IGTA Journal - Autumn 2017

Treasurers entered in what I qualified as the V.4.0 definition of their role. Treasurers are specialists and even hyper-specialists. And therefore, they are more than other exposed to technical and IT evolution or we could claim “revolution”. The treasury department is the one using the largest number of IT solutions in the whole finance department (e.g. TRMS, Payment Factory, platforms for dealing, dash boarding tools, netting, market data feeding tools, etc…). Every day new solutions become available. However, the diversity and the multitude of solutions make interfacing, “Straight Through Processing” (i.e. STP) and connectivity complex and sometimes even impossible. It makes the “Business Intelligence (i.e. BI) and the dash boarding more complicate than man thought. The multitude of formats of data coming from several applications make consolidation difficult. It is why paradoxically EXCEL has never been so used, despite the IT evolution and specific solutions available. The “big data” and data analytics is a challenge we can now face. There are decision-making solutions and tools to crunch huge data numbers and to aggregate them into a common formats to produce useful dash boards. A major issue remains in the aptitude to smartly use available data, too often unused by treasurers. The Bitcoins and cryptocurrencies will maybe not challenge real currencies. We will see. Some bankers are doubting they will emerge as a real competitor to classic ones. However, the block chain derived technologies have demonstrated that the underlying technology will enable a multitude of other solutions. It also was a sort of booster for pushing banks and market infrastructures to eventually move and find other solutions (e.g. SWIFT GPI, KYC register, e- payment methods, etc…). One characteristic of this financial revolution is the number of new entrants, the myriad of FinTech’s offering interesting App’s and the new Peer-to-Peer solutions, reinforcing the disintermediation. The difficulty lurks in the multitude of solutions proposed. How to choose the right e-payment method in this jungle, for example? What will be the emerging standard(s)? Who are the best partners? These are the obvious and relevant questions we all raised. IGTA eJournal | Autumn 2017 | 46