A risk management system can help you transform your business, but a lot of companies still struggle with adapting to a new tech such as this once they introduce it into their tech stack. Ashley Pater, Chief Product Officer at GTreasury shares a few thoughts on the challenges businesses face when investing in new fintech or risk management systems while also discussing her journey so far.
_____
As the Chief Product Officer at GTreasury, tell us about yourself and journey, what is your background in the treasury management technology space? What’s been your career path in this fintech sector, and what do you consider to be a couple of your career highlights to-date?
I’ve worked at GTreasury for over 10 years. My career began, and remains, in the treasury technology space. I first started at GTreasury in marketing, but at the time there was no marketing department, and we had just established a direct sales force. My role was helping create the marketing department and build brand awareness within the treasury and risk management system (TRMS) space. My work ranged from event planning to email marketing, content creation, and digital marketing. GTreasury went through two different rebrandings during this time.
As our brand awareness grew, so did our client base. It became clear that we needed an account management team to be in charge of client satisfaction and client upsells. I helped create, grow, and manage the account management function within the organization, and this function ended up being a core driver of our revenue growth. With our client base and marketplace position growing, we recognized the need for GTreasury to establish a strong product vision, team, and roadmap. This led to my shift from marketing and account management to product management, where I now help to guide our product structure and strategic direction.
Read More: GlobalFintechSeries Interview with Sean Worthington, President at CloudCoin Consortium
In my time as Chief Product Officer, GTreasury has focused on providing best-of-breed SaaS treasury technology with end-to-end cash, payments, and risk and exposure management. Among what I see as our key product successes: we completed the acquisition and integration of Visual Risk as our Risk & Exposure Management solution with our cash and payments system, combining those two products into one. We’ve also improved our user experience and implemented a business intelligence tool to improve visibility and reporting within the application. We have and continue to grow our API library, which extends our ecosystem. Our product has taken some key steps forward on several more fronts as well, including the addition of predictive forecasting analytics and a real-time banking API. In addition, we continue to grow and expand our ecosystems through partnerships with Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, and Fenics Market Data, among others.
Fintech as a whole has evolved at a particularly rapid pace over the past decade, which has included significant changes to treasury and financial risk management technology as well. What are your thoughts on some of the biggest and/or latest innovations within this particular fintech corner that you think have been game-changers.
I think the biggest financial technology innovation within the past year has been the focus on Open Banking: leveraging APIs to get data faster, make decisions more efficiently, and determine liquidity positions in real-time. Technology providers have leveraged APIs for a long time now, and it’s great to see financial institutions now also adopting this technology.
An additional innovation is the development of growing technology ecosystems, enabled by leveraging a TRMS as the digital backbone of the organization. The ability to connect to third-party systems, consolidate data within a TRMS, and support workflows from ERP to money markets to FX (and beyond) is a key advance.
There’s also exciting movement forward in leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – and not only by technology providers. We’re seeing clients adopt RPA and AI within their own organizations to automate redundant processes, which is great to see.
What are some of the challenges you see businesses struggle with when it comes to financial risk management (or, perhaps more pointedly, when it comes to investing in risk management software)?
The biggest challenge we see customers grappling with is simply finding the time they need. This means finding the time to go through the fintech (in our case, treasury management software) selection process, complete the implementation while simultaneously doing their normal jobs, and then execute the new tasks they can now perform with a new system in place. For businesses migrating to a new TRMS, for example, new capabilities range from creating dashboards to developing forecast scenarios – and are well worth the time investment, if that investment is made possible.
The other area where I think companies struggle is in adapting to the financial technologies they purchase. A risk management system offers the opportunity to transform your business. It provides the capacity to adjust your processes, reporting, and even workflows. For example, perhaps your cash, account, payments, and deal workflows each previously leveraged several different systems. A treasury and risk management system enables end-to-end workflows in a single location, which you can then report on. For most firms, there’s always been that one report or excel sheet that everyone has had to create for as along as anyone can remember. But with new reporting tools or BI solutions, you can evolve that report and streamline its execution. A TRMS empowers users to evolve their processes in this manner. They just need to have the time, support, and willingness to do so.
Read More: GlobalFintechSeries Interview with Erwan Gelebart, CEO at Veon’s JazzCash
Other than GTreasury’s own, what other fintech (or related) solutions are you seeing your customers gravitating towards to fill out their technology stacks?
We’re seeing customers leveraging RPA solutions such as UiPath or Blue Prism within their own organizations, which I love to see. It’s great that these organizations are driving strategic innovation by adopting these technologies. Customers like these are a huge asset to us as a provider as well, since they participate in our beta programs and offer guidance as members of our Client Advisory Board.
We’re also seeing greater adoption of our APIs among our customers, which enable them to move their data and leverage it within internal reporting tools, such as Power BI or Tableau. Customers also increasingly leverage technologies such as Zelle for payments, and mobile devices for common day-to-day actions. Within our space, organizations have heavily adopted SWIFT in order to exchange financial data with their financial institutions. Businesses similarly engage with foreign exchange trading platforms and money market providers.
Another key advance is in leveraging tools for e-signatures. You’d be surprised how many treasury departments depend on hard signatures, and in our current remote work environments not as many people have printers and scanners so easily at their disposal.
How do you think emerging technologies like AI will impact fintech? What are your predictions for fintech in general, and perhaps treasury and financial risk management technology more specifically, in the near future?
The adoption of AI and machine learning will only increase going forward. AI still has plenty of unknowns, and the financial sector has some hesitancy to commit to relying on AI in making decisions that impact the bottom line. While I believe that most firms look forward to leveraging this cutting-edge technology, it will take some time before AI earns their full confidence. That said, the ability to leverage AI for auto-reconciliation, forecasting, and fraud prevention represent true game changers in the treasury sector of fintech.
Many business’ financial and corporate treasury teams are, of course, still dealing with the impact of pandemic-fueled changes and uncertainties (and/or are actively planning for a possible second wave later in 2020). Do you have any tips or best practices you’ve heard from organizations – that you’d like to share today?
During these uncertain times, a TRMS is essential for corporate treasury teams to operate efficiently and successfully – and especially those utilizing remote work environments. Teams that don’t have a TRMS should reach out to technology providers to conduct an evaluation. Even teams that currently face limited budgets will likely find that vendors are more than willing to work with them.
If you already have a TRMS, here are a few pieces of advice I’ve found helpful. Since the pandemic started, the most common trend I’ve seen within treasury departments is the need to forecast cashflow frequently – meaning weekly or even daily. Be sure you’re leveraging the forecasting tools available to you to provide scenario and version analysis. There are plenty of capabilities within your TRMS, so make sure you’re using what you have to its fullest potential. If you have a risk management functionality available, it may be beneficial to leverage it to enable Cashflow-at-Risk and Value-at-Risk analysis and stress test existing portfolios over thousands of simulated scenarios. This functionality can also analyze the impact of potential “what if” hedging strategies on your cash flow outcomes.
For more than 30 years, GTreasury has delivered the leading digital Treasury and Risk Management System (TRMS) to corporate treasurers across industries. With its continually innovating Software-as-a-Service platform, GTreasury provides customers with a single source of truth for all their cash, payments, and risk activities. The TRMS solution offers any combination of Cash Management, Payments, Financial Instruments, Risk Management, Accounting, Banking, and Hedge Accounting – seamlessly integrated, on-demand worldwide and fully secured. Headquartered in Chicago with offices serving EMEA (London) and APAC (Sydney and Manila), GTreasury’s global community includes more than 750 customers and 30+ industries reaching 160+ countries worldwide.
Ashley Pater is the Chief Product Officer at GTreasury, where she oversees the global product group, ensuring that the product vision and strategy align with GTreasury’s business objectives. Prior to her current role, Ashley was responsible for the Marketing and Account Management functions at GTreasury, which focused on growing global brand awareness, lead generation, event management, as well as client upsell and cross sell programs.
