Treasurers Watching FinTech Innovation To Get An Upgrade

Capital One’s Treasury Management Group is already looking ahead to how corporate treasurers will face the most modern of challenges in 2017. A new survey from the group published earlier this month found that 83 percent of treasurers are gearing up to upgrade existing technologies, or implement entirely new ones, in the coming year.

In response to the survey’s findings, Capital One Executive Vice President and Head of the Treasury Management Product Management Group Patrick Moore said that innovators of the treasury management space need to take “a human-centric design approach to identify pain points that clients are experiencing day to day.”

In addition to those pain points, CFOs and treasurers are facing waves of innovation across the payments and FinTech arenas, and corporate treasury no longer exists independently from these industry-wide shifts.

In offering up his predictions for the corporate treasury space in 2017, Moore told PYMNTS how CFOs and treasurers are driving the strategies of that innovation and how payments innovation overall forces changes in how these professionals approach their jobs.

“Clients are increasingly demanding real-time payments, and the rise of financial supply chain companies is removing the inefficiencies of paper POs and invoices, providing greater transparency into the procure-to-pay cycle and enhancing the client experience,” he stated, adding that competition in the corporate FinTech space is also spiking.

“Technological advancements, including cloud computing, sensors, wireless, APIs, blockchain and mobility — along with the decreased costs of IT processing — are accelerating the pace of tech innovation,” the executive continued. “At the same time, client behaviors and expectations are shifting; clients are demanding easy, intuitive mobile experiences. In addition, regulatory initiatives are driving financial inclusion, competition and infrastructure improvements.”

For Capital One, approaching the future of treasury management means collaboration.

“We’re focused on emerging technologies, harnessing the power of mobile banking and creating lasting partnerships in the FinTech space to radically change the way we serve our clients,” Moore explained, noting that his unit is often collaborating internally as well, working with Capital One’s Enterprise Payments unit “to drive strategic conversations and develop coordinated payments strategies across the company.”

Capital One’s own research shows that corporate treasurers largely have their focus on incoming tools to improve their business processes. With the payments and FinTech sector developing with a pace of innovation never before seen, CFOs and treasurers will have more technologies at their fingertips that will infiltrate those processes and change the game.

“It’s an important and historic time in the payments space,” Moore said, “and there are many developments to be excited about. The conventional theories of what works are being challenged by emerging technologies every day, and a confluence of forces is reshaping the payment industry and influencing the path of transformation.”