All Speakers
Rise Up: Finding Strength & Conquering Challenges in Tough Times
Imagine yourself on the highest mountain in the world. You’re dealing with the physiological effects of extreme altitude--along with bone-chilling temperatures, battering winds, and a climbing team that's counting on all of its members to make smart decisions. There's simply no room for poor judgment -- one mistake or misstep can result in an "unrecoverable error."
In any situation where lives on are the line or the stakes are exceptionally high--there's no better training ground for leaders than settings where people are pushed beyond their perceived limits. Drawing on her experience as team captain of the first American Women's Everest Expedition, Alison Levine shares the "unconventional" lessons learned from the mountain and explains how these can be applied to today's rigorously competitive business environments.
Outlook for the U.S. Economy in 2024 & Beyond
As the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve is responsible for monetary policy and supervising financial institutions. In the face of changing macroeconomic factors and key indicators such as unemployment, inflation, GDP performance, the housing market, and interest rates, the Federal Reserve sets policy that treasury and finance leaders must plan for and ultimately react to. Executive Vice President and Chief Economic Adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, David Altig, shares his insights into current economic conditions, how key macroeconomic indicators are analyzed, and discusses the tools used to drive policy forward. Altig also provides a national economic forecast while discussing the key performance indicators to keep an eye on in the coming months. This keynote addresses how key indicators shape the Federal Reserve’s economic policies and the macroeconomic factors that treasury and finance leaders need to monitor.
The Poet’s Keys: A Guide to Unlocking Innovation The world is seemingly one disruption away from shaking the very foundations of our successes to their bones. After spending a decade alongside world-class innovators at institutions like Stanford and Google, Tucker Bryant has discovered an unexpected perspective professionals can adopt to confront the future with confidence: the outlook of a poet. Bryant shares powerful tools poets have relied on for millennia to escape their comfort zones and innovate through language - tools that allow treasury and finance professionals to achieve enhanced creativity, collaboration, and competitive advantage in their work.
L.E.A.P: The Extraordinary Method for Boosting Productivity and Navigating Uncertainty
Progress only happens in one direction: forward! When ambiguity arises, you can either flee, pause, or charge ahead blindly. Creativity Strategist, Natalie Nixon, shares a straightforward approach to boost productivity and confront uncertainty.
By Leveraging, Envisioning, Asking, and Prototyping, treasury and finance professionals gain clarity, essential tools for proactive planning, and actionable strategies to move forward through uncertain times.
The 5th Domain
The world faces a dangerous combination of known and unknown cyber vulnerabilities. Today, we encounter strong and rapidly expanding adversaries utilizing new tools and techniques with ever increasing technical capabilities. Let’s call these the good ol’ days because securing the future, especially in the workplace, will be the real challenge. This session focuses on the rise of artificial intelligence, its impact on the cybersecurity of payment infrastructures and what payments professionals can do to combat the bad actors. Additional discussion includes how the proliferation of the Internet of Things will challenge our capacity to protect data.
Tactical Influence: The Superpower for Leaders
Tactical influence is vital to gaining trust, aligning efforts to pursue goals, inspiring positive change, and significantly improving performance. Developing and maintaining trust supports effectively managing risk, improves culture, and increases innovation to prepare for an uncertain future. Using field-tested techniques backed by science, trust and nonverbal communications expert Pamela Barnum shares techniques for how to leverage intentional communication cues that increase collaboration and improve negotiations. Additionally, she demonstrates how treasury and finance professionals can communicate fearlessly with confidence while maintaining a strong executive presence during times of uncertainty.
The Serious Business of Humor, Humanity & Resilience
There is a misconception in today’s corporate world: that treasury and finance professionals must suppress their sense of humor in the work environment to be taken seriously. On the contrary, research tells a different story. Building on her bestselling book, Humor, Seriously, Jennifer Aaker delves into the behavioral science of humor, and why it fuels creativity, fosters resilience, and strengthens teams and organizations. Aaker shares stories from inspiring leaders and tactics that can be deployed to bridge the trust gap, cultivate cultures of levity, unlock agility in the face of change; including concrete tools for embracing humor with a purpose in your personal and professional life.
Why the Merchant’s Voice is Critical in Payments Innovation
The Business to Consumer landscape has seen a rapid shift in payment transactions from the use of checks and magnetic strip cards, with most taking place at a physical location, to technology-enabled, faster payments, same day ACH, cryptocurrency, tap transactions, digital wallets and PayFacs, to name a few. In the face of these developments, it’s critical for merchants to also have a voice in the development of this evolving payment ecosystem. CEO of the Merchant Advisory Group, John Drechny discusses the current payment landscape and how merchant collaboration is leading to better outcomes.
The world's largest database of major projects reveals that a shockingly small percentage of projects are completed on budget, on time, and with the outcome envisioned. That means the most important elements of the business case are far off base. Worse, projects aren’t merely at risk of being a little off - catastrophic failure is frighteningly common, and the story is the same around the world for projects of all sizes. In this talk, Dan Gardner draws on his book How Big Things Get Done to look at why failure is so common and what successful project leaders can teach us about conceiving, planning, and delivering on our own projects, big and small.
Charisma and Leadership: The Science of Trust, Influence and Rapport
You only get one chance to make the right first impression. Within a few seconds, people judge your level of intelligence and trustworthiness. For the first time, science and technology have taken charisma apart, figured it out and turned it into an applied science: In controlled laboratory experiments, researchers could raise or lower people's level of charisma as if they were turning a dial. This talk covers the science of charisma; the keys to making fantastic first impressions, and the secrets to having that "Wow effect", that "boardroom presence" to quickly establish credibility, trust, and rapport.
Stress Management for Work-Life Integration
Anxiety, insomnia, muscle tension, fatigue, high blood pressure and anger are just a few of the physical symptoms of stress. Stress not only affects your body, but also creates behaviors that can lead to social withdrawal. This keynote explores the nature of our mind and the various factors in our lives that cause us stress. Treasury and finance professionals learn simple meditation techniques that can nourish the mind, which will lead to increased focus, greater productivity, improved relationships and better health.
Reimagination in a Time of Change
The circumstances of the last 3 years accelerated many previously developing trends at an exponential pace (e.g., distributed and hybridized work; increased use of AI, etc.). It also magnified existing issues such as the limits of short-term thinking, changes in trade, evolving technology and the impact of various supply chain disruptions. It is imperative that treasury and finance professionals successfully analyze such anticipated changes to better invest in capabilities that won't be out of date by the time they are in-place. In the face of an ever-evolving technological landscape, Erica Orange shares strategies for challenging core thinking to better identify and translate trends into actionable strategies, while creating new future-proofed opportunities for your organization.
Managing Human Capital Risk from a Generational Perspective
With multiple generations represented in the workplace, HCR management is more complex, requiring integrated strategies to address generational diversity. It is critical that treasury and finance leaders tap into the values and expectations of multiple generations to improve engagement, performance, productivity and develop talent to assume greater leadership responsibilities. This keynote explores how generational identities translate into behaviors as they relate to three organizational factors – relationship to the organization, relationship with authority and work styles, while providing effective strategies for leading generational diverse teams.
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In Conversation with John Cena: Be A Work in Progress
John Cena attributes his success to remaining completely authentic and his never give up attitude, but his path to becoming who he is today was far from easy. From being bullied as a kid to having to sleep in his car, Cena never let his challenges define him. Achieving blockbuster success across multiple industries, Cena shares inspiring stories from his unique journey and how authenticity, positivity, hope and the drive to continually challenge himself has shaped his career.
John will be available for photos in the exhibit hall for a limited time after his keynote!
In his latest book, New York Times bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell, revisits the phenomenon of social epidemics and examines the ways in which we have learned to tinker with and shape the spread of ideas and trends—sometimes with great success, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Today’s epidemics are turbocharged versions of their earlier counterparts, and we are more tempted than ever to try to manipulate tipping points for our own ends. Treasury and finance professionals need to apply the concept of the tipping point – how small changes can make a big impact - to influence their organization’s success or even the world for the better. In this thought-provoking keynote, Gladwell shares the insights needed to meet these challenges head-on in innovative ways.