Evaluating Tech Solution Sets

Brian: Welcome, everybody! We’ll get started in just a few seconds. Welcome, everyone, to today’s webinar on “Evaluating Tech Solution Sets”, which is part four of the “Digital Transformation Strategy” series! This is Brian from Strategic Treasurer. And we’re pleased you could join us today as we consider how best to evaluate and choose tech solutions that can serve you for years to come.

Before I introduce today’s speakers, I have just a few quick announcements. Zoom offers several different ways for us to interact today. If you would like to post comments or questions viewable by all attendees, please use the chat icon in the toolbar. If you would like to ask your question to just the presenters, please use the Q&A icon in the toolbar. You can ask your questions at any time during the presentation, and we’ll try to get to as many as we can. But if we don’t get to your question, someone from our team will gladly follow up with you. There will also be a few polling questions throughout today’s webinar, where you’ll be able to select your response from a list of multiple choices. You will need to click the submit button on the polling questions to have your response recorded.

Our presenters today are Craig Jeffery, Founder and Managing Partner of Strategic Treasurer, and Brett Turner, Founder and CEO of Trovata. Welcome, Craig and Brett! And I’ll now turn the presentation over to you.

Craig Jeffery: Brian, thank you so much for the introduction! Welcome, everyone! I’m glad you could join us today. Good day! Brett, it’s good to do another webinar with you.

Brett Turner: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Craig! And thanks, Brian!

Craig Jeffery: Excellent! So let’s get started. We’ll begin looking at our overall agenda. So these are the topics that we’re going to cover. So in the next fifty whatever minutes, we’re going to be looking at treasury tech: what’s changed with treasury tech over time. So we’ll look a little bit at the history from older on-premise installed software. We’ll look at the hosted, software as a service. We’ll explore the concept of cloud-native as a progression of tech as we’ve seen it change in the either step function or gradually over time.

Then, we’ll look at some of the drivers of updating solutions and solution sets. So we’ll take a view of what makes sense for organizations that want a more digital process drive to make sure there’s enough time to do what’s essential for organizations.

Then, we’ll move over to the current landscape. What are the available tools that can be used to help us with treasury, with cash positioning, with managing activity? So we’ll look at that.

Then, we’ll move to the forward looking. How do we plan for growth? What does technology have to do to inform us about plans for future-proofing or scalability? How do we take advantage of growth and compute power, scalability, ability to reach, on-demand services in a very scalable and demand-driven manner?

Then, we’ll look at evaluating options. We’ll look at some of the considerations. So these are the key considerations, things like, “How do we think about data, collecting information? How important is speed? This idea of real-time, is that necessary? Is monthly okay, prior day fine, intraday? Are we moving towards faster real-time activities? And what are the options that we need to be thinking about there?”

And then, we end up with some key takeaways. So we’ll leave you with some questions for you to consider and to think about, to reflect on what we’ve talked about and some, I’ll call it homework if you will. And then, we’ll also touch on, “What are some of the characteristics of the future environment with a focus on tech?” So as we look at evaluating tech solution sets right now, we’ll talk about these items.

But let’s begin first on the evolution of treasury. In a large way, it’s the evolution of tech as well. I’ll talk about the headlines there, Brett. I know you’ll wanna weigh in too on this slide. So across the top, going from left to right, we have on-premise installed. This is software that’s put on a server or servers in your data center. Then, the next version or iteration was hosted software, where the same software might be run based out of a data center off-site, maybe the backup data centers at another location. So it’s the same type of tech run in a different manner. That’s also called ASP (or application service provider). And then, we have SaaS, which is software as a service. It could be a private cloud SaaS as an example, but it’s the software component of that. And then, you have cloud-native where you’re using… You’re certainly using the public cloud SaaS, but there’s also a platform aspect of it. We have leveraging platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. So there’s a number of components, but there are differences there. And, Brett, I know you’re tied in the tech here. So I’d like to invite you to comment as well.

Brett Turner: Yeah, absolutely! I think a big part of what we’re experiencing is really just sort of the final innings of the journey to the cloud from an IT perspective and now when you look at a lot of these, whether it’s banking, or insurance, financial, workloads from an underlying tech perspective: where they’re at, what that infrastructure is like, where they’re hosted. And this is not new. This has been going on. And really what’s disrupted and driven. Most of what we experienced with many other industries… You look at just what you have in the power of your hand with your mobile phone and all the various platforms, whether it’s ad tech or other areas, Facebook, Google, where everything has kind of grown up. It’s all kind of been influenced and radically changed and shifted because of the cloud. And I think part of it now is it’s just really making its way to start to really disrupt and change more in financial services and banking. And it’s also unlocking all of these opportunities.

This big notion that we’ve heard a lot is “do more with less”. And I think that’s a big theme that we’re seeing now. It’s not just because things are now opening up and there’s a whole new toolkit and whole new aspects of how things can be done differently… And the banks are getting in on it, which is really exciting with APIs and how they’re innovating too. It’s really exciting to see all of these pieces start to converge. And it’s giving everybody a chance to understand what these things are, what are APIs, what is the cloud exactly, and all of the technology now that can be brought to life in a way that can be completely transformative.

So this notion of digital transformation, that’s been going on. AWS has really driven that in large part and now, of course, Azure, Google Cloud with all of the advanced web services that can be available there, that pretty much every tech company in the world is all building natively on that and have been for the past ten years or especially the last seven years. So if you’re gonna build anything new, it’s gonna be more in that far-right column there. You would never think to build it in another environment. And so that’s sort of leapfrogging where we’re at. And it’s opening up the playbook to do these things, not just again that whole notion of “do more with less”. It’s not just to do the same things more efficiently. It’s not just about efficiency. It’s about being able to be opportunistic, do these things, more things in a way that is causing you to rethink your environment to some degree, rethink your workflows. And it’s just opening up the doors then to be more strategic, do all of these things that can really help your organization propel it to that next level, or do things in a way that’s only gonna help it and folks on your team across the business units be that much more productive.

So I think when you look at this whole notion of kind of journey (we kind of used that term)… I’ve just been in tech for a long time now. It had been my background kind of living through this. I was a CPA at Deloitte. I was a controller for many years. I managed SEC reporting for Amazon. I was a CFO for three different companies for about ten years prior to starting Trovata, all kind of selling into the enterprise, all dealing with very complicated quote-to-cash cycles generally. But for me, though, it intersected with startups, so that finance background intersecting with startups. I was just living through a lot of these disruptions because that’s what the company I was a part of was doing. The last one was in cloud computing. And so having a front-row seat to this really provided a segue of why starting Trovata also because, in a lot of ways of what Trovata is, it’s a little bit of analogous to what AWS has done into IT.

So if you think of it as an example of reconciliation or the treasury reconciliation, that function, that just 101 kind of thing that needs to be done on a daily basis, that is something that I think is more akin to like upgrading server licenses or servers if you were maintaining those in your own network 10+ years ago. Now, all of that stuff, whether it’s updating antivirus software or upgrading your Microsoft Windows server, things like that, all of that is taken care of by your cloud provider. All of that has been automated and widgetized in a way where now IT folks are doing more value-added kinds of things. And so it used to be the IT network administrator. It was a very common role. Well, there’s not much of that now. It’s more of the cloud architect or DevOps engineer things that are starting to really move more from an operational standpoint, more on the engineering, more value add. And all of that is propelling things that can be more accretive to the organization.

And I think also with treasury reconciliation… So play it out. A part of that now is APIs. Like what we’re dealing with at Trovata, we’re automating that whole process right in the data gathering. So if you think of reconciliation as a term for accounting and treasury, it’s different. For accounting, it’s more of reconciling between the books: what is your balance, say, on your cash accounts in your ERP system, reconciling that from timing differences. That’s sort of CPA 101 that’s part of your month-end closing and all of that, closing the books. And that’s reconciling that to the bank. But for treasury reconciliation, in a lot of ways, you’re just trying to make sure you have all your data. When you look at opening and closing balance, closing ledger balance from your bank, and getting this traditional file, a BAI file or MT940 through SWIFT, you’re just, “Do I have all my files? Do I have all my data across all my accounts, across all my banks?” And that is where this treasury reconciliation happens. If that can just be automated and just go away, so you don’t have to do that, wouldn’t that be nice?

So now with APIs automating that process, now… And we’re doing that at Trovata. Automating that piece and then even having a way to further do it in a way that you can see that, automate the opening, using a whole different way to categorize all of your data and autocategorize that data, tying out to your ending balance, giving you that alert to see, “Hey, if there is something wrong, we’ll either fix it, we’ll either work on your behalf, or you can see it and have that visibility to it or get alerted on really quickly.” But you don’t have to be in the weeds doing that work. And so I think that’s more akin also to that change in behaviors of things that needed to happen in IT. You don’t have to do that anymore. It’s something that I think we’re going to see and we’re gonna get continued to automate that further to where you really rarely have to think about that as much anymore unless there’s something that’s going wrong. But again, that’s part of the SOA. That’s a part of why you should expect your provider just to take care of that for you. And I think you count on an IT person that counts on AWS taking care of that. Any treasury will expect their provider to take care of that for them as well in their technology environment.

So I think that’s an example of kind of where this is going and what… All of this is enabling and this evolution now, that’s speeding up. And it’s APIs, data-driven automation. The banks are in on it. The cloud now is starting to… Having native tools that are built in those environments, taking advantage of those services, doing things at much greater speeds with greater agility than ever before – all of these things are converging now and really making the things available to you to really drive digital transformation. It’s really exciting.

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, as we extend the discussion from the evolution of treasury, there’s some additional background Brett talked about. You don’t have to put patches on your server software, install antivirus. Those absorb some of the time that many treasury groups and IT groups would rather do different functions with.

So we have a couple of slides that indicate what’s going on, where are people, shortchanging functions that they have. So we asked questions in different surveys. Over a third of corporate respondents said, “We have responsibilities that we don’t have time to perform.” And I know there’s always, “We could do more,” but this is where we have activities that we don’t have to perform. And you can look across the screen from the left to the right side: financial risk management, relationship management to even things like cash forecasting, reconciliations and accounting, exception handling, cash positioning and reporting. Some of these are core functions for cash management personnel, treasury personnel. There’s not as much time to get those done, especially depending on what kind of toolsets that you’re using. But I think this is important as each of us examines, “What are we doing? What can be automated? And how can we leverage tools that allow us to get the different tasks done? Can a machine do it for us? Can we use a tool that helps us get things done more rapidly?” And that flows into… We don’t have enough time to this desire to put more of our activities on a more fully digital activity. We might use the term “move towards full electronic processing or end-to-end straight-through processing”. The idea is, “How do we move towards digital?” And it’s really interesting to see these totals. When you look at your peers, 72% think it’s important or very important to move towards this fully digital environment, more of a machine-to-machine handoff. When you look at low importance or not at all important, it’s only 7%. So you can see the vast majority of your peers see, “This is important. This allows us to add more value to our organizations. So how do we take advantage of what’s available to automate more properly?”

And so, Brett, that brings us to our first poll question. So I’m gonna ask you to weigh in on that, too. This is about future-proofing. So if you see the poll question, “What is essential to futureproof your department?” You can select any or all that apply: upscaling people – making people smarter (that’s the new cool term to talk about upgrading our brains), using the most modern tech, reducing the time to value and time to develop (all right, so shortening these life cycles, that’s been a long-term trend in tech), and knowing when to jump the chasm, so the chasm between different types of tech or different types of processes. So those are some of the elements for you to consider as you select those and hit submit. And when that’s ready, Brian, if you feel there’s enough, then you pop it up. We can see… So Brett, as a technology firm, I think you’re probably going to be happy that “Use the most modern tech” is number one by an 11-point margin. Upscaling people – number two and then… Even the third one, reducing time to value and time to develop, fits into more modern tech. Your thoughts on this besides it making you happy because of the business that you’re in?

Brett Turner: Well, yeah, it’s not surprising because, again, that whole “Do more with less”… I mean, we know we can’t just keep hiring people. I mean, so how are we gonna get there? And this is where… You have to get there through digital means. You have to get there through technology to enable that. And so I think that’s the other thing. It’s some people out there may say, “Well, how do I get budget for this? Or how do I get a CFO for him or her to give me the budget I need to get this done or make some of these upgrades?” And I think part of it is that… In some ways, it all started with the cloud because the CFO, in particular, experienced this great cost compression. And it was reallocation. So IT folks, instead of doing certain things, were doing more value-added tasks. And so it was reallocating. But then, in that, all of that equipment and built-to-meet-the-peaks models with the servers, there was a tremendous amount of cost compression that happened: not having to buy a lot of servers every single year and phase those in and tracking all of those from inventory management, end of life, and all that kind of stuff. So when you kind of look at that cost compression the CFO has experienced… And every CFO loves to see efficiency and cost compression. And so they just kind of assumed that, “Well, if I have that on IT, then I pretty much should also experience the same kind of cost compression across the rest of G&A.” It’s not true unless you have that technology. So I think in order to get them to free a budget, it is to say, “Yeah, we can get there. We absolutely can get there, but you’ve got to carve out some budget to be able to invest in technology, upgrade your environment, and start investing in some of these new things that are gonna allow you to achieve this kind of cost compression.” This whole “do more with less” can now happen because of that. Oh, you’re on mute. Craig, sorry!

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, I liked your comments. And I know it’s common about “build to the peaks”. But I just think about that in the historical environment. You’d have a production server, a development server. Maybe, you’d even have a test server. So you’d have to build their capabilities for processing for like, “What’s our worst day of the month?” Well, at the end of the month, we run all this process, and we need 50 units of CPU capacity. But most of the month, we use zero to three. But now, we have three servers we’re buying for 50 units and this idea of, “If I can scale when I need it, it’s like just in time compute or storage, etc.” And so those are significant areas about future-proofing, scalability, etc. So thank you, everyone, for answering those questions! Thanks for your comments, Brett, as well!

And for those who are interested in seeing the poll results, if we get 50 people who type the word “poll” in the chatbox to everyone… Don’t just send them to me or to the speakers, but send them to everyone. If we see 50 of them, everyone will get the poll results. So that’s one way of just seeing how interesting you find those poll questions. We really like to have good poll questions so that everyone learns. You can see the responses of hundreds of people all at once at one point in time.

But as we continue the discussion, I thought it was important to show some additional elements about this idea of moving towards digital or straight-through processing. It’s not just treasury. It’s all of finance. It’s most of business, but even accounts payable and accounts receivable. You can see some of these numbers. What drives you to more automation? Efficiency, reduction in errors, control or security, forecasting accuracy on the payable side, ability to scale on the accounts receivable side. It’s interesting. Treasury has some different views and mindsets: optimum use of cash, reduction in risk. There’s a number of areas, but everybody in finance is moving and desiring to improve what they’re doing in different areas. And many of them, many of your peers have these different reasons to drive them to automation. Brett, before I move on with this… I know there’s not a ton there, but I thought you might have something to add here before we jump to the landscape.

Brett Turner: I think this is a good segue. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all moving toward data-driven automation. At the end of the day. Can I get my data more quickly? Can I get it in real time? Can I use technology to really take that and do things that I don’t have to touch or lean into? I mean, that’s what it’s all about. And that’s really what your tech journey should be driving toward in having that filter in everything you evaluate and look at.

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, it’s kind of like the opposite questions. Where in life are people asking for information more slowly or to have a narrower view of analysis? They might wanna dive deeper, but it’s usually broader and faster. I can’t think of any area that says, “No, no. Slower is better. Give me all seven newspapers in paper form at the bottom of my driveway once a week. I don’t need information quickly.” I’m sorry! I think that’s what we see.

Brett, in this slide, we worked a little bit on putting some different tools, types of technology, issues that confront treasury, payables professionals, finance professionals. Across the board, we’ve got cloud services, computing power, business intelligence. Then, we’ve got connection options, RPA and machine learning, the data explosion, fraud prevention. Why don’t you talk about a few things here? I’m happy to talk about a few things as well. There’s a lot here on the powerful tools that are changing landscape that we need to think about.

Brett Turner: Yeah, one thing too that came up too in the early days, before even starting Trovata, in some early discovery, was when I kind of looked at the landscape. I mean, at the end of the day, here’s kind of how the landscape stacks up. You’ve got an ERP system. You’ve got the bank. And then, you’ve got bank portals. So if you have more than one bank (you’re kind of in a swivel chair mode with different bank portals), there’s this chasm or gap between those two if you look at that from your systems environment. And generally, that gap is covered with Excel. So most people are using that to some extent as your system of record, at least broadly.

Now, of course, there are treasury management systems. And so if you’re a larger corporate and you have the money and time to implement… It’s sort more of the large corporate elites. They are able to invest and have one of these TMSs. But the stats were pretty alarming. Even the 5,000 largest global companies in the world, only 50% of them still had a TMS. And then, of all the folks that even had a TMS, only there was 73% or 74%. And this is one of the Big 4’s reports that had come out about this. All they really needed it for was more of the core basics, so just visibility, the transparency, cash positioning, just a lot of the basics of just cash flow analysis.

And then, on top of that, then forecasting was still a major gap. All of that was done in Excel. And then, some people were using a BI tool to do things, but again… Or other people were just using pivot tables in Excel. So there’s still a lot of work that you still have to do to manage a lot of your data tables and data elements or having IT support to even leverage a BI tool. So that was kind of summed up. For me, when I looked at it, most people fell into that. And frankly, most people were using Excel. And so I think at the end of the day, it was really about… In order to truly get more of driving this adoption, it’s all about the data. The banks now… Because again, access to data was very limited. So if you could become one of the few corporates who are members of SWIFT, you could then go that way, but that required a lot of expertise. It’s still all file-based, so it was gonna take a long time to get set up. And then, you could work directly with your bank, but even setting up through the bank’s file gateway for information services could take anywhere from six to seven to eight weeks. So this whole notion of getting access to data was a real problem.

And then, to be able to take advantage of that data, then you’d have to be able to have… There wasn’t really anything in the way of like a modern technology system to be able to process all of that. And that’s where everything kind of fell down or fell in Excel.

The other aspect of just gathering or preparing all the data was… If you’re gonna do forecasting… The stats are, 75-80% of the work is all just preparing the data, getting access to data sources, which are dynamic. If you’re gonna forecast to keep it relevant, you’ve got to refresh that data. So just the preparation, just to get into the mode where you’re forecasting, and then be able to use it for making decisions – most of that work is all prep.

So if you kind of look at that landscape, the two major things that are completely busting the doors wide open are, the banks are getting in on it. So your bank partner matters. Banks now leaning in… 90+% of banks worldwide now have an API strategy. So as the APIs are coming online, banks are shifting to APIs and looking at even how banking services are gonna be consumed. The bank portal… And not my words. The banks are even saying that like, “We’re not happy with our bank portals because it’s sort of this links farm that’s become,” because they really started in the late 90s. And so even that has become somewhat legacy in how to deliver banking services.

So a lot of this is, the APIs are becoming this way to deliver this data. And then, how to build on top of that to automate services or automate reporting or automate certain aspects of forecasting, that data-driven automation is now what it’s all about. And that’s what’s really changing and upsetting the entire Apple Card. The way it’s been laid out with all of this traditional tech… And it’s incredibly exciting because it’s a way again like we’ve talked about to do all these new things, be opportunistic, and really allow folks… Because I’ve been hearing (that’s the other thing), part of the discovery was like everybody wants to be value-added, everybody wants to move more and be more strategic and be more tied in to what’s going on with the business and be more accretive into business operations. Now, it allows you to kind of get away from a lot of the manual-driven things, reallocate, and apply yourselves in those ways. And you’ve got the great data-driven tech to back it up. I mean, that’s really, in a nutshell, kind of what’s driving the landscape, those pieces that are at play today, and why your bank partner matters. Access the data through APIs is a big deal, and it’s coming. And just being able to have more of a modern tech experience now to be able to capture and deliver the kind of things that you want and drive with built-in automation is really key to all of it.

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, Brett, as I look around the chart here, there’s a number of combinations that can be made. Some are the ones you made. This idea of data explosion on the left. There’s this massive explosion of data. You need that for forecasting. We used to have this dearth of information, a lack of information, and now there’s almost too much to handle. You can’t handle it with the way we process in our brains or with spreadsheets. And so things like business intelligence tools, scalable computing power, doing things in memory changes how we look at data and what we can do.

Brett Turner: Yeah, I mean, one example that’s very pragmatic or very practical (and this is a basic tool we help Trovata customers in getting set up) is just anomaly detection. It’s a basic thing. If you’re dealing with a lot of data and a lot of bank transactions, wouldn’t it be nice to right away get an alert on an outlier? So it’s a simple report that takes less than a minute to set up, and it will be fully automated from there on out. You can pin it to your dashboard. And what it does do is, it says (it’s an easy visual you can kind of create), “Here’s your band of transactions.” And anything outside that band that falls out of that, it’s pretty easy to visually see that on that report that you can see. And when that happens, getting alert – that’s what you would expect, right? In a modern tech environment. So bringing about those things where you’re not having to have this aspect of “Man, how did I not know about that?” or “We’ve got to touch all of the data. We’ve got to do more of a comprehensive and more detailed review in our treasury reconciliation because we have to know our data so intimately that we’ve got to catch those kinds of things”… You don’t have to do that anymore, and that’s the beauty of it. Just calling those out and using the machine to do things that you just can’t humanly do as you continue to scale – those are the kinds of things that are enabled now through more of this shifting of tech landscape that’s providing more of that value. So calling it out, being able to have that in seconds as opposed to building an entire workflow across your team to try to do some of that. Now, that’s a simple example. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it in that category than that. But these are some of the things too. They’re easy and really accretive. It’s not trying to let the tech do everything. It’s this whole blend of art and science. Let the tech do the science and people do the art who have the knowledge and skills to do that. But seaming that together and bringing that environment together is really important.

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, the idea of there’s more data, how do you detect patterns or anomalies in that? So machine learning is great for detecting patterns. And when you have patterns, you can detect anomalies. Anomalies might point out, “Here’s a problem.” A quality control issue. It could be fraud as we look at the right side. But it also helps with forecasting: what do we expect and what can we do? Now, there’s more data to go through, but we have tools and machines that can help us do those. Great discussion, Brett!

Let’s move on. Future-proofing is kind of this buzzword or a buzz phrase that’s like, “Hey, everything needs to be future-proof.” And yet, stuff changes all the time. But there are certainly some strategies and components that we need to be thinking about as we evaluate the growth of our organizations, how they change, increased expectations. And some of these headlines here, automated processes, improving visibility, optimizing cash management, this is really the beginning of a broader list. But, Brett, when you think about future-proofing, what are some of the key thoughts that you have on making sure the organization is what? Scalable? You don’t have to worry about tech. How would you describe that?

Brett Turner: Yeah, I think this is one of the things right now that gives every finance, treasury person, counting person, just… It can be decision paralysis, right? Because what happens is, we’ve traditionally gone through, as a practitioner over years and years, this traditional RFP process. And the reason for that is, we wanna make sure we get it right. We’re gonna make a really big investment, and we don’t wanna screw it up. We wanna optimize every opportunity that we wanna do, the things we can’t foresee. But we also, of course, wanna check the box and all the things that are core, that we’re gonna get some nice wins and some upgrades for. So this has become sort of this endless thing that you can really obsess on. And you can continue going down that rabbit hole of waiting and waiting and waiting and then perpetually waiting if it’s on that extreme. Or you make a quick decision, which many of us experienced. Like whether it’s six months down the road or even three months, you get sort of this buyer’s remorse and you’re like, “Oh, why did I not think of that?” or “I didn’t account for that.” And what’s happened right now is tech is coming, all the stuff is coming online so much faster and even the… Like a lot of the ecosystems to kind of drive RFPs are not even quite up to speed with some of the newer pieces that are coming online. So there’s this aspect of these traditional features and functionality. It’s this giant checklist grid. But what gets missed is like, what about the tech? And that, again, is the most important question in all of this because this is going to drive and enable you to future-proof this journey because it’s, again, the “do more with less” is “the do more”. Like you can do the same with less like that’s… You’re gonna be able to achieve some of those things. But you wanna do more with less. At the end of the day, that’s what everybody’s expecting, right? To do more things. Not just the things that you’re already doing, but start to be opportunistic and lean into these other things that can be more accretive. And I think that’s where that future-proofing starts to segue into.

And I think there are two things that are part of that. One is how financial information gets communicated. I think that’s a struggle for a lot of folks. And that’s one thing that you just don’t get a lot of time, whether it’s with the board, or even with the CFO, or there’s… You get a few seconds. And how do you convey a lot of complex information or complex aspects of what’s going on in terms of cash flow or the business in sixty seconds or a couple of minutes or on a slide? Like you just don’t get a lot of time, a lot of airtime to do that. So you have to make how you communicate the information really crisply, really saliently in a way that can drive. Speak to the business drivers, not just around in the weeds but in a way that’s really gonna drive value and point out things that the senior management team cannot start to act on or care about. And those are the big business drivers that you can impact.

All of the data is there. And now, yeah, all of the data is coming online. So you now have the ability to finally be more strategic. But how are you gonna do that if you just do it with what you’ve done before or existing tools or having something that’s actually gonna help you communicate? It used to be like put it on a PowerPoint slide, do a weekly meeting or a monthly meeting or whatever. Now, that stuff is changing. Like what many of us are experiencing with Google. Just you basically share out a link or share the file. You’re having different people work on that together. So that whole sharing and distribution of kind of that end result or report where that can be the self-consumption of that in different ways, that’s a big important thing. And like we talked about with forecasting, being able to just reduce all of that prep and have a lot of this dynamically updated for you, so you’re not having to go out and refresh and experience the whole text to columns constantly in your spreadsheet because you’re actually doing your own ETL, your extract, transform and load, basically handling all of your data to get it from some clunky format into a consumable format for the system of record that you’re maintaining in Excel, right?

So a lot of these pieces can start to change, and a lot of these things can start to come together. But it’s this future-proofing. When you have the tech, it’s not just doing the things that you’re currently doing more efficiently, but it’s opening up the doors. And some of that stuff you won’t even think about. So you wanna make sure you have tech that’s three months, six months, a year down the road because it’s an architecture thing. It’s like you’re already now building four floors up and building the high rise, and you can’t just like, “Ah, we’ve got to change and redo the foundation because we didn’t think of this a year ago.” Like with tech, it’s different. Now, when you’re dealing with modern web services and building more from cloud-native, microservices, componentized architecture, you’re not bound to these monolithic pieces that you now have to completely change. You can do some of these things. You’re now inherently future-proof to allow you as those things are coming, as you’re thinking about different things. If you didn’t foresee something, that’s okay. All that gets handled now because you have modern tech that’s cloud-native, that’s all taking advantage of all the latest and greatest. And all of that is being swapped out and upgraded as we go as your provider. So that stuff you just expect to happen for you as well. So all of that stuff just… It’s things you don’t have to think about, things that set you up. And now, you kind of don’t have to have this whole “think through a million things” or this decision paralysis like, “Did I think through every single permutation or every scenario or every possible benefit that I wanna achieve?” You don’t have to do that. So it’s a lot less stressful, and it’s changing the whole traditional RFP paradigm.

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, I think, besides picking on a consultant in the RFP paradigm. But the point that you’re making is, some of your early decisions, the big stones, or occupying the passes in the mountains or whatever, whether you wanna use a sports, military, or some other analogy… When you’ve selected those, the other components are much easier. If you get those big items wrong, everything is harder. Every step, every action is harder when you haven’t done that. And that flows from the RFP and how you look at technology to the decisions you make and prioritization. So I do appreciate that a lot.

Brett Turner: One thing, Craig, I mentioned too in that picking on at the consulting ecosystem. Actually, the beauty about it is, everybody benefits because now consulting teams can start to think about and do things and lean into things that weren’t possible before. So now, you can start to leverage the same tech and do different things. Instead of just maybe billable hours on an integration, now they can think of doing something opportunistic to transform an area that ties back to accounting or that kind of ties to some other business unit, leveraging that data. So the tide really raises all boats. So it’s exciting for everybody throughout the chain.

Craig Jeffery: That’s interesting, talking about things like data lakes and reporting and analytics across not only core treasury data but all of finance data. It’s something that was really hard to talk about four years ago and something that’s quite easy to talk about now because people understand that their tech is moving in that direction, their expectations, their mindsets are moving that way. So some fun stuff. So I didn’t take offense, but …

But we have a poll question. Our next poll question. And this is, “What’s your highest priority?” And this may not be in all of life, but it’s among these options, right? So we have efficiency, reduction in errors, control or security, forecasting accuracy, avoiding management’s attention, or something else. So this is “Just pick one”, and go ahead and hit Submit. And we will give you just a moment for that.

Brett Turner: Listen, you and I should place a bet on the order, who’s gonna win.

Craig Jeffery: Nice priority!

Brett Turner: Is that legal?

Craig Jeffery: This is a crowd. I don’t think… There’s also no money. I don’t think it’s illegal, but… I’m gonna think that control or security is probably number two. I’m thinking that efficiency or forecasting accuracy is number one. I know that’s saying too much. Let’s see if I’m close. Hopefully, you guys made it close. Efficiency is number one. Control or security is number two.

Brett Turner: Yeah.

Craig Jeffery: Okay, Brian, you should have held up to hear what Brett said. Is that what you have expected? To say, this is exactly, but… I love that. Avoiding management’s attention – 1%. It’s actually less than 1%. That’s pretty interesting. So efficiency is a key driver. We didn’t put anything down here about ability to scale, adapt to the future. Any thoughts on any of these categories or the whole group, Brett?

Brett Turner: Yeah, I know. I think I was pretty like-minded in where you were going with the two. I think, two… Avoiding management’s attention. Yeah, I think it’s the opposite. If it was flipped, it could be… We want management to absolutely get their attention because we want the budget and we want to start investing in some of these things. I mean, I think that’s a part of the theme to start to realize some of this as well.

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, that’s good. So we are slightly behind in our poll responses. I only asked for 50. We’ve got 49. So unless we get one more, we’re not gonna be sharing that. That’s where we draw the line. So if we get one more person to type in the word “poll” to everyone, we’ll do that and so that would… Okay, we’re over. We’re over. We’ve run to the fifties. We don’t need to go on to the hundreds, but we appreciate your engagement in the polls and your interest in getting this data. That’s encouraging to us just to see… People love to find out what others are doing and thinking, and we’re happy to send that along. So I appreciate you guys listening to some silliness as we share that, but…

That moves us to democratization of the treasury. And when we think about the word “democratization”, how do we make some of these capabilities available to everyone? We’ve got a couple of categories here: a single source of the truth to functionality and flexibility. It used to be things like FX trading platforms, reconciliation platforms, treasury systems, you name it, across the board. It was only available to those that were in a multibillion category. Well, now it’s become much more available. Brett, as we think about this, maybe you can talk about a single source of the truth first. What does that mean? There’s data everywhere. What are we talking about in a single source of truth here?

Brett Turner: Yeah, I mean, it all starts with that data layer, getting that right. The exciting thing is, the banks are releasing APIs to be able to get the data directly. But the barriers to that are that companies… They can, but it’s hard for them to do that because it requires significant IT resources to do an integration with those bank APIs to get that. And that’s where a company like Trovata comes in, where we’re basically… And we’ve become now the global leader in API integrations. So with that, though, what’s now starting to happen, whereas these traditional… Getting it either directly from the bank and everybody dealing with that in mass or getting it through SWIFT or even the banks leveraging SWIFT to do some aggregation as well. With all the banks now coming online with APIs, there isn’t really a standard for that, which is a problem. It’s why we’re starting to kind of work with banks and drive a standard because we’ve got so many of these integrations, normalizing all of that data because when it comes to the API, sometimes it’s not even quite the same with a global bank if it comes from certain branches or how it all rolls up because there could be multiple different systems within the bank that are housing that data. And so we’re kind of in the early innings still in terms of like the banks kind of building their own data lakes, being able to aggregate all of that internally and then to be able to release the APIs for that to go through. It’s a very IT-heavy exercise. And that’s why going through the equivalent of…

With SWIFT or service bureaus or directly with the bank from their information gateway, I mean, these are practices that have been around for decades. But now, as the APIs come along, it has the promise of having all of this data come through really quickly, even in real-time, richer data. So it’s more than what can come through. Like you’d have to build a customized file just to get all of that richness of data. So that’s all now happening. But be able to aggregate that all in this single source of truth, meaning it’s all normalized in sort of this common backplane of data essentially that you can tie into and leverage for all of the upstream work of data processing and analytics and, of course, machine learning, all of the things, these advanced data operations, but then your application layer to build that on top of that – your whole user experience is dependent upon that as well.

So, I mean, at the end of the day, again it all comes down to data, having all of that normalized, centralized, fully managed. Like you don’t wanna have to touch that. It’s messy. It’s hard. And then, having that fully managed in the cloud, highly available – all of those are kinds of things you kind of expect now from the IT world if you’re working through more advanced services in that way. That now is coming online. That’s now available, and that’s the big part of what we do. 

Trovata – a trove of data. We wanna build the smartest financial trove of data on the planet. So that single source, that’s… You have to have that as part of that because everything kind of hinges on that. And that’s why being in the data layer is really important for us. We know that data extremely well. We’ve got years now working with banks. We’ve spent two and a half years really in stealth, working closely on managing a lot of these things before we even released our product. So having an understanding of all that data, getting that right then to set the stage or set the table for all of these things, and a big part of this is that it sort of allows that single source of truth, it sort of allows this… Democratization comes in where now you can do it because it’s available to the broader market. And now, you can start to automate and build things, build services, applications really that are sort of this best practice in a box. I mean, there’s only so many…

Bigger companies have treasury teams. There’s a lot of other companies that really should benefit from that and more best practice, but it’s maybe done by a finance team or the accounting department. And so there are aspects of bringing through some of those pieces to the broader market out of the box, no IT required. That’s democratizing that. That’s a big part of… 

We started working with Square as one of our earliest customers. And the treasurer of Square, where… He just right away wanted to be a part of the journey because… And that was a big part of what he was so attracted to. It’s like, “Hey, now everybody can benefit from this,” so democratizing, letting all companies really participate in what’s really been this type of access of just only certain people because of cost, of implementation, access to data. Now, that broader playing field opens up, and it’s exciting. We’re now getting nearly 150 customers. We’re bringing roughly 15 customers a month onboard. Being able to have that kind of scale. Most companies are coming out of Excel and maybe a few from a TMS. But still, there is an underserved market out there, and it’s enormous.

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, Brett! Yeah, some of the background and context is helpful. You said something earlier about bringing data and normalizing it. Isn’t there some aspect as well that not all data needs to be normalized and there are other tools like natural language search that allow you to go well beyond what…? It doesn’t always have to be rows and columns.

Brett Turner: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s where that whole end piece is really important. So it starts with that data layer. It starts with having a big data platform or technology to drive a lot of that data processing in a whole new way that’s not static, that’s not monolithic, that can give you a lot of that speed and agility. And then, that’s what really unlocks and enables building more of a contemporary user experience on top of that. And that’s partly where now we’re starting to kind of gain some momentum, where it’s not just about one single user interface. I mean, we’re now launching a Trovata payments application. We have a full enterprise entitlements application. There are all of these things that we’re starting to bolt on and add within this whole workspace of applications. Those are the kinds of things you get momentum just in the way AWS did in the early days of the cloud.

Again, a lot of people don’t know that, but when AWS really got going, it was only in 2006. And then, they really didn’t kind of hit a lot of traction. They started to get a lot of traction where big companies like Netflix or… Even Apple was starting to use AWS in those early days in like 2011. EA Electronic. So big companies started using it more discreetly. But that’s where it really started to proliferate. AWS is doing 50 billion in revenue. That’s how transformative… And I think that’s the kind of thing where this leads to as well: this whole building better, faster, more widgetized services and getting the momentum. In the early days of AWS, it was basically just AS2 and S3, basically a database and then this elastic server component. Now, they’ve got a gazillion different services that are all packaged, that their users can put together and piece together like a really complicated set of Lego blocks to build out their infrastructure. Those are the kinds of things. Meeting folks where they’re at, how they see value, and how they wanna configure things – it’s a lot where we’re headed and we think that the entire shift of the technology landscape is setting as well.

Craig Jeffery: Yeah, so this is a considerations slide. There’s a lot on there. We grayed some out because we knew we wouldn’t be able to get to all of them. We wanna leave these on there for your thoughts. The idea of how do we manage data? What resource do you have available in your IT department? How has that shifted over time from, it used to be IT departments wanted everything to be run internally to now they’re much more heavily focused on “move things to the cloud and make that work”? There’s another aspect too about real-time data or manual refreshing activities, the idea of “I need more information, more timely, and I need ways to organize it.” So as we think about expectations and some of the tech, those all factor in. And I know we would have quite a bit more to talk about even on this slide, but just for the sake of time we wanna get to our final poll question. And then, Brett and I have a few key takeaways, some questions, and some thoughts about the future environment.

So our poll question is, “Which of the following terms are you familiar with?” Terms or phrases. Banking as a service, open banking and open APIs, embedded finance, SaaS, PaaS, and none of the above. None of the above means you don’t know those. Not that you’re unfamiliar with that phrase, so… I just wanna make sure that that is the case. So we have enough poll questions. Enough people typed “poll”. Some people typed “pool”, and some people typed “poll” with three Ls, but we have enough to share all those poll responses. Brett, which two are going to be the least popular? How about that?

Brett Turner: Oh, boy! This one’s a little harder. The least popular… I think banking as a service is probably the most important. A lot of people are just kind of hearing about that. And it’s incredibly important, but probably it’s new in terms of being on people’s radar. I think people… Maybe, embedded finance. It might be another one that’s still kind of “What does that mean?” for a lot of folks. I think the other one is SaaS, platform as a service, those things. Maybe, platform as a service. That’s maybe a little bit more of an IT term, so…

Craig Jeffery: SaaS should be well up to 85% or more. Let’s go look at the answers, see how well you did, Brett.

Brett Turner: Oh, wow! Excellent!

Craig Jeffery: Banking as a service and SaaS are the top two. Okay, so I was wrong on that. 13%. Embedded finance and PaaS are low as well. Very, very interesting. So we have a lot of different webinars and things that we could cover. All right, some people are typing funny things in the chatbox, so I’d better stop looking at those. We’re gonna close that poll and get to…

Brett Turner: I’m thrilled that people have banking as a service on the top of their radar. It makes me feel a lot better.

Craig Jeffery: All right, so on the takeaways, I’ll throw out a few of the questions. When we think about, “Where do we go from here?”, we’ve talked about a number of items on this technology journey. And talking about some mindset, Brett shared some things about Trovata. And I think I heard one time long ago, there was a trove of the data, but him saying it again reminded me of how they’ve taken the approach. But what should we be thinking about? What should our mindset be? Are you ready? Are you prepared for the shift towards cloud-native technology? And what does that mean if you’re a finance professional, treasury professional, or you’re IT? How future-proof is my system’s environment? What am I doing? Every change I make, will that move me to my future environment or might I have to rip some of these things out? And finally, can I access and manage data at scale? I’ll turn it over to Brett for the last few comments on the future environment.

Brett Turner: Yeah, I mean, I think in a nutshell, in a 30-seconds wrap-up… I mean, the big part is, if there’s anything, if your tech is older than maybe seven years, then I would be a little skeptical in terms of the architecture and how it’s framed up and how it’s built. I mean, it’s probably not cloud-native. Almost certainly, it isn’t because again those tools haven’t been around for that long. That’s when really everything has been architected in that way. Maybe, there’s a couple of things kind of right around that in that vintage that was able to kind of pivot quickly toward that and has had this close but has had to swap out things. But I think that’s one key thing. So you’re looking at something that’s more new and contemporary from that standpoint. The thing is, at the end of the day, this is that blend of art and science. Like you wanna be the artist. Like if you’re gonna spend your time, more of the time painting, you don’t wanna gather the paints, wash the brushes, put all the things together, like all of that… Let the technology do and automate those things. Focus on the things that really matter and the things that can really drive value for your business.

Craig Jeffery: Thanks so much, Brett! Thanks, everybody, for your attention! And Brian, I think you have a few final closing announcements.

Brett Turner: Thanks, everybody!

Brian: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today! The CTP and FP&A credits, the webinar slides, and a recording of today’s webinar will be sent to you within five business days. If you’d like to hear more of Craig and Brett on this topic, be sure to check out this week’s podcast using the link in the chatbox. Thank you for joining us! And we hope you’ll have a good rest of the day.