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- March 23, 2024 at 9:25 am
- in reply to: Key Treasury Tech focus for 2024
Start with the basics, so you can walk before you run. I believe AI has a lot of potential when you have solid foundation.Too often treasurers are focus on technology and new trends and forget about understanding their business, documenting their operations properly, then remove waste with “creative destruction” (think about all those reports that take days and you have no clue who’s actually using or even looking at those!), having a BCP in place, educate and train your staff, ensure they have clear roles and responsibilities, etc.
Once you have this, you can optimize: have a workflow tool in place to better manage end-user requests to treasury and manage workload, create and maintain KPIS, have your own BIC for example to be less dependant on your banks and have better negotiating power, implement a TMS to connect your BIC and all your banks to it, allowing you cash visibility at first, payments optimization and better control, automated reporting, and then why not starting to look at AI for cash forecasting capabilities, using machine learning, then you can look at your FX process where AI can also play a role.
All in all I think there’s a lot to do before jumping straight into AI.
Benjamin Defays- March 10, 2024 at 3:24 pm
- in reply to: How do you optimise your interest rate result
I find repos not the answer for treasurers who are looking for risk diversification, risk-adjusted returns and simplicity in operations. In my view it should be about the right balance between banking products (negotiate your current account remuneration condition, ask for saving account options, and also term deposit when you can lock in liquidity – and rate – for several weeks/months), and money market funds. The latter will offer highly liquid instruments, with rather decent returns and good risk diversification without treasurers needing to review underlying assets constantly. On top of this, technology is there and readily available to invest/divest easily with some interfacing with TMS. For daily operations this is the best I’ve seen so far, with relatively easy onboarding and accessible to multiple risk profiles. I envision MMF as being the best product also for the upcoming rate change that is pointing on the horizon (rate cuts for Q2 2024), where fund providers will play with the WAM to protect yield while bank products will likely suffer more from rate cuts.Benjamin Defays