Advancements in technology are reshaping the treasury profession, freeing up manual processes and allowing for more strategic work. This paradigm shift requires treasury departments to rethink how they operate, often needing to retrain employees and forge closer relationships with technology partners.

 “We live in an environment of increasing complexity,” said Daniel Shaffer, senior global public relations manager for Kyriba, who moderated a panel discussion on treasury technology at Kyriba Live in Las Vegas. “Technology is here to help us, but we still have to have the basic fundamental understanding of what we're doing and why we're doing it.

KEY CHANGES

Seth Marlowe, senior vice president and strategist with Wells Fargo’s Strategic Advisory Group, pointed out that treasury needs to make an effort to adopt new technology. If it doesn’t, then the treasury function as a whole may not be able to attract talent. “Who wants to come into treasury? The reality is there is a lot of manual activity that we're all frantically trying to automate,” he said. “We need to create positions that are going to be appealing to the next generation or generations of workers that are going to come into treasury.”

Kevin Permenter, research manager for IDC, noted that treasury’s profile in recent years has risen considerably. That rise in prominence has resulted in treasury needing to deliver data faster, and technology can help significantly in that regard. “All of a sudden now, visibility into your cash position, being able to forecast and do those kinds of things at speed and at scale, have become more important,” he said. “It's a double-edged sword. Treasury's becoming more strategic, but as a result, there is much more scrutiny and much more intense visibility into its capabilities.”

Tom Hunt, CTP, AFP’s director of treasury services, added that treasury’s role has also expanded to take on tasks that it previously wasn’t involved in. “We're seeing more treasury departments take on real estate and take on insurance,” he said. “With the analytical mindset that treasury has, the role can continue to evolve in that partnership with your organization.”

TUG OF WAR

Marlowe sees treasury in a “perpetual tug of war” between doing strategic work and its more traditional duties. The CFO may be relying on the treasury department to be a strategic partner, because treasury touches so many different places across the organization, yet it also is typically small-staffed and has its own work to keep up with.

“So you're trying to do more with less, but at the same time you got all this stuff that you've got to do, and it doesn't help your case in treasury when you have paper signature cards brought to the CFO to sign,” Marlowe said. “That's the epitome of treasury not being strategic. So if you've got to get to the point where all this stuff is digitized.”

Permenter added that as treasury becomes more strategic, it will require a change in the skillset for a treasury professional. He believes that, at an earlier stage in their careers, practitioners will need to be able to find the insight behind the data. “You’re going to have to find the person that is comfortable stepping out from behind the spreadsheet and telling the story behind the numbers,” he said. “And to be quite honest, that’s not the typical skillset you’ll find when it comes to treasurers.”

Hunt sees this as an opportunity for treasury departments to take the initiative and develop their staff members. “For those that want to tell the story with numbers, this is a great opportunity for the treasurer to look upon treasury analysts to develop them or lead them into more of a strategic role,” he said.

ADDRESSING TECHNOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

In addition to practitioners expanding their analytical skills, they also will need to continue to grow their technological skills. So going forward, every treasury team needs to have someone on staff that is really tech-savvy. “I encourage people to go down that path because you're not always going to have an IT person sitting next to you who's going to be able to build it for you,” he said. “So sometimes you've got to build it yourself, and you either find it amongst the folks you have, or maybe you find someone that's actually on your IT team and wants to pursue the finance path.”

Treasury departments can also look to their technology vendors to help fill that gap. As treasury doesn’t always have someone on staff that can address technology issues, and IT may not always be available to help, it is often up to the vendors to continually address any ongoing issues.

This new approach requires vendors to also rethink how they work with their clients. Marlowe believes that the ideal technology vendor would be seen as a “treasury partner,” which has actual practitioners working on the support staff who truly understand the issues that treasury departments face. “They’d have a significant degree of knowledge on treasury, cash management, and the things that I'm going to do on my day-to-day basis so that when they're guiding me through an implementation, they're giving me best practices,” he said. “Because without that, it's just software.”

For more insights on treasury technology, download AFP’s Treasury in Practice Guide, Getting the Most Out of Your Treasury Management System, underwritten by Kyriba.