Surviving treasury: where globalisation and digital transformation collide

Leslie Holstrom, producer of this year’s EuroFinance international treasury management conference, sets out the agenda for Copenhagen.
While economists and politicians increasingly debate the benefits and downsides of globalisation and digital transformation, companies and their employees know what these forces mean for them in practice. They mean complexity. They mean constant change. They mean stress – to business models and to people.
Globalisation has been a central driver of treasury stress for years. As businesses expand internationally, the burden on treasury rises: risk management, foreign exchange to interest rate to regulatory risks multiply; new banking and customer relationships mean new processes and problems; and complex new supply chain issues jostle with new AP/AR, cash management and funding headaches.
But treasurers have at least had decades to adapt. After all, globalisation has been the centrepiece of corporate growth strategy for longer than most executives have been employed and with it treasury assumptions and structures.
Now it is the questioning of globalisation that is causing the next wave of corporate and treasury stress. What happens if the rising forces of ‘localisation’ become more important? What are the key assumptions they may have to revise? What does de-globalisation mean for different regions and industrial sectors, for the availability of finance and access to supply chains? And is there a wider issue – are the easy gains from globalising gone and if so, what next?

Digital transformation
Like globalisation, technology – in most cases meaning ‘pieces of software’ – is also turning out to be a bringer of both promises and problems. It is touted as the solution to many of the challenges posed by globalisation. It is also touted as the solution to itself – in the sense that legacy technology, advanced technology in the hands of customers and suppliers, and new technology in the hands of service providers are all challenges for corporates and their treasurers, challenges that technology companies say they can solve.
This may not be the infinite loop it seems but it is true that technology is just as capable of making problems more complicated and expensive than it is of solving them. Implementing new software platforms at enterprise scale is one of the most complex jobs in any corporate, and most projects run over time and over budget, even those that in the end deliver the promised results.
And for all the talk of transformation, for most businesses, digitalisation has meant Rackspace, Salesforce and a third-party e-Commerce and payments platform, if that. Larger, and also purely digital companies, have gone much further but for even the largest SMEs, the costs and complexities of true digital transformation have been unsupportable and the benefits hard to quantify. Traditional communications channels between businesses and customers are failing, disrupting everything from marketing to payments. Digital transformation is finally happening but mostly externally, to companies and not by them. So how do companies recapture the agenda in this process? How can ‘normal’ companies survive the transition? And what role does treasury play?
The Copenhagen interpretation
This year’s Eurofinance international treasury event in Copenhagen October 16 to 18 takes these themes as its central narrative. Treasurers from the world’s most significant corporates will share their insights on dealing with this new and difficult environment. They will be joined by renowned economists, academics and thinkers, who will paint the big picture as well as providing more practical advice on both creating growth (through new customers and channels, sales models and acquisitions) and better de-risking. All this will be accompanied by the mix of detailed case studies, research, debates, panels and Treasury labs that treasurers have come to depend on from EuroFinance.
Delegates can join the regulation series where they can learn more about Libor’s replacement, the impact of Brexit, IFRS16 and global tax changes.
Register now to join the world’s leading international treasury event on 16-17 October in Copenhagen.