35CORPORATE TREASURY SUPPLEMENT 2020 |^ OPEN BANKING
36
The Future of
Open Banking40
Smart Finance42
Managing
Crypto Cash48
Data Science &
Technology
52
KYCSmart Survival
Tools For
The Digital Age
T
he Covid-19 pandemic has brought unaccustomed prominence to the role of corporate
treasury as businesses large and small across all industry sectors lean on cash-flow man-
agement and control, funding and risk management to keep on top of the liquidity issues
the Covid-19 crisis is exacerbating.
Cash is king is the watchword of the pandemic, repeated by CEOs, CFOs and treasurers sud-
denly confronting the reality that cash flow is the lifeblood of business. To explore how banks and
their clients are confronting the challenge and its effect on payments, securities, cash management
and trade, we are combining our annual Treasury Services Supplement with what would have been
our preview of the Sibos conference.
The theme of this year’s Sibos, to be held online October 5-8, is “Driving the Evolution of Smart
Finance”: timely for both financial institutions and corporate treasuries as the global health crisis
and economic downturn accelerate their shift to digital.
Our supplement looks at the rise of smart finance and the baby steps that banks are taking into
cryptocurrencies. Here also are the first-hand experiences of a CFO and an assistant treasurer
forced to make changes as a result of the pandemic, insights into the progress of open banking
and how it is transforming into open finance, and the role of APIs in opening data for business to
improve pricing and other decision-making analytics.
We take a look at machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models and how they can
leverage this data to learn, evolve, help operate a tighter feedback loop and make decisions on
these subjects at a faster pace.
“The next step,” says Sonny Singh, senior vice president and general manager of the Financial
Services Global Business Unit at Oracle, “will be how technology such as AI and ML can help
customers come up with the most optimal balance sheet: ensuring an organization is taking the
least risk, unlocking trapped capital through better analytics and then deploying this capital in the
areas that generate the highest margins for the bank.”
ML and AI open up new vistas for both banks, most of which are still running on systems that
are older than the people running them, and corporate treasuries, which have been rather inward
looking. If the pandemic has a silver lining, it’s that smart, automated tools and technologies that
once appeared futuristic have revealed themselves as survival tools, necessary for weathering the
current crisis as well as going forward.—Gilly Wright