Sessions to Understand the Treasury Professional
AFP 2023 sessions that flesh out the role and responsibilities of treasury professionals so those working parallel to the profession are better equipped in their day-to-day.
- Capital Markets & Investments Track
- Career Development
- Financial Planning & Analysis Track
- Payments Track
- Risk Management Track
- Treasury Management Track
Capital Markets & Investments
The Hidden Power of Cash: Meeting Yield Targets While Elevating DEI Efforts
Treasury teams have a unique opportunity to leverage their balance sheets to meet corporate diversity, equity and inclusion goals while also earning targeted returns on cash. However, navigating this complex landscape can be challenging, especially in today’s volatile yield environment. That’s why accessible, next-generation data platforms and community finance institutions are becoming critical tools for treasury teams to achieve their DEI goals. In this session, speakers share their experiences and effective strategies for seamlessly allocating cash to impact-driven community financial institutions, minimizing risk in their portfolio, and earning returns comparable to conventional investments.
Your Essential Guide to ESG Deposits
The influence of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors on how companies manage their businesses is ever evolving. With mounting pressure from investors, banks, consumers, and government regulations, the momentum for sustainable finance continues to grow. As more companies undertake sustainability initiatives, sustainable deposits have become an emerging topic of treasury conversations. It’s therefore critical that Treasurers understand how to align an ESG style deposit with their enterprise goals and incorporate ESG into their company’s cash optimization strategies and securing buy-in to participate in ESG initiatives. In this session speakers share insights on how treasurers can position themselves as strategic thinkers and contribute to enterprise goals beyond their traditional role.
How Corporate Treasurers Can Invest with a Social Purpose
Corporate treasury teams are increasingly seeking ways to align their actions with their organization’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) mission statements and drive meaningful advancement. One way corporate treasury teams have supported
these goals is by participating in investment products and programs that support affordable housing and education. This panel discusses the relative merits and impact of available socially conscious investment options and sheds light on the role Community
Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) play in reaching underserved communities, which mainstream finance has historically ignored, and shares how they have raised internal support for implementing socially conscious investment approaches.
ESG Financing, How Do I Start?
As ESG financing gains popularity in the U.S., treasury practitioners will face pressure to incorporate ESG elements into their debt issuances. The process requires careful planning and collaboration between internal stakeholders, external advisors and banks. Speakers representing companies with a focus on environmental and social responsibility share their experiences and lessons learned. This discussion also addresses the consideration of third-party verification communication with investors, structuring legal documentation, negotiating KPIs and selecting a sustainability coordinator.
Michigan State's Blockchain Project: A Success Story!
Financial services, including bond issuance, is being transformed by blockchain technology but most financial practitioners are not certain how and where to begin the process or determine which collaborators and providers are trustworthy and capable. At Michigan State University (MSU) the treasury team worked collaboratively with a Blockchain Bond Advisory Group comprised of students, faculty, staff, alumni and external advisers to develop a new paradigm for raising capital using blockchain distributed ledger technology. Attend this session to hear how MSU, with a proven success model, realized the potential of blockchain to create new nodes of opportunity for treasury functions to meet financial goals.
Career Development
Connection Matters: Building Team Resiliency and Engagement
Trying to manage the seismic shifts within the workplace has been disruptive and unsettling; the increased strain of emotional and mental health is real. We’ve been left feeling disconnected, uncertain and oftentimes lonely. The presenters draw from their experiences to help attendees focus on moving beyond the digital and physical constraints of the workplace to reconnect with the human aspect of work. Attend this session and take away tools to help increase your team’s productivity, collaboration and retention.
Increase Mental Resilience to Boost Creativity, Problem-Solving & Strategic Thinking Power Skills
Change is inevitable, and can negatively impact our mental and emotional well-being. As a result, burnout, stress, and change-fatigue levels have reached an all-time high, leading to decreased creativity, problem-solving, and strategic thinking skills. The consequences of these power skill deficits are tangible and can impact an organization's bottom line. This session provides practical, actionable steps to help attendees improve their mental resilience, reduce stress, and enhance their creativity and performance. By building and boosting individual agility and team resilience, practitioners can better adapt to change, drive creativity, and increase company performance and profitability.
Prioritizing Well-being: Strategies for Communicating with More Empathy in ANY Situation
Fostering an environment of psychological safety and well-being through more compassionate communication can boost performance in healthy ways and enhance your bottom line. However, with so many interactions in the run of a day, it’s reasonable
to expect that some of them are going to be difficult. Whether these conversations are with staff or stakeholders, there are emotional intelligence (also called EQ) tactics to ensure conversations go more smoothly for all involved. In this session,
Leadership Communication Strategist, Shakira M. Brown, delivers valuable insights to manage difficult conversations and shares tools to avoid the headaches that come from miscommunication and misunderstandings.
Achieving Career Success in the New Hybrid World of Remote & In-Person Teams
The shift to remote and hybrid work has become the norm for many organizations and has presented several challenges for corporate treasury and finance professionals, including technology issues, unequal participation in meetings, and difficulty maintaining social connections and company culture. This requires new approaches to communication, collaboration, and leadership, as well as the ability to balance the demands of both personal and professional life. Treasury and finance practitioners share the methods they have employed to address these challenges. Discussion includes the efforts leaders have made to level the playing field for remote workers and hybrid / in-person teams and strategies for maintaining social connections and fostering creativity.
It’s ALL Visual: A New/Old Look at Data Presentation
Every year, data visualization becomes a hotter and hotter topic, as graphing software becomes more powerful and ever-increasing volumes of data need to be summarized. Sadly, this has led many treasury and finance professionals into making
false choices. Graphs and other visualizations are NOT always the most effective way to present information or to make a point. Today’s Excel and other table software offer presenters plenty of often-overlooked opportunities to present concise
and visually effective tables; put another way, all numbers presentations are visual. This session reviews the five critical questions that need to be asked before presenting a visualization to an audience.
Financial Planning & Analysis Track
Transitioning From Number Cruncher to Strategic Partner
Making the transition from individual contributor to people leader and strategic partner we are increasingly asked to sit at the epicenter of decision-making, distilling alternatives to a common language of dollars and cents that considers
the full financial statement impact of tactical choices. This discussion explores the way our individual value propositions change as we make the leap to leadership, and how we need to work differently to grow our influence in the organization.
Payments Track
Open Banking for U.S. Corporates, Avoiding the Pitfalls
Open banking is fast becoming a worldwide phenomenon. By opening access to users’ financial data by regulated companies, new companies and products will come to market faster than ever. What’s missing from the conversation about open banking and its impact on consumers is the opportunity it presents for corporations. This session discusses that opportunity through the lens of what’s currently happening with open banking in Europe, where thousands of banks have gone full in, with open APIs, etc. The result is an ecosystem where every bank is using a different language, making it tough for corporations that need consistency, reliability, speed, and security around money movement — the lifeblood of their existence.
How the Exchange Framework is Achieving Greater Automation in Finance
In the U.S., challenges and barriers have prevented greater adoption of electronic invoicing and the advancement of automation between buyers and sellers, as well as their respective systems, platforms and service providers. In response, the Business Payments Coalition successfully launched the Exchange Framework, which is a set of technical standards and policies that enable businesses to share electronic invoices with each other, regardless of their accounts payable or accounts receivable system, network, platform or application used. This session covers how the Exchange Framework breaks down the barriers that have prevented the adoption of e-invoicing; how it simplifies the connection process for delivering and receiving e-invoices; and how it results in increased payments efficiency, security and cost reduction through an open delivery network.7 Best Practices to Improve Your B2B Payments
In the last decade, B2B payments have gone digital, with the coronavirus pandemic accelerating the trend. This has led to increased investment in the B2B payments ecosystem to develop new use cases and address payment-related pain points. Edgar, Dunn & Company conducted research on B2B payments, interviewing over 150 stakeholders, including corporates, issuers, payment schemes, and fintech. The study identified six key payment-related pain points and seven best practices to implement a successful B2B payments strategy. This session provides insights on these pain points and best practices, based on EDC's interviews with corporates and associations of corporates.
Speaking the New Language of Payments: Delta Air Lines on ISO 20022
As the financial messaging standard ISO 20022 rapidly becomes the norm for many countries' payment rails, changes are coming to the payments ecosystem. Join this informative session with Delta Air Lines as they share their experience in making ISO 20022 their common language for payments with their banks worldwide, and the resulting benefits of doing so. Discover how speaking the same ISO 20022 language brings a common set of data elements between Delta, their ERP/TMS systems, banks, and market infrastructures in the U.S. and globally. And learn about exciting industry developments in regard to cross-border, real-time payments that leverage the ISO 20022 standard.
Getting Ready for Instant Payments: Request for Payments (RfP)
Request for Payment (RfP) service, offered by the RTP Network and FedNow, is creating opportunities to reshape the receivables landscape by providing new bill pay and POS experiences, while simultaneously offering payers unprecedented control when making
a payment. In this session a panel of payment experts discuss the most pressing topics concerning RfPs today including benefits to billers, merchants and consumers, as well as learnings from early adopters, compliance with RfP warranties and implications
for the future of receivables.
Risk Management Track
Disruption 101: Perspectives, Lessons and Strategic Shifts to Overcome Supply Chain Challenges
Treasury professionals need to be agile in this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. The crises and major disruptors of the last few years, the current global inflationary environment and emergence of higher interest rates have been a challenge to corporate agility and adaptability. Navigating supply chain disruption and management of geopolitical risks continue to occupy the agenda of many organizations. Attend this session to hear how treasury leaders overcame these challenges to maintain the liquidity in each aspect of their cash conversion cycle and to ensure that their supply chains continue to deliver.
Cyber and Payment Fraud Risk: Combatting with the Latest Tools and Preparing for Incident Response
Treasury and AP departments have been working to shore up payment processes against fraud and cyber risk; however, while there are new tools and best practices widely distributed, fraudsters are also evolving to keep pace. This expert panel, which includes PMC Treasury and Kroll, covers the latest forms of attacks, strategies to minimize exposure, best practices for securing workflow and offer valuable insights into mitigating risk in today’s electronic and real-time payment landscape.
Solving Treasury's FX Problems from the Inside Out
Turnover in global foreign exchange (FX) markets reached $7.5 trillion per day in April 2022, a volume that is 30 times greater than daily global GDP. With continued and increasing FX volatility even among the major currencies, Treasury and Finance practitioners tasked with and responsible for understanding and mitigating foreign currency risk need to be able to navigate the FX space. In this session panelists with decades of experience both working and managing multiple treasury roles, living overseas, and engaging daily with global operations provide valuable insight on protecting your company’s financials from unnecessary FX impacts.
Cyber Readiness for Treasury: Practical Step by Step Solutions
Corporate Treasury departments are in the direct line of fire for cyber criminals using Business Email Compromise, ransomware, social engineering, and other methods to infiltrate the company’s defense systems. Join this session as speakers discuss strategies for blending hi-tech and low-tech approaches to become effective in cyber defenses, performing routine data hygiene exercises such as data purges for enhanced PCI and PII security and erecting proprietary rails for payment requests or payment-instruction modifications.
Understanding the Impact of a Cybersecurity Attack: Safeguarding Your Organization
As digital transformation continues to shape organizations, cyber theft and fraud has also evolved. This has created an urgent need for tighter data-security controls and related compliance measures, particularly in the fields of company and customer data. Corporate Treasury is the nerve center of any organization’s finance operations and its reliance on IT for risk operations, real-time cash visibility and analytics is critical for timely business decisions. While IT certainly works to safeguard data and mitigate risks, they can’t do it alone. In this session financial crimes experts stage a simulation that gives attendees an inside view of a cyber-crime in action.
Treasury Management Track
Digitizing RFPs
Despite the widespread digitization of the financial services industry, the issuance, analysis and scoring of RFPs in both cash management and treasury management systems remains manual and costly. Fintech organizations are making inroads in their attempt to solve these problems by digitizing the RFP process. This session explores the pain points of the RFP process, real-life problems facing corporates in the U.S., and whether banks and treasury system providers are willing and able to adapt to a new way of issuing and scoring RFPs. Ultimately, the goal is to empower end users, including corporates and treasury consultants, to make informed and correct decisions when evaluating proposals.Good vs. Great: What Makes the Best Marriages Between Bankers and Clients Work
In a business-banking relationship the focus is typically on the basic services offered and their related costs, often overlooking the strategic value and advantages of developing and retaining a long-term partnership. Hear firsthand from long-time practitioners and bankers about what makes the difference — the attributes that exist within those relationships that have lasted for years versus those that haven’t. Is it all about the money, or are there other, more important factors that matter? Attend this session to learn the key advantages to long-term relationships between a business and a bank, and how to make it last.eBam: Much More Than Opening and Closing an Account
Managing multiple bank accounts can be a challenging task for companies. Each account requires significant time and effort to open, there is a high annual cost to maintain
to each account, and they all demand regular updates and maintenance. With modern technology such as APIs and electronic bank account management (eBAM), the process can be synchronized to improve efficiency, reduce operating costs and ensure appropriate
user/signatory updates to minimize risk. This session explores the benefits of eBAM and APIs for synchronizing bank records, reducing operating costs and managing users/signatories to ensure compliance with internal policies and mitigate risk.
The Future of Treasury Management: Are You Ready?
To succeed in a rapidly evolving financial ecosystem, treasury teams must adapt by developing new skills, embracing new technology and most importantly, gaining a new mindset. Forward-thinking practitioners want to lead the change, not follow behind, to create the best possible outcomes for their function and their organization. This discussion, which includes treasury professionals from Google, Amazon, Netflix and Staples, addresses practitioners’ pressing need to stay competitive in the marketplace, not solely with treasury capabilities, but also risk management, resource reallocation and training, digital transformation, technology integration, and working capital and liquidity management.
Taking Control of Liquidity: A TMS Transformation
As CFOs prioritize digital transformation, treasury teams are emerging as business leaders and strategic thinkers, collaborating as both advisors and drivers of financial transformation. They are increasingly being asked to invest in programs to drive productivity and unlock value. In this session, a panel of treasury leaders from Amazon, Koch Industries, and 2021 Pinnacle Award Winner HCSC, detail how they established business objectives, quantified the impact of their transformation projects, and shared best practices to increase cash returns, reduce costs, and support global financial KPIs.
Improving Cash Forecasting in a High-Rate Environment: A Treasurer’s Perspective
Forecasting accuracy has become critical in the corporate drive to optimize liquidity, investments and debt in an inflationary/high-rate environment. Accurate positioning and forecasts are the foundation for all financial decisions and are still difficult to compile and produce with accuracy. Join this session as a panel of Treasury experts looks at forecasting best practices, and challenges from both a treasury and FP&A perspective. They explore real world examples and discuss how best-in-class treasuries develop and manage their forecasting process to achieve maximum accuracy and efficiency by leveraging the latest in Treasury technology and automation.