The Future of Corporate Treasury

15 The Future of Corporate Treasury “Technological changes will impact how corporate treasurers are managing their operations. For example, API functionality allows treasury to manage their banking activity in real time, directly from their own trusted applications, whether on a tablet, mobile device or laptop.” “FIS has recently partnered with Citibank to connect the Trax corporate payments factory via APIs rather than more traditional bank connectivity channels. This is a vital step forward in allowing treasuries to execute, manage, monitor and report on their transaction flows in real time, increasing cash management and visibility.” “We are developing use cases for more advanced business intelligence tools, which use machine learning to improve decision-making in the most historically uncertain and challenging areas.” Andrew Owens Business Line Executive, Treasury SaaS and Group CTO Banking and Payments, FIS The fully automated Smart Treasury that is going to use next generation technology won’t be there overnight. The expectation is that machines or computers will only pass the Turing test as of 2029 and the ultimate principle of Singularity 4 will be there as of 2049. Therefore, it will probably take another decade or even more before concepts such as artificial intelligence (AI) will be fully integrated in the corporate treasury practice. In our opinion corporate treasurers however cannot continue to take a reactive response but will need to start preparing today for the changes of tomorrow with a more proactive and “pilotive” approach. Unfortunately, many professionals find themselves in numerous unfruitful discussions about how they should react to these new complex technologies that will shape the future of their industry. Advances in exponential technologies will cause a significant impact on all areas in treasury in the coming years. In line with the expected exponential technological developments, the focus areas for the development of future treasury technology solutions will be around two main themes: process improvement and data intelligence. “Why is AI such a hot topic right now? There have been rapid advances and new approaches to create self-learning algorithms such as those using deep reinforcement learning. Given the concurrent increases in computer processing speed and the availability of large sets of training data, such algorithms are revealing new relationships and strategies to us in many fields. We are currently exploring how such algorithms can assist the treasury team in their day-to-day activities.” Paul Higdon Chief Technology Officer, ION Treasury 4 See the glossary at the end of this whitepaper for a more detailed explanation. “By 2029, computers will have human level intelligence.” – Ray Kurzweil, Futurist