And I think that's another, I'd say, really key kind of area where skills should be sought, where we should have more experience, I'd say, in the treasury space.

And what advice would you give to some treasury professionals, if you like, who are slightly nervous about the pace of technology change at the moment? Again, when I'm talking to— it's actually all levels, you know, whether you like it or not, you talk to a treasury manager, they're like, wow, all this stuff's coming at me.

Me.

But then, whether they say it or not, there's a lot of treasurers doing the same, going, goodness. How would you advise them? How do you reassure them? Or what, what should they be doing?

Yeah, I'd say, uh, maybe the first thing is that technology is always evolving, right? And we go from one wave to another wave to another wave. So technology is always evolving. Don't panic in the situation, right? Also, what we're seeing now, AI is actually with these large language models models is actually making a deeper penetration into what we do into treasury. Absolutely. At the same time, there are still some fundamental topics that haven't been answered around AI, which are kind of forcing us to take a step back. I mean, we answer less of key areas, like key topics like traceability, right? That's something that you don't hear that much about is that, okay, my model spits out this number X and then the treasurer will come and say, okay, well, you gave this number X. Well, where did this number come from, right? If you're not able to provide this traceability and kind of use your brain, how this thing actually got to where it's gotten, then you're in a difficult situation. And so that kind of limits the ability to kind of roll out that technology more and more. Maybe it's just a question of time, but I'd say traceability is a big piece. Another piece as well where I see a lot of investment on the AI side in kind like saying that, yeah, yeah, it's gonna really take our jobs or whatever, is, have you ever asked yourself backups? Do we have backups of these great agents that people are developing, for example?

Absolutely.

If you don't, and the humans aren't around to kind of who developed this, who understand it, then you've got a real problem because we back up everything else. We back up our servers, we back up this and the other. But if these tools, for example, these AI tools aren't being backed up. And if that's not taken seriously, then, hey, then, then we have an issue. So there's a lot of, you can say, mushrooms popping up with individual solutions left and right. And I think it's important that Trezor shouldn't be panicking, but I think they should just have a healthy approach to this, as with other technology changes that are happening, and just ask the right questions. And ask these questions as well about traceability, about backup, and a slew of other questions, as you would for any other technology that's coming around.

And you talked about this project you just coming to the end of and things like that. You've got some exciting new ones which I don't know how much you can talk about them, but tell us what's happening next if you're able to.

Absolutely. And I think one of the— let me tell you a couple of exciting— I've got two key ones at the moment. One is related to data, and this is something that we've seen, something that I referred to as well just a few minutes ago, that indeed treasuries either, either all sitting on one stack, one solution, and that has massive advantages in some areas, maybe disadvantages in others. In our situation, we've got various systems fit for purpose, which also have positive negatives. But one of the negative sides about that is that you have a legacy and you have potential issues related to data, right? And every time we come back to this topic about, you know, what is the next step with AI and with data analysis, it comes back to the reality of having containers where you can normalize your data and then do something with that data. And so right now it's a project to create a treasury reporting database. Database where we're extracting out of multiple systems this data. And it's a really exciting project that's ongoing. And part of this as well, I'm hitting the limits of my knowledge. In ABB, we started a program 2 years ago, which I'm really, really excited about that the treasurer and my boss also is supportive of this, that we hire an intern to come in straight out of the university, 1 year, complete crack on the AI side, as well as a lot of knowledge on data, data modeling side. To really to take this to the next level. And so that's one project that's ongoing right now. Another is actually a really interesting project it's doing related to insourcing. So insourcing of actually specialized skills, which we over the past years actually had outsourced, but for various reasons, and again, this is all a knowledge game. Let's be realistic, right? For various reasons. Also, I'd say also because the application owners, the people that really want the results, the returns. They're saying, we're not getting our information quick enough. We're not getting the results, the fixes and everything around these applications quick enough. Let's see if we can't insource these skill sets. And it's an interesting topic to be able to insource, you know, and we've always heard this in the past. The first reaction is that it's expensive. It goes against the grain, but then you just say, think about it for a second. Knowledge in general, some stuff is very generic.

Quick.

Some stuff is very specialized. In a lot of these systems that we have in treasury, there's a lot of very specialized knowledge. You don't find the resources out there who can actually contribute and deliver value on it. And in our case, we had the business case that for a couple of our systems that we have, it makes sense to insource this. We could then deliver quicker results, quicker value, and like that, our stakeholders happy. And so that's a really interesting project that I'm working on to build up then that that we just hired.

Fantastic. Now I know not got too much time left with you, but, you know, next few years, I was asked again at the UK conference, someone said, oh, what's happening in 5 years? I went, no, no one knows in 5 years. I didn't know what's happened 5 years ago. How can you say what's happening 5 years in the future? But the future, where do you see it going next? What, you know, as you look in your crystal ball?

Yeah, I would say again, I can't reveal too much mostly because I don't have a perfect crystal ball. I'd say one, one key area, one thing that, that we'll see a lot more of is that with time, as for example, AI matures, we'll see a lot more depth in the existing solutions that we're buying off the shelf, a lot more depth and maturity of these models, which will allow then treasurers, for example, more quickly to be able to extract data, extract information, doesn't have to run a report, wait for an analyst to analyze the result. You'll see quicker returns in that area. And so I'd say that's something really exciting that, that's happening, the depth of these AI models within these applications. I mean, we hear about Joule and SAP, I think it's Trusted AI and Cariba. I mean, everyone's got their area. So that's kind of on the technology side in the systems. Another area which I'm really excited about is the payment space. And as we move more and more to, as consumers, kind of real-time payments, payments, I think it's really interesting to see the bigger adoption by corporates as well in this space. It's a little bit slow moving, right? Also, we have regulators that are also, you know, asking certain questions and et cetera, et cetera. And the banking system maybe isn't quite ready for it in some areas, but I think that's going to be, that's going to be a game changer across the board for all corporates to see to what extent we can finally not only talk about real-time treasury, but actually have a real-time arbitrary.

And with yourself, it's amazing. We'll do a summary of all of your takeaways each week. You know, the advice has evolved over the time. So we, you know, I was just looking there, so in 2020, then 2022, and now 2026. I like this. What are the takeaways for someone listening? You've given some advice there already, but, you know, early stage, mid-stage, you know, what are you going to give us takeaways today?

Yeah, it's interesting. I did take some time this morning to listen to some of the older podcasts. Like, ah, it's all out of date. But no, it's like when I listen to It's like just some key takeaways. It's like I saw as well, just this topic about staying hungry, staying ahead of the curve, taking the time to see what's in the market as far as new technologies, new solutions, also educational opportunities. As I mentioned last time as well, it's internal or external. There is so much good, even YouTube videos.

Exactly.

There's so much good stuff out there that even if you don't don't understand what are the nuts and bolts of AI or what exactly is happening in a cybersecurity attack, you can educate yourself out there. And it used to be going to the library, getting a book, and then, and like digging through it, for example. But now the stuff is at your fingertips. And I think that really is a lot of power that we have and really power that's concentrated to specifically what we're doing. And that kind of, that gives one new ideas as well. And so, I think that's, that was a tip that I gave a few years ago and I think that still, still remains. Stay hungry, stay ahead of the curve. And I think those are two good takeaways.

And I think, and I agree. And what I would add to that is the podcast is, I never knew, as we said, we're coming up to 8 years old. It's like, I thought we'd do 10 or maybe 15. We've done 430 plus, but 280,000 downloads.

Yes.

But that's also people listening and getting that knowledge. And that's what I think really makes a difference. As you say, people are going, actually, this is a way that I can listen to it, listen to it, get my CTP credits, but also actually listen to another treasury professional, you know, looking at it as if they're sitting next to you.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think part of that is actually engaging yourself. So staying out, talking to people, going to conferences, exchanging ideas. And I think that then you're like, oh, that's actually a neat idea. Let me take that home and see if that works in my setting.

Yeah, fantastic. Superstar as always, looking forward to it. We'll see you in Barcelona, but hopefully you won't go midnight swimming. We will put a link to that in the show notes. But mate, you're an absolute superstar, and I can't wait to see you later this year.

Thanks so much, Mike. It's always a pleasure being on your show.

Thank you, sir. Before we finish, a quick reminder: we've got a few discounts that could save you some money.

First, if you're heading to Eurofinance in Barcelona this September, you get 10% off your registration through the Treasury Recruitment Company.

Then in November, I'll be speaking at the AFP National Conference in Las Vegas.

You can also access a discount on your conference registration. I know, you're welcome. There are also discounts available for CTP and FPAC qualifications. And don't forget, you can earn official CTP credits simply by listening to any of our Treasury Career Corner podcast episodes and complete the short quiz You'll find all the details, codes, and links on our partners page at treasuryrecruitment.com/partners.

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