Treasury Tech in the Fast Lane: Real-Time Data, APIs, and the Future of Finance

Joseph Drambarean:

Welcome to FinTech Corner. We’re live at AFP. This is crazy. Look at this production that we have going here in our AFP boots. It’s buzzing. This is John Bolden. He’s our first guest actually at the AFP Conference, and I’m joined by Brett Turner, our founder, and CEO. And I’m Joseph Drambarean I’m the CPO and CTO here at Trovata and the host of FinTech Corner. And we’re excited because we’re going to kick off the AFP event with a podcast, and I bet that nobody else has that in store here at AFP. So we wanted to just dig into, first of all your background, John. We thought that it might be really fun to kick everything off with some of the stories that you have to tell because you’ve definitely been on the bleeding edge of innovation, especially within treasury. And I thought if we could just begin by taking a little spin through your history and where you’ve landed and how things are going, that’d be awesome.

John Bolden:

Yeah, so I mean, I’ve been in and around finance for about 20 years, and I’ve done everything from investment banking, FP&A, and now I find myself in the dynamic space that is corporate treasury. And so with that much experience, I’ve seen many things, and I know that being able to obtain information quickly is always sort of better than waiting. And that I think is one of the things that was the most enticing about Trovata to me as a user. And I mean, it is been great seeing the platform develop over the years. And I’m currently at a company called City Storage Systems, probably more affectionately known as CSS. But yeah, we’re a multinational company and obviously we have hundreds of bank accounts around the world, so being able to have real time visibility to our actual cash position is very important. We also, aside from traditional bank accounts, we have Stripe businesses, Alipay, we pay in China, those sorts of things, and those that is real cash.

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah, absolutely.

John Bolden:

So it’s very important that we have visibility comprehensively.

Joseph Drambarean:

It’s interesting, we’re kind of in the midst of the soup here of all of the buzzwords, all of the phrases that are being tossed around, whether it’s APIs, real time payments, ChatGPT, generative finance, all of the different things that are swirling around. And I was just curious, especially on the API side of the house, which I know has been gaining a lot of traction over the last five years, we know that we’ve been pushing that message since the beginning here at Trovata. What has it meant for you kind of being in the thick of it, multiple roles, multiple implementations of APIs? You’ve got to see this whole story play out at this point with multiple banks as well. What does it look like on the front lines?

John Bolden:

Well, uniquely, I guess all banks are moving at a different pace of adoption, which is unfortunate. However, the larger players are making a substantial effort to adopt the sort of migration or the maturity of the technology. For me, the one thing I do wish that they would do is make more information, more endpoints available, whether it be credit facility information, credit card, corporate credit card information, that sort of dataset seems to be lagging, but what they’re providing from a cash perspective is so valuable because it is real information and you can’t have realtime finance without realtime cash.

Joseph Drambarean:

Absolutely.

Brett Turner:

I’ll just jump in a little. One of the things too that, I mean, you’re being modest with your background. I mean, just even

John Bolden:

Can’t talk all day.

Brett Turner:

Uber, Nike. And when we first met you too, right away, you were experiencing some real pain points because you were having to deal with massive amounts of data. Correct. And I think this whole discovery around APIs and how to diversify all that data became a big issue that you got to. But maybe what a little bit of that pain point where that intersected, where there’s just nothing out there that’s going to help you solve the problems. And you’re seeing it also that it kind of extended beyond even treasury, that you could see that you’re in a position to help solve not only some of the things that you’re working on directly on treasury, but also with other groups.

John Bolden:

So that was a big thing for me, I’d say. And to that point, in our latest implementation, when we connected Stripe, it brought in a million transactions. So there’s no G-Sheet or Excel spreadsheet that could gather and arrange, extract, transform, load that amount of transaction data. So we need something like Truvada. But then also if you are willing or you have the development resource, the PDE resources, to contribute to the platform, that developer environment that you guys have, there’s tons that can be accomplished there with users, internal resources being devoted to that and seeing what they can create just to help the business run more efficiently.

Joseph Drambarean:

That’s a weird shift that’s happening in the space because Absolutely. I think for mean, is it to say decades at this point, the space has been dominated by point solutions, bespoke built for a specific use case, you use it, you don’t really change it, it just is what it is. Correct. The new wave, it seems like creating this almost data driven, but also developer driven economy of custom solutions that are built on APIs that are built on interfaces that you as a business stakeholder can be effectively the product person, if you will.

John Bolden:

Absolutely. And they’re dynamic enough, well, I guess Trovata is dynamic enough that you can structure that environment to align with your business, but it’s not so rigid that you can’t change it. And so I think to your point, that’s a very important feature because businesses change. You add products, you deprecate things, you shut down markets, you add new ones. So you definitely need a solution that is flexible enough to adjust with your business. You fire a bank, you hire a bank, you bring on Stripe, you get rid of this and that. And so yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

So let me ask you this. It seems like there’s a shift happening in the role of treasury as well, because if you’re not rotating through different corporations and different banks simply spending time implementing these solutions, but instead it kind of seems like you’re shifting to more of a strategy, almost product management thinking through, Hey, how can we create real leverage in the business with the data that’s flowing through? How have you seen your role change over the years? What has changed?

John Bolden:

Well, I guess it depends on the size of the company, but just the concept of treasury and the questions that we are required to answer has definitely matured as my career has progressed. And people look to us, especially on the debt side, to be more strategic and think through different things like how you’ve seen the cost of money even in the past 36 to 24 months has changed so much that the treasury has leaned on to say, Hey, if we have floating rate debt, how do we keep that debt from getting out of hand? How do we price different derivative instruments or do I need with this cash information and these forecasts that I have, how is that going to impact my weighted average cost of capital or my actual debt mix, fix the floating, whatever the question is, people are coming to treasury now more so to get answers to those questions versus how much cash do we have? How much cash are we burning every month sort of thing.

Brett Turner:

Once you’ve had experienced something more of a tech platform to manage all this, and you’ve had experience in the past working with some of the traditional TMSs, would you ever go back, I mean, once you’ve experienced that, to be able to get that kind of leverage? Maybe talk a little bit about the difference of just the system environment to do things.

John Bolden:

Well, I guess for me, if I were to go to traditional route, it’s like, do you want to buy AVCR or would you prefer to stream things? Right. I know people that have tons of DVDs in their homes, collections, and so no, I don’t think I would ever go back because not only is…

Brett Turner:

Once you’ve experienced 4K

John Bolden:

Yeah, once you’ve experienced 8K and 4K and OLED and all these other different technical advance technical advancements and products, it is very hard to go back to an archaic structure. And then incrementally with the APIs, the implementations are so fast, and then we don’t need to get into the technical differences, but the implementations are very, very fast with wells, I mean a few days. And that’s on wealth side. That’s not you guys. You guys are, we’re ready, we’re ready, we’re ready. And the bank can only move as fast as they’re willing to or able to with the support team that’s on your account. But regardless of relationship, but regardless, no, I just need, I’m all about speed because the questions come in hot and fast and they require immediate answers.

Brett Turner:

Well, it’s pretty cool with your, like you said, investment banking, FP&A, I mean, in some ways you kind of are able to think outside the box. Is it because you haven’t always been in treasury too, so you kind of see a little bit more of the big picture. Does that come into play when now you’re using something that you’re able to do more things with? Do you find that folks from accounting or other groups or even IT they ask questions,

John Bolden:

Absolutely.

Brett Turner:

Find ways in which they can leverage that capability?

John Bolden:

Yes, and that was why I mentioned the whole developer environment that’s within Truvada. Because yeah, we receive questions from accounting on things that they may not have visibility to our Stripe instances based on how the GL set up. It’s a little weird at my current company, but accounting needs that granular amount of information. Our ERP team wants to explore a direct integration with our ERP vendor. And so those groups definitely want to know more about what is inside of Trovata, and how it works versus what we currently have for a host, a host or something like that. And then from my prior experience, absolutely I can see how things would be connected, whether it be bank recs or an FP&A platform or an FX execution platform like a 360T or FXall, those types of integrations and how it ultimately impacts cash. And so that’s why I kind of get bent out of shape about the APIs with the bank, not exposing more data or presenting you guys with more data through those APIs. I mean, if I borrow money from my facility, I shouldn’t have to wait until next week to see an update to the ballot.

Joseph Drambarean:

John, one thing that I am curious if I can pick your brain on a topic and it’s walking around the show floor, there’s so many payment providers here, so many different folks talking about payments. The banks also have been pushing real-time payments, the possibility of new rails like FedNow that are coming. Where do you see payments over the next five to 10 years moving and how do you see your interaction currently in your role with payments, especially considering that you have a complex ecosystem that you serve with your merchant processor environment, all of the different transactions that you said are flowing in the settlement of those. How does it all play out and does the payment ecosystem play a role in improving your overall infrastructure?

John Bolden:

Got it. So I’d say five to ten years, I have no clue, but I definitely would think that money will move faster, especially with things like crypto, like stable coins, because I think in the next round of politics, stable coins will be adopted more broadly. So stable coins, and then with the increase of the real-time payment limit, you could send a million bucks on Venmo,

Joseph Drambarean:

Right?

John Bolden:

And so I would think

Joseph Drambarean:

I’ve tried that myself. Just saying

John Bolden:

It’ll be,

Brett Turner:

You might have to get authorization for that.

John Bolden:

Yeah. Yeah, I definitely would. I don’t have that much liquidity, but it’ll be interesting because you’ll start to see more participants in the space. So your ADPs, your credit card providers that aren’t banks like Ramp and all these other different use cases, having a real time payment aspect and people just being able to actually get their money when they earn it, so to speak. So I think that’ll, there’ll be a bit more adoption there. Stable coins.

Brett Turner:

Do you think FedNow kind of starts to come in on the corporate side?

John Bolden:

Yep. I mean, as a country we’ve been sort of dragging a ball and chain on that one with advances in India and Europe around immediate settlement, just like with FX and equity, those two asset classes requiring two days to settle a spot trade guys, come on, I sell 10 euros and you want me to wait till Wednesday.

Joseph Drambarean:

That’s where I still feel like we’re a little bit in the stone age is just cross border, getting my money from here to there, regardless of where there is. And I think the promise of crypto and stablecoin is really interesting on that front.

John Bolden:

Agreed.

Joseph Drambarean:

There hasn’t been much innovation in the world of cross-border payments. I mean, it still is what it is for the most part. And it’s interesting to see it evolve, especially trying to create more solutions bank to bank. I think that’s where things get interesting, especially on the API side of the house.

John Bolden:

Completely, completely agree, because the infrastructure is definitely not aligned globally. So with some of the developing nations or just the inability for groups to come together to align on things like centralized payments, and the one thing that I always think about is all of San Francisco can’t swipe their credit card at once, so there’ll always need to be capacity in the system for payments, because there isn’t enough space to go around. And then we’ve got four networks, so there will be an increased use case because people want to be paid now and participants in those two asset classes, especially FX, I mean, 5 trillion of FX is traded every day. And so if I have the money, settle me now.

Joseph Drambarean:

Exactly.

Brett Turner:

I was just going to, one of the cool things Joseph and I talk about a lot, just like we’re able to build off the back of giants from a tech perspective like Google and Facebook and all of that, you think how database architectures have changed, but then when you look at on the payment side, you think of what Uber is essentially a payments company. You look at what Square is doing, and so is this whole changing on payments and rails sort of building on the back of those kinds of innovations that are happening, more consumer work its way into corporates, it’s got to change, right?

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah, absolutely.

John Bolden:

Yeah. And for us at CSS, we don’t outsource our payments. So we’re definitely always working and trying to improve our execution, so that we don’t have payments sort of fall out or be rejected. But I definitely think that for companies that are not as solution, more platform forward I guess, or development forward, the need is just, it’s astounding.

Joseph Drambarean:

I have a fun topic if you’d be interested in diving into it. So we’ve been hearing a lot about generative AI lately. Well not lately since the beginning of the year last year, if you’ve been playing with it since the first iterations of ChatGPT, I have a couple of questions, but the first one is where do you see the role of the treasurer being impacted by this type of technology? I could say AI just generally, but I’m going to focus in on generative. Generative AI specifically.

John Bolden:

So my thoughts on generative AI, I guess in the treasury space stuff is just, it seems not to be necessarily aligned with the discipline. And it’s maybe a more, not to knock on marketing, but a more marketing and copy sort of focused technology. The use cases are more apparent there immediately, but he and I were having a conversation about FBAR. When you think about what an FBAR filing is, especially if you have hundreds of bank accounts, Trovata is collecting the bank balances every day, and then you probably, you’d need some way of securing the PII of the people that are the signers on the bank account. But then from there, generative AI should be able, if it can produce copy and the Mona Lisa randomly, it should be able to produce an FR filing because all of the components of it are there. And I mean, that would relieve so much stress on so many people.

Joseph Drambarean:

So obviously we launched our own generative AI solution with Trovata AI and there have been customers playing with it.

John Bolden:

Absolutely. Yeah, I play with it.

Joseph Drambarean:

And one of the things that we get a kick out of when we’re looking through the anonymized questions that are coming through for trying to get our arms around how it’s being used are the risks that are being taken in terms of the questions. Some customers are asking, can you just make an FBAR report for me and it’ll give it its best shot, right? Because it knows what an FBAR report is. So it’ll take from the data that it can have at its access and give you what it thinks an FBAR report is. And it’s impressive because it’s close. It’s not right. But it’s close. And I wonder what will be the threshold or what will you look for, I guess as a manager or as an operator in the next few years? Because these are advancements that are happening in quarters at a time, right? They’re leaps at a quarter. Let’s fast forward five years from now and let’s say that it’s at an acceptable level of accuracy, that it’s now dangerous. It’s disruptive. What are the things that you would be looking at as a manager making a decision on, Hey, is this a viable technology to either displace some of the roles that we have or to add to some of the roles that we have?

John Bolden:

Well, I think I’ll start with at the end. I do think it’ll be accretive on the efficiency front,

Joseph Drambarean:

Right.

John Bolden:

But to me, nothing replaces the human mind. And then for things like it’s treasury and for me, I’m a pretty specific person. It’s not any tequila, it’s not any tattoo, it’s not any shirt. So it has to be right, and I mean all the way, right? Anything that’s not all the way right is wrong. So I can’t use it because then it would put me at risk.

Joseph Drambarean:

So it’s a toy until it is proven a 100% correct for every question.

John Bolden:

Absolutely.

Joseph Drambarean:

Is it also the case, do you think that as a participant in the technology in the foreseeable future, you are a participant? Just out of curiosity, but not as a tool?

John Bolden:

You say out of curiosity, but not as

Joseph Drambarean:

A tool?

John Bolden:

No, no, I’m not a participant out of curiosity, I want to see it advanced. It’s not a gimmick to me.

Brett Turner:

A pragmatic approach.

John Bolden:

I want to see it advance because I actually need it. I can see the benefits of it, but I’m just apprehensive it doesn’t do math.

Brett Turner:

What about

John Bolden:

Which my job is foundational in that aspect.

Brett Turner:

What about risk management, though? You think of hedging or even forecasting certain things like you’re trying to protect risk, which in some of those cases you might not need an X precise number on something, but you just need a good, where do you start to see some of those, especially your FP&A background, trying to look at forecasting, things like that? It gets really religious to manage it on your model. You might not have to get in the weeds a little bit.

John Bolden:

Agree, I do. I agree. Because the accuracy then is less important. There’s some level of precision, but I can deal with a standard deviation, whereas what’s my cash balance? That action that needs to be right. Or payments going out or things of that nature.

Joseph Drambarean:

Super interesting. John, thank you so much for joining us. This is an amazing discussion. Enjoy your time here at AFP and we’ll see you around.

John Bolden:

Absolutely. I plan to.

Joseph Drambarean:

Awesome.