IGTA Journal - Winter 2020/2021

New skills required for modern treasurers The modern treasurers must be skilled in IT, have curiosity for innovation and data mining, be open and among all other qualities be creative. They must develop features they were not used to show. A treasurer is often pragmatic, rational, conservatist and not open to (too much) innovation. However, the successful example of treasury departments, like SANOFI with SAP4Hana (supported by INTENSUM), proved a “revolution” of your treasury (and finance) IT environment is possible and can create a lot of value. As the function keep evolving fast, treasurers must keep up and revisit their IT strategies to modernize the whole finance function. Treasurer role is key and central to address challenges in a fast-changing world. It may support the execution of the broader business strategy through several initiatives and implementation of ad hoc IT solutions. Common objective: efficiency gains The objective is to streamline processes to gain efficiency, lower costs and enhance internal control through automation, while simplifying processes. Treasurers should develop clear treasury IT-road map to enhance treasury management. The “treasury-on-demand” requires establishing robust organizational structure with forward-looking/prospective models. They may move away from acting as a cost center and becoming a value-adding service center, improving working capital management, and implementing automation to generate more efficiency on transaction processes. All this requires a combination of treasury technical knowledge, skills in executing strategic transactions, availability of already scarce resources to support integration with other functions. Not being able to meet these requirements can result in missing opportunities to boost company value. This challenge is to be able to leverage treasury analytic to address these risks. It is critical to identify opportunities to improve the value the function can create, and work toward establishing the necessary capabilities. The digital journey is a long one and it is time to consider tools to succeed and to set up a fully integrated and optimized IT organization. IGTA eJournal | Winter 2020/21 | 33