Pre-conference training courses | Tuesday September 26th
Dive into the skills and techniques required to propel treasury into a successful future in the pre-conference training course of your choice. You will come away with tactical insights and key skills to advance your treasury.
Cash plays a central part in treasury and this has a direct impact on systems, and processes, complemented by the use of technologies from banking and fintech providers. This course will help treasury departments design a “connected cash” strategy. Using real-world case studies to illustrate the theory, participants will be able to define a business case for connected cash in their organisation.
Throughout this course, attendees will learn:
- How to manage cash as a corporate asset in a connected organisation
- Expectations from treasury related to cash management
- Design of connected cash processes including setup of in-house bank
- Treasury’s role in new business models like “Direct to consumer”
- Design of treasury organization including set-up of center of expertise
- Use of technologies (for e.g. AI, Machine learning, predictive analytics, APIs)
- Design of banking infrastructure and optimized bank account structure to support connected cash
- Learn about the market offerings (virtual accounts, connectivity solutions, sanction party screening and compliance solutions)
- How to identify quantitative benefits and develop a business case for transformation
Who should attend?
- Treasurers thinking of treasury transformation or in the process of transformation
- Cash managers planning to improve or optimize cash management processes and infrastructure
- Treasury technology champions / treasury IT managers
- Finance / treasury transformation project managers
- Finance shared services / center of expertise (COE) responsible
Course tutor
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Aniket Kulkarni
Partner, PwC
Aniket Kulkarni
Partner, PwC
Gain a holistic picture of treasury technology from a practitioner’s point of view and get the skills you need to design a technology strategy for the treasury function, or optimise the introduction of already chosen technologies. This intermediate level course is run by Nicholas Franck, a treasury professional with over 30 years’ global experience in treasury, banking and consulting.
SaaS, APIs, RPA, AI/ML and more. New technology is enabling treasury staff to minimise time on processing and concentrate on adding value instead. However, poorly understood, bought or implemented technology doesn’t deliver the results wanted. It is, therefore, vital to understand the solutions available, the environment and plan ahead to identify and solve company needs correctly.
Throughout this course, attendees will:
- Get an overview of existing and new technologies relevant to the treasury department and some of the underlying enabling infrastructure
- Gain awareness of the solutions available to address their companies’ pain points
- Establish a framework for identifying technology needs and constraints
- Learn how to structure a holistic approach to selection right through to implementation
- Develop a strategy for their functions and companies on what to do, when and how
- Understand how to implement effectively and assign roles
- Build the tools to gain credibility with their non-treasury management and peers through the display of technology knowledge and fact-based proposals
Who should attend?
- Mid- to senior-level executives who want/need to know about, at a high level, the different treasury technologies available and the benefits they bring. Also, how various technologies relate and integrate and the challenges to be overcome to implement and maintain them successfully over time.
- Executives who want to understand the consequences to their units of new technologies already being rolled out enterprise-wide.
- Executives at all levels who want to understand the current status and future directions in treasury technology
- Executives at all levels working on a treasury technology policy
- Professionals from IT and other functions who support treasury and need an overview of the treasury technology space and the changes happening in it
Course tutor
-
Nicholas Franck
EuroFinance Tutor
Nicholas Franck
EuroFinance Tutor
Nick is a treasury professional with over 30 years’ global experience in Treasury, Banking and Consulting. He studied Engineering at university and specialised in computing during his final year. His earliest jobs were hands-on with technology, building a dealing desk information management system and implementing a treasury management system. His responsibilities have grown since then to include technology strategy and implementation management whilst still remaining hands-on. He has been responsible for buying and implementing treasury technology, designing processes and controls, and maintaining and upgrading all of these over time. Examples include straight-through-processing integration with banks and advanced reporting tools. In addition, Nick has worked on non-treasury projects. These have given him practical knowledge of technology integration across business silos, which is now particularly relevant for cash forecasting, real-time reporting and dashboards. Nick’s combination of Treasury and business expertise, knowledge of technology, and deep interest in the subject make him an ideal tutor for this treasury technology course.
This workshop provides practical examples of the practices used by multinationals to meet challenges. There is a particular focus on treasury’s activities impact on the wider finance and other business functions.
In a rapidly changing economic environment, treasury is both central and critical to many of the key tasks facing a CFO. These include, but are not limited to, ensuring the solvency of the company, safeguarding assets and controlling and managing risk. Risks today come in many forms, driven by the volatility of exchange rates, fluctuating bank appetite for credit risk and more recently interest rate volatility. Political and country risk is also firmly back on the agenda. Coupled with significant internal changes around shared service adoption, working capital management and automation possibilities there is an important challenge in deciding where to focus and invest for the optimum return.
By the end of the course, participants will be able to understand:
- The evolving role of treasury and whether there is an absolute “best practice” in treasury?
- What are the proven and available treasury organisation structures and treasury techniques
- How to manage corporate liquidity; solvency and controlling investment risk
- The role of supply chain financing and working capital management
- The various treasury approaches for shared service centres and payment factories
- Global payment infrastructure and treasury technology
- How cyber-risk and cyber-security are crucial to treasury and the wider business
- What to expect in the future
Who should attend?
This course is ideal for CFOs and/or Financial Controllers new to treasury management or as a refresher to update your current knowledge and set the agenda for the coming year and beyond.
Course tutor
-
Adrian Rodgers
Senior EuroFinance tutor and director,
Arc Solutions
Adrian Rodgers
Senior EuroFinance tutor and director,
Arc Solutions
After qualifying as a Chartered Accountant, Adrian spent a number of years with IBM, in a variety of treasury and sales roles. Adrian was also part of the implementation team which created IBM International Financial Services, the European centralised treasury operation based in Dublin. Adrian then joined the newly created cash management consultancy team of Chase Manhattan Bank, with a brief to help create cash management solutions which matched the needs of customers’ underlying businesses and technology infrastructures. As a Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, he specialised in managing change in the finance function, including re-engineering of corporate treasury. His current company is an independent consultancy providing advisory, design and implementation services to corporates and banks, on a variety of change-related issues within the finance function. Services include strategy development, process design, bank and vendor selection and project management. Clients include major corporations with a strong international focus.
Registration and refreshments
Registration and refreshments
Registration and refreshments
Introduction from the tutor and collection of the participants’ learning wishes
Introduction
- Evolving role of treasury and the impact of market situation
- What is connected cash?
The evolving role of treasury, is there a “best” treasury practice?
- Role of treasury in the 21st century: defensive, proactive, strategic approaches
- Maximising liquidity and availability of credit facilities
- Importance of cash, liquidity and working capital management
- Coping with risk: FX, interest rate, commodity, counterparty risk
- Treasurer as polymath
A general introduction to treasury technology
Treasury activities and where different technologies fit in
Vapourware and beneficial technology – The clients’ role
- The importance of identifying pain points precisely
- Having a clear strategy
- Practical implementation methods and stakeholder buy-in
Business processes around cash
- Role of cash in enterprise processes (for e.g. O2C, P2P)
- Direct to consumer and B2B payments
Treasury organisation and treasury techniques
- Organisation of treasury and the role of the CFO
- Setting treasury policy and governance
- Treasury as a tool to actively manage risks
- Levels of treasury responsibility: centralised, distributed, decentralised
- Inter-company lending
- Centralising exposure management: inter-company FX
- Treasury dashboards for CFOs
The pace of change in today’s technology landscape and how to handle it
Applying 80:20 and ‘No blame’ project shifts in all aspects of project planning
Morning break
Refreshment break
Review of established treasury technologies and infrastructure requirements
- On-premise TMSs
- Market information providers
- Some dealing platforms
- Systems integration
- Legacy reporting capabilities
Refreshment break
Connected cash strategy
- Vision and Objectives
- Design principles
Management of liquidity: maintaining solvency and controlling investment risk
- Accessing balances and capital locked in the organisation
- Types of notional pooling, zero balancing and concentration
- The tax, legal, documentation and regulatory issues
- Mobilising core balances and money market investment
- Tax neutral or tax advantaged treasury vehicles
- Impact of BEPS
- The changing role of cash flow forecasting
Historical issues with the above
- No ‘perfect fit vs requirements
- Lots of manual work
- The difficulty of managing change
- Silo-based technology
- Extensive use of IT needed both upfront and over time
New technologies and how they address the issues
- SaaS
- Diversification of information providers
- APIs in systems integration
- Enterprise-wide provision of and access to data (data lakes and data warehouses)
- Analytics platforms and dashboards (‘Super’ Excel, Power BI, Tableau and more)
- Robotic process automation RPA
Lunch
Supply chain financing and working capital
- Principles of supplier and receivables financing
- Creating win, win, win in the chain
- Financing: POs, invoices, acceptances, promissory notes
- Leveraging credit differentials
- Distributor and inventory financing
Lunch
Lunch
Key building blocks
- In-house banking
- Virtual accounts and On-behalf of models (OBO)
- Technology
- Regulation (e.g. sanction party screening) and security
Treasury approaches for shared service centres and payment factories
- Critical role of treasury – deliver banking interfaces to SSCs
- Integration of ERP accounting with payments systems
- Examples from ERP vendors
- In-house cash driven solutions for cashless funding, POBO, netting
- Achieving economies of scale: benchmarking the processes
- Challenges to eliminate domestic instruments and paper
Recap of the morning and participants’ comments
One framework for planning new technology introduction
- Avoiding the Tower of Babel – Importance of effective communication Bottom-Up and Diagonally [e.g., with other functions] as well as Top-Down to identify issues correctly and who needs to be involved, how, and during what steps
- Understanding XaaS and the acceleration of software development – Importance of keeping in touch with IT infrastructure and software-writing environmental changes
- Finalising issues and their prioritisation
- Creating a business case
- Shortlisting providers – Established providers and / versus new challengers – Strengths and weaknesses of each
- Understanding resource availability for new project implementation and tailoring a change approach aligned with these and the expected useful life of the technology
– Early-adopter versus laggard preferences
– Enterprise-wide vs silo only change
– Small-step / partial solution versus big step / complete solution change
– Data cleansing/ wrangling requirements – upfront and ongoing
– Order of implementation – front office or back office first
– Implementation methods – agile vs waterfall; 80:20 and ‘No blame’ project shift planning
– Planning for the discovery of new, better technologies and budget constraints –Flexible 60:40 mix-and-match vs 80:20 planning - Stakeholder buy-in, in writing
- Provider selection
- Stakeholder buy-in, in writing (gain!)
- Implementation
- Continuous review (bottom up, diagonally, top-down)
Refreshment break
Connected cash processes with case study
- Cash position and cashflow forecasting
- Global payment and collection factory
- Electronic payments and collections (for e.g. D2C, B2B)
Refreshment break
Global payment infrastructure and treasury technology
- The systems architecture of typical multinational
- Who needs a TMS? Who doesn’t?
- Connecting you company to its banks: multibanking and Swift
- Automated bank reconciliation and receivables matching
- Role of a treasury dashboard
Connected cash organisation with case study
- Treasury organization and roles
- Role of shared services (SSC) and Center of expertise (CoE)
Afternoon break
Fintechs and the explosion of niche applications
- Examples of Fintechs – new payment methods, dynamic supply chain financing and investing, KYC, RegTech, ESG and more
- Stages of an entrepreneurial startup and increasing ease of application creation and funding – Relevance of this to Treasurers
- Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and its immediate applications
- Distributed Ledger Technology/Blockchain and immediate applications
- Bitcoin, Digital currencies and Central Bank Digital Currencies
- Decentralised Finance (DeFi)
Business case and roadmap with case study
- Business case elements and key quantitative and qualitative benefits
- Roadmap
Cyber-risk and cyber-security
- Definitions
- Threat vectors
- Major risk areas; why AP? Why not treasury?
- Lowering your risk profile
Transformation roadmap – case study
Future trends
- More of all of the previous applications, improved, plus: Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Integrated multi-functional AI/ML
- Citizen developers and low code/no code
- New skills needed in Treasury
- Lack of availability of ‘true’ data scientists – ‘Call to Arms’ – Train Your Own!
What to expect in the future
- Treasury policy agenda issues for CFOs
- Expectations; what to expect in 2O23 and beyond
- Policy agenda issues for treasurers
- New banking products