Balancing Digital Aspirations While Addressing Risk Management Fundamentals

FX Risk Management Solutions Quarterly | Issue 132 | October 2021 | XXXXXX 1 27 July 2020 | Trending Treasury and Trade Solutions | Risk Management Solutions BALANCING DIGITAL ASPIRATIONS WHILE ADDRESSING RISK MANAGEMENT FUNDAMENTALS Achieving the right balance and prioritization of investment across people, processes, and partnerships is now a core challenge for many companies. This challenge may be particularly acute when addressing the inefficient deployment and utilization of operational and financial toolkits. Some have expressed digitalization aspirations, but many remain challenged by legacy infrastructure. Ultimately, bringing together fractured data sets may be the key to unlocking digitalization opportunities. As we emerge from the global pandemic, many corporate treasuries have established greater resilience across their operations with many now commencing the journey away from the manual processes of the past to adopting new techniques and digital solutions to make ready for the future. Given the increased pace of change in the world — and the world’s interconnectedness — and the need to balance the aspirations of treasury with the better utilization of data and data insights while addressing broken risk management fundamentals, there is much to consider. For some, future-proofing treasury through intelligent automation is initially based on rules and then extended to algorithmic techniques to augment human decision-making. For most, this means addressing the basic building blocks of data, process, and people to best measure and manage objectives. Tension now exists in corporate treasury between what might be called embracing the digital opportunity and addressing the underlying infrastructural challenges. While treasury objectives remain constant and digital opportunities exist in how those objectives may be delivered, for most treasuries, the fundamentals need to be addressed first to lay a technology foundation and on it, data layers, for realizing such future aspirations. Benchmarking treasury through Citi Treasury Diagnostics Citi Treasury Diagnostics (CTD) is an award-winning benchmarking tool designed to help companies assess the effectiveness of their treasury, working capital, and risk management practices against industry peers and best-in- class companies. It equips treasury departments to identify opportunities to deliver more value to their firms.