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HR Challenges of Global Treasury
26-04-2022 | treasuryXL | ComplexCountries | LinkedIn |
The twin challenges of being a people manager and handling essential cross-function communications have always added to the technical and strategic demands of being a treasurer – and these have become more difficult with COVID and remote working. This report explores the approaches of five senior treasurers from Europe.
The peer group discussion was chaired by Damian Glendinning.
This report was compiled by Monie Lindsey.
We are happy to share a copy of the full report FREE, please contact us and mention ‘HR Report’ in your message.
Source
Chair’s Overview
This session was suggested by a member and produced a thoughtful discussion. The twin challenges of being a people manager and handling essential cross-function communications have always added to the technical and strategic demands of being a treasurer – and these have become more difficult with COVID and remote working.
The shared input from all participants was that we have put a lot more effort into communications. When you don’t see people in the office all the time, you have to make the effort to pick up the phone and talk to them. The result has been an even greater emphasis on communications skills – and it is even harder to motivate and support employees who are working in different countries, as it is very hard to go and visit them. These skills are required, not only within the team, but when dealing with other functions such as Sales, and external providers, like banks.
A lot of emphases was put on the ability to keep things simple, and avoid confusing partners with technical jargon.
Initially, the impact of the pandemic was to reduce staff mobility, and cause people to stay in their jobs for longer. This is now giving way to increased mobility, and the need to hire and train people without physically meeting them. This has placed an even greater emphasis on the quality of procedures and process documentation. It has also led to an increase in remote learning, and, potentially, increased the available talent pool, since geographic proximity may no longer be required.
Finally, there was a lot of discussion about areas where the pandemic has simply accelerated trends that were already present – notably an increase in automation, and a reduction in the amount of manual transaction processing work. Again, this has resulted in an even greater emphasis on analytic and communications skills, with a reduced focus on operational ability. As an aside, there was a discussion about whether treasury staff still need to actually understand how the underlying systems work.
Bottom line: the pandemic has accelerated trends that already existed: more remote working and learning, more automation. This has put even more emphasis on the need to communicate well, especially as the phone and video conferencing, while they have undoubtedly saved us, make communications more difficult. The result is a need to put in more effort, and spend more time on it. Paradoxically, this may even prove to be beneficial.
Myths and basics of RFPs
25-04-2022 | treasuryXL | Treasury Delta | LinkedIn | RFPs are one of the less attractive parts of projects, although a necessary evil. Treasurers hate them because to set up this huge document and organise the necessary stakeholders it takes time and effort, while remaining highly manual. Let’s break down the myths around tenders and see […]
Effective API Strategies Go Beyond Banks & Payments
21-04-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |
By Brian Blihovde, Senior Director, Product Marketing
Source
Bank Connectivity is Only the Beginning of the Transformation Journey
CFOs looking to optimize their processes and systems view APIs as a gateway to enterprise-wide liquidity and the organization’s financial capabilities and health. Finance transformation starts with bank connectivity, leading to real-time decision-making, but the opportunities do not stop there. Bank connectivity and payments help finance deliver more complete, real-time information to all parts of the business. This is the benefit from composable financial systems and design. CFOs, treasurers, and their IT counterparts must all collaborate, consider and plan how transformations continue to drive impacts beyond bank connectivity for all of finance and business units as well.
Finance and the business units to include manufacturing, warehousing, inventory, sales, and distribution all comprise enterprise-level functions contributing important strategic decision-making information. APIs should be used to drive transformation, resilience of data, efficiency, and real-time reporting. Strategic liquidity decision-making will improve once IT and finance can collaborate.
Legacy Systems Don’t Exist with New Data Unification Strategies
CEOs and CFOs are finding it harder to justify an entire re-do of their systems landscapes. CFOs should not look at their systems as “legacy” as API integration can take data and transform it into information and expanded decision-making capabilities. This API-driven unification of data from systems available and stored within various databases and systems across the organization. Legacy is an outdated concept when leading-edge, comprehensive APIs are introduced as technology enablers.
Information, today, is compiled, rationalized, and optimized with APIs regardless of the source system or application; definitions of “legacy” are not relevant any longer. CFOs and finance leaders make decisions with aggregated data transformed into business intelligence repositories from the information they have today and at reduced timelines with leading APIs.
Doing More with Less: APIs Beyond the Bank
Treasury and finance can do more when they use a vendor with integrative API capabilities beyond payments and banking alone. Integrating procurement, ERPs, GLs, and other third-party systems delivers the data unification needed for a comprehensive decision-making platform. Today, APIs go beyond banking and payments for integration across:
Taking Next Steps
To obtain better, and more accurate access to finance information, APIs link the systems used to compile and compose this data into an automated and real-time systemic process. When synchronous ERP, ancillary and core treasury systems collectively feed into the strategic cash flow forecasting process and BI dashboards, the result is a comprehensive view of mid and longer-term flows equaling less effort, more insight and better decision-making.
Enterprise views of cash and liquidity begin with bank connectivity as it provides the needed access to payments, cash and liquidity availability and should always be real-time. However, it is not the end of the story; today’s organizations require more prescriptive, forward-looking capabilities only delivered with information flows like procure to pay and order to cash cycles from the entire unified financial landscape. These holistic, API-integrative systems can generate the business information and intelligence needed to quickly make better decisions and speed the success of today’s organization.
To learn more on how new leading APIs are becoming the standard for how finance and treasury become more than information stewards, but rather catalysts and centers of excellence for better strategic decision-making for their greater organizations – www.kyriba.com.