The Treasury Update Podcast by Strategic Treasurer

Episode 191

Digital Twins, Meta Reality, and Treasury

On this episode of the podcast, Host Craig Jeffery continues his conversation with Royston Da Costa on the latest innovations in technology for treasurers. They discuss the growing online immersive experience through holographic images and the metaverse. Is there a potential impact for treasury with this technology? Is technology moving into treasury faster than before? Listen in to find out more.

Host:

Craig Jeffery, Strategic Treasurer

Craig - Headshot

Speaker:

Royston Da Costa, Ferguson plc

Royston Da Costa - Ferguson PLC
Ferguson plc

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Episode Transcription - Episode #191: Digital Twins, Meta Reality, and Treasury

INTRO  0:06 

Welcome to The Treasury Update Podcast presented by Strategic Treasurer, your source for interesting treasury news, analysis, and insights in your car, at the gym, or wherever you decide to tune in. On this episode of the podcast, host Craig Jeffrey sits down with Royston Acosta, Assistant Group Treasurer at Ferguson plc to discuss a wide range of new technologies that may or will influence finance as we know it. Some of the topics discussed include digital twins, holographic images, and the metaverse. Will treasury be quick to take advantage of these new technologies? Listen in to find out more.

 

Craig Jeffery  0:52 

Royston, good to have you back on The Treasury Update Podcast. Welcome.

 

Royston Da Costa  0:56 

Hey Craig, always a joy and a pleasure for me to speak to you.

 

Craig Jeffery  1:00 

So, when we were talking ahead of time we talked about digital twins, meta reality, and the intersections of treasury. I wanted to start with digital twins. I hadn’t heard that phrasing before. I’d like to hear you describe that. And then, you know, draw that back to how this might relate to treasury at some point.

 

Royston Da Costa  1:20 

Yeah, sure, Craig. I mean, as always, these discussions I like to preempt them by saying clearly, you know, I’m a treasurer. I’m not an IT expert. But I think it’s foolish for anyone today, the treasurer or the CFOs to ignore the fact that technology is a big part of our lives. We live in and we look around it, smartphones, so I don’t need to have explaining more than that to say that there’s a good reason why I believe technology is beginning to become a very large part of not just my life, but I think treasury and I think there’s a lot of benefits that we’re going to be are realizing techonology. Digital twins is another one that I’ve come across, which I think is very exciting in terms of how you could benefit and how we could perhaps get to use it in treasury and certainly from a corporate perspective. So, what’s happening with digital twins, and I’ll go into detail a bit but just in terms of where it’s being used currently. It’s using, effectively what we call the metaverse involving 3D. And this the concepts, but the Dutch are using this technology to replicate a bridge. And what that means is it’s the libraries they have, and they’ve created a digital twin. But it’s not just the fact that you can do this digitally because we know that’s possible. It’s more around that technology that they’ve adopted or implemented to recreate any potentially event or the day-to-day impacts of the life bridge is going through. So that includes traffic, that includes potential accidents, that includes weather events and traffic power failures, that sort of thing. The degree to which this digital twin can then give them the opportunity to plan for any disaster events to me, it’s incredible, because you extrapolate that to from a worldwide event perspective, it could be a tsunami, you can talk about a pandemic, although scientists have historically tried to predict them with some degree of accuracy, so often it’s impossible. It’s been impossible to work out what you do when these events happen. I think they also apply this technology to city which kind of makes sense, right? Because God forbid you ever go through that, Katrina, the Hurricane Katrina…what happened in New Orleans. I mean, these sort of events, potentially, in my view with this technology shouldn’t really catch us by surprise, if it’s employed or deployed correctly. Take into treasury work and this obviously, where it becomes really interesting, now, we are treasurers, a big part of our roles is about managing risk and so often, we realize in data clearly, to help us manage that risk, but with the way technology is going and the way that solutions are being developed, it’s thankfully I think and very exciting, it’s helped to in my view, reduce that uncertainty. You know, when your hedge an exposure, you never get 100%, right, because no one can predict what 100%. I don’t think this technology is necessary going to be 100% but it’s always to me, about reducing the margin of error. So, if you can get it down from 20% to 5%, that’s gonna be a lot better than where you are today. Of course, it’s going to be at some point, I’m sure there will be a scenario where we be almost down to 99% correct accuracy. But digital trends, I think is exciting and powerful, I would say, in what we can expect to see. I would like to think, again, when I talk about technology and some of the developments we’re having today. I never look at something like 10 years, there might be one or two which I haven’t spoken about yet that could be in that timeframe. For me the way that these are evolving so rapidly, I would say five-year timeframe is a long time frame for some of these. I would expect to see it much but some of them already played but in treasury I’ll see it being applied absolutely well before that timeframe is completed.

 

Craig Jeffery  5:42 

Taking the way you were describing the digital twin as it is a digital representative. It’s, it’s another is another way of running scenarios in a digital world like in the case of the bridge instead of on the bridge, it’s in a digital environment to model and to see how things work and go and that seems fascinating. A good use of tech applied in this physical realm. Royston, at work, one of our senior consultants was describing how she’s using these HoloLens and these immersive, I’ll call them, gaming experiences, but there’s the more immersive experiences with games, putting a headset on there’s markers on the floor so you don’t get in trouble and bang yourself up in the real world. One of the things that you and I worked were meeting over a digital meeting we can see each other–we can smile and laugh and interact. This whole move into COVID. This ongoing increase in virtual meetings via Teams or Zoom. I think we’ve continued to see the technology getting better and better. You know what’s next for that? But really what’s going on in the digital world that we need to think about maybe in terms of how it may impact treasury going forward.

 

Royston Da Costa  7:01 

Yeah, I think this is probably again, more on the social side of ESG, isn’t it, because you kind of have to in my mind, always, whenever you look at something like this technology, there’s a there’s a bit of rewind clock. I mean, I don’t want even to go back 20 years because how would be incredible story distance and I’m sure I did this the other day for personal reasons is to kind of compare what sort of technology we were using 20 years ago compared today and it’s just incredibly…it is quite an…. You only have to go back five years in my view and that’s when we looked at the… solution. And generally, the treasury world was still very, say reticent perhaps in embracing particularly cloud-based solutions as perhaps even suspicion or maybe dysfunction, plight but one thing that a pandemic has kind of honed in on and this is a site the point that you made about gaming. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but just in terms of treasury, pandemic brought to life the fact that in the treasury world, I hate to use the expression, but we are in a sense 24/7. Although, thankfully, the reality is we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to work 24/7. But there’s an element of urgency in what we do on a day-to-day basis and with our systems that go down sustained back in time or when we haven’t got access to technology. It’s quite serious, it can be quite damaging some cases. And I think with the pandemic, a lot of companies that weren’t on the cloud or using cloud extensions were caught short and had to effectively equip their start with laptops in their homes, to try and keep business as usual. Those companies like ourselves that have solution we’re very fortunate. I think we were in a big, completely honest pain backs, five, six years where we can …. there was a thought in our mind that we, you know, in a disaster recovery situation, those days, we had a hot site, but most companies so it really wasn’t accessible, fire any sort of thing. And something like that major event, we would go to that off site and we had a process to do that. But the cloud you don’t need to do that cloud, you can pretty much work from anywhere as long as you’ve got access to the internet and Wi Fi and so on so forth. So, we can prepare enough specs so when pandemic kind of really hit, it didn’t affect us almost at all but as much as other companies. Out of that came whole consulting been a long time and review if you like or focus on how do we interact with each other not too interesting, but within the company? The mental health topic came up is a big concern naturally for all companies. I guess where’s … have always been used to the concept of being able to interact virtually might not be as slick as technology we are using today or that thing. I mean, that’s coming across today in 3D, they will still kind of very much in the forerunners for what we’re looking at in terms of the metaverse. And so, I feel like today, a lot of companies of big companies, Microsoft, the Amazons and the Googles and some of the FinTechs are developing this technological simple reason. Zoom to tea is a thing, right, and I think from a meeting perspective, you know, when you are able to actually be virtually in the same room as the person you’re speaking to, there are some inherent benefits to that. No, I mean, that’s the whole I mean, you’d have to wear some sort of virtual augmented reality specs just to help you get into the technology if you like. But the game itself still very important. And I from a personal perspective, I’m based in the US my treasurers are based in the US, I’m basically …  my team is based in the US and when we have our meeting the great team, we are quite interactive, but I can’t take with that. I’m still on the monitor on a on a wall on their wall. So, we need to at some point I had meetings where we interact with someone through a Zoom call, and we can sometimes you forget that person’s even in the meeting. So, with this technology, the using holographic images and metaverse will prove, enhance, that whole meeting strength and it’s just another step for me in going forward for companies to help their teams engage wherever they are in the world.

 

Oh, the other thing I meant to mention is in terms of the technology itself, so I think we mentioned it or discuss it before I was reminded of film believe it or not all came back to the 1999 before Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. So, of course, Disclosure. The main thing from the film was issues of being with that sexual harassment in the workplace, the company that character Michael Douglas workforce or distressed. And they were developing this technology, which actually looks very similar to what I’m seeing today in terms of the metrics. They put on these Virtual Reality specs and in depth go into this kind of like a storage room where all these files are stored and is picking them with these gloves that funny today they’re saying that with this virtual meetings, they can they’ve got technology now where if you’re sort of in a business where you need to feel the product, so to speak, or you need to understand what the product looks like or heavy this connectivity technology, we’re able to do that. So again, you know, it’s moving so quickly and people I think in the industry are beginning to see how this is going to benefit their business. And in terms of corporates like ourselves potentially when we have meetings.

 

Craig Jeffery  13:16 

I like your example there like you’ve taking it from gaming to buying products. Maybe I’ll throw out a couple questions here, maybe more and more, maybe it’s more of a dialogue on it. How is this technology being applied outside of game and you gave you just gave an example. But maybe with a particular focus Royston on what is the potential impact for treasury with this type of technology besides meetings and being able to be more be more immersive in the meeting for example, where might this be applied to treasury? First or second, what are some of the uses here?

 

Royston Da Costa  13:52 

Good. Okay. So, one of the big bedbugs I have in treasury today and still exists is KYC. Know your customer. It’s a real pain on a person in treasury, not the solution. I totally get it. I mean, the … big thing as well. But I see this technology potentially helping tell you the … and to some degree to look at resolving this issue. Because if you can digitally identify the person that you’re looking to validate or to recognize or accept from the counterpart that photograph or require that document, and it all comes down to again, the FinTechs that are involved in the banks that will be involved in what each one’s comfortable with. Accepting in work of validating customer, but it’s that the opportunity that should be looked at quite seriously. And frankly, you know, that could apply to many other areas really to think about it because the main area encompasses the banks because that’s the pain point, we experienced, but it could be also certainly in terms of how you engage with your team members and users within the group. You could probably I mean, again, it kind of depends how creative the technology companies can be and will be and how secure they can make that solution, but you know, all the validating that we currently have to do. Admitted, we’ve come a long way from having to have wet signatures on documents to attacking digitized documents, but we still need someone to digitally sign that document. I’d like to see a day when a person can be identified if you think of what we’re using as a biometric, like, you know, sort of ID, you know, through eye scanner, or thumbprint but even the fact that you’re, you know the technology is beginning to be developed in that direction where you can digitally have that person sitting across the table from you. You have to look at some of the futuristic films again, I’m not you know, some of them created done that have tried to deal with just the reality of what I’m seeing rather than that’s what I mean apart from dysphagia, which I would say 30 years ago, but I could see this huge potential for some of these supplements to help us in treasury and this is just purely my view of where I think there’s this potential scope. I’m not a developer and I’m not bank, but as a customer any customer. I’m saying to myself, well, when we look at for example, Blockchain again, a lot of people are focusing on cryptocurrency and, I get it, cryptocurrencies currencies it’s definitely come a long way since when I first saw it six years ago. But for me, it’s always been a distributed ledger technology behind it. And now that people talk about NFT’s I think that non fungible tokens where you can create a unique footprint and that starting …. I have this fear because I get that you can’t say anything’s 100% If you say that my solutions is 100% secure, guaranteed someone hack into at some point, all I look for and I say to people is where we were five, six years ago, we could be let’s say you only 50% secure, it’s arbitrary I’m just making these numbers up. I like to think that as a whole, the history treasurer to become, let’s say, 70% or group in terms of security on top, see if you can improve them those statistics to become 80% using quantum computing, for example, or even 90%. Who would argue those numbers, because the fact that you’re not 100%? Yes, it’s not brilliant, but it’s got to be a lot better than 50, 60. And so that means increasing the odds until such time word ever happened. I can never say that I can’t say but it’s got to be in the right direction.

 

Craig Jeffery  17:53 

You know, Royston, one of the applications in this meta reality, right, where you leverage technology to look at some universe and I think we were talking about a building or a structure you gave an example of how that allowed the exploring of, I’m not sure if it was the strength or safety or just versus… Maybe you could talk about that. Because so I want to tie that back into or extend that into some of what we talked about on the treasury side.

 

Royston Da Costa  18:26 

Yes, again, this is coming back to some of the technologies of what you described, but it’s more on the augmented reality technology that I’ve heard and seen and to be honest with you, this is not enough top secret a lot of information I have got from either this guy locked up from passing a webinar or believing opportunities. We have an excellent program here in the UK on the BBC. Once a week called, Click, and it’s really half an hour. And they focus on a lot of the upcoming or current technologies. And these are you know what, like by the program doing, going back further back, some people might recognize setting particularly in the UK of protocols tomorrow as well. And it didn’t very much reflect that concept of tomorrow being not now or tomorrow literally, it was always in 10, 15, 20 years away whereas this program, Click I love the way that they actually show you what’s happening today. The examples that are in this one I’m going to share with you in a minute, companies that are actually selling the solution as we speak, and then might be in the book where some companies are working on solutions will be out there 10, 15, 20 years away with about two to three years. So this particular solutions when the company was called XYZ is you represent to say, and basically involves going if you think about building site, for example, building structure, and I would imagine if you’re an engineer, I’m not putting on privacy per se, the ability to go into the site and this is not new I imagine wait for all the specs, and you can see the structure and you can see what’s behind the walls, and it’s all pretty good and you think fantastic, but then there’s the bit that I love about this technology and what this company is doing. You can overlay what the blueprint or the plans that structure should be and what parts should have gone where now the degree of accuracy. This is amazing. It’s not talking about just your steel beams or big kind of wall structures. This is talking down to the rivet and screw the bolt and nut, making sure that you’ve got the exact right part and it’s being put in correctly or installed correctly. To me that’s an extremely powerful technique for business Ferguson and know when plumbing and heating and then I thought to myself, you know, we’ll I’m sure most of your listeners should be aware of a company called IKEA right company and a lot of times that I’ve seen and heard people talk about trying to install one of their products, they’re good. They tend to be I guess, fairly straightforward, but I hear people saying I’ve got these bolts left over when they go, I can get it does become key for them. Right? You never have to have anything left over or at least you know why?

 

Craig Jeffery  21:27 

You wonder if it’s just like they gave extra pieces or you’re missing something you’re gonna have a catastrophic failure. But it’s yeah, it’s like those there’s like 9 million parts it’s almost like here are the raw materials for this cabinetry you’re gonna make they’re great but you have to follow those parts by…

 

Royston Da Costa  21:45 

And the series side to that Craig is I can imagine be larger if you can a bridge or some even airplane for example, is as such a, you know, sort of highway structures and if you can’t get right then you have to make sure that every part is correctly installed and this the right part. So, I can see the signal I think extremely useful in this type of industry, but from a training perspective, I just began to wonder whether what could not be adopted in treasury when you’re looking at for example, hedging. You know, you have your set of rules, you’re hedging rules, and you kind of mark them up, put them into place, but the committee the degree which you need to match the aspects of not so useful in that particular example, but the technology behind it should be named should be able to give you all a similar result, right? Because you’re looking at what we put in place. What should have been based on what we actually put in place and making sure they all match up correctly. Equally, I can imagine you do that your bank structure or bank accounts, wherever you’ve got some sort of structured data, whether it’s KYC, the security, you want to make sure that what you put in place matches up to what you should have done or what should have been placed. It’s just getting those types of technologies to really enhance the environment we work in from a treasury perspective.

 

Craig Jeffery  23:12 

Hedging is greatly explored the exposures, how they work, the policies, and as you talked about banking structure, there might be a security overlay to that like you have a policy. Well, is it really in place at the account level or transaction level controls? Are they are they there and signers, I can see how that could go on and on.

 

Royston Da Costa  23:33 

Just on a creative factor, just that I’ve seen a solution, it’s not new and it’s not new technology, but three, four years. ago, a far eastern bank will piloting cash pooling solution and they wanted me to look at it for me in person then. It was quite innovative at the time I didn’t he says you need to kind of think of what we’ve just discussed, or what was nice or neat about solution is the fact that they use visual imaging in terms of the global map. And you put in a copy your data in there, so you have accounts all around the world and see where your cash is visually, might seem very straightforward, simple, and it is. But if you’re looking at something like this technology where you want to make sure that if you’ve got rules or policies about what cash we had, where I could see using the specs in this case, even though it might seem a bit odd because your face here, or I’ll say inspect, like you’ve got the rules, the tiny things, say let’s go out and say you’ve got the UK, you have a limit of no more than 20 million. Now I’m picking my myself, solutions can do this themselves by a distinct virtual interaction perspective. It’s giving everything at one in one group. It’s all visual and it’s kind of more I feel it’s more powerful.

 

Craig Jeffery  24:52 

When you think about that or sometimes when I’m thinking about how we view things. You’re going somewhere you plug something into your phone, or we used to have GPS is that we’re dedicated to that. But now our phones tell us that the turn by turn and optimizing the routing is great. I want to know the macro view. Where am I going? What’s the general route? Not two turns in front of me, that’s it, like and that’s like, I don’t want to be trapped because what if the power goes out? You lose cell signal or macro and micro it’s like there’s the building like you said with your HoloLens or whatever you go down to the bolt to see what it is there’s two sides. Now, you talked about the speed of technology adoption a couple times and how rapidly things are moving out. Some things are in place, and they can, I guess be ported over to treasury and wanted to have you talk a little bit more about how quickly will some of this technology be adopted. How should we think about the speed of technology and what what’s been changing with regard to speed or other areas.

 

Royston Da Costa  25:58 

This is a kind of a bittersweet pill to swallow or into discuss and I’ll tell you why. Because on one hand, it’s extremely exciting when we think about what we have and we could experience further down the road because let’s be honest, I mean, no one wants to implement anything that’s going to make the life more miserable. And it’s going to enhance our lives. I mean, that’s what most businesses I think are trying to do, right in terms of the in text. I think and I will say that, you know, firstly, we’re not a technology business, right. But clearly, technology is a big part of what we use to service our customers and sell our product. But I can imagine if you’re working for technology can say wow, life must be pretty challenging because one of the things apart from working from an ordinary I call it ordinary corporate, or you cannot afford to do I think regardless which company you work for, is ignore what we see happening around you. Now yes, you have to look at some of the there are, shall I say, all the companies have gone past because they refuse technology at the right intervals and was accelerated great speed that this model wasn’t sustainable. My view in terms of what we see today, around us and also with treasury, the big game changing for sure are the FinTech’s. I think the look at the discussion and debate around FinTech’s going back into three or four years. There was a lot of concern that FinTech companies shot banks and be honest, I never saw that. I always believe that banks in terms of treasury, at least, and society for that matter have a vital role to play. In fact, everything even with our IT, department and the way they’ve had to evolve, and people and you have to recognize that although I still believe they have a primary function just like treasurers have a primary function. Technology is here to facilitate and to improve and just now my personal view is that banks should begin to begin to see that. And that to me, where it’s happening is a huge game changer. For the simple reason that if you look at for example, what one of the examples I could give you well, and when the pandemic kinda hit us have that point. Most banks will not accept digital documents and literally overnight they did. Not a number of discussions the parties had around, sometimes maybe not having the infrastructure or having legacy system and all that good stuff. With, frankly, even Ferguson have had challenges in part and the systems that we used, but you can’t afford to do it forever. The way it was great, you know, if you don’t upgrade you, incrementally have the right technology, and you’re gonna get to succeed succeeded, because you want to connect towards the face of your customers. Customers expect that to pay their suppliers online. It’s going to show very important when we look at a project that became that said is the FinTechs close to the banks and banks partnering FinTech’s I think tastic nice to have because the simple reason that banks have the financial clouds they also have in my view the infrastructure to fully vet these FinTechs that they will partner with corporates like us, on the other hand, we are not only adopted, you’ve always made that very clear. We like to think workplace technology solutions, but we don’t have infrastructure where we get to look at all the latest solutions. And say, right, I’m talking about with trade. This is a big question. And coming to us and saying this tax solution or not. I think we’re going to be much more effective. We went from you can find it to be our year sort of backing that solution. And then overlay on top of that aseptically syntax regression. So, one example is not taking loans treasury, but just to give you a sense of the speed at which this project evolving. One of the companies I’ve seen recently presented on a regular webinar hosted by his actual which is a car that converts into helicopter. I believe that we took price can be quite difficult at $800,000. And $800,000 in the basement, just give you a context, but it does whether it be in production. It’s looking at three four years. A car that converts into a helicopter it say China and India probably the first two countries to kind of implement this type vehicle but I can just imagine four years’ time to find this type of path certain parts of the getting lucky and only in the US in Arizona have got autonomous vehicles in Arizona. But not for the states and I can see why. But you can see that this type of technology will begin to, once the regulation in each of these countries has to be looked at has worked, but you can always step over and distant time will be something of the past. Yeah, speed and safety. I agree. But yeah, this this will be worked out at the time. But think three, four years’ time somewhere in the world I won’t be driving a car which has been converted to a helicopter, but let’s be also clear in terms of what I understand how to fly. She’d have to have some sort of qualification today to see any kind of fly a helicopter, but I think that’s all the heavy, heavy meddling. Still and then they you know, you trust the person that picks you up and have a license and myself and the other sort of like you do, you have to have been credentials to do anything. So anyway, it turns timeframe. Time frame short in short from this light on set this urgency sometimes and what I see today to think, well, we can’t afford to just assume that this is not going to happen, or it doesn’t affect me. And we’ll just wait for five or six years when everyone else is using it. We will find that particularly the banks…. There are customers out there that are probably already adopting something, or they want a competitive edge and play that’s a be a major catalyst.

 

Craig Jeffery   

Right so I’ve been looking forward to a car that can also drive on the water. Now I can see thinking about the helicopter side too, but on the speed and change in attitudes, blockchain has been in the news and you know the interesting story that you were telling me the other day, it’s wonderful to get finished with how that has changed, you know, fairly recent times.

 

Royston Da Costa 

That’s a good point actually. No, so it’s kind of accentuates the point that we’re making so far. So, three years ago, I attended the FP conference, thinking might be in Chicago and met with one of our venture partners say, FinTech or one of our vendors who have a very interesting blockchain solution with I thought the pipe race or Banking Finance, my expenses unfortunately not as impressive because the bank is … Now it is interesting to look back, part of reason could have been that they didn’t see this type of technology as being anything that will be resolvable will be stable. But I also thought there was an element of where maybe they felt that the FinTech was perhaps too small, maybe I’ve heard of for whatever reason, well, I guess when we look in Fintech, we sometimes say, well, you know, be competitive to supplement ERP solution provider. There’s no comparison. There is so small to me, the TMS world, lo and behold, this same bank today is now investing over $10 billion dollars. That’s $10 billion in technology. And I love the fact that they are fully engaged, they are not engaged. They’re actively evolving and partnering with FinTechs and also reaching out to their customers they’re interested in in looking at these very interesting solution very radical, because although we all work in Treasury, I get that I find that we are becoming kind of increasingly major stakeholders within our company. And I’ve heard this mentioned before, it’s also the economic crisis 2008, treasurers have become major stakeholders on … and so on and so forth. I think technology angles bring us even more so into play with other companies, for example, supply chain, tax, their solutions in IT without technology IT and one thing that I do want to share with you, Craig, is that and this probably might be a different specialty. But the relationship with IT, in my experience, not just at Ferguson, but generally, hasn’t been as positive as I like the thought of going back in my belly for years expenses but what I’m really pleased to say is today, our IT CSO chief information security officer actually reaches out to us to me and treasury to engage with me “Say what are you hearing about in the technology world?” Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about I’m doing his job fair because I’m not qualified and we’re not talking about security. I’m talking about applications that are coming across my desk because the banks that are involved with the FinTechs are involved with and information they’re sharing with somebody and they’re just going to, at the end of the day, the Treasury, we work for a company that’s obviously looking succeed in the business that we’re in. So, you can even think in terms of, let’s say, mergers and acquisitions, you know, yes, you can see the value, directly treasury, but quite often is a commercial aspect to that production, which treasures have often been required to proceed to add the expertise. And so, you can see that I think in great form, why and how it’s so important that the goals that we have in the way that that goal evolving and developing, we are able to connect an I tool to use that expression where this is where the silos can be defined in companies. Those silos are rapidly being broken down for this very reason that due to many circumstances that happened in the last 10 years. So I think in particular technologies have been catalysts. And it’s not just a catalyst is almost like a turbo booster of burst and various developments that are happening. It’s great to see today that banks are beginning to get involved, get engaged, and with their … saying that backup. It’s a good win-win situation from a corporate’s perspective, right. So yeah, I’m looking forward to hopefully next time we speak, and I don’t expect I’ll be too long because you know, that’s talking about the speed of how some of these things evolve. I’m pretty certain there’ll be who have a different discussion. Probably even a:  “Wow, that’s already happened. We’re here now.”.

 

Craig Jeffery  

Royston, thank you so much.

 

OUTRO  18:53

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This survey, underwritten by Deluxe, looks at various practices and plans for modernizing and automating AP and AR processes. The influence of recent disruptions, calibration of various pain points that drive change, and other motivators to upgrade AP and AR processes will be examined.

Episode 184 - Treasury Update Podcast
2022 Outlook Series: Quantum Computing

On this episode of the 2022 Outlook series, Host Craig Jeffery joins Royston Da Costa, Assistant Group Treasurer at Ferguson plc, to discuss the outlook of quantum computing. They explore this developing technology, discuss how it’s relevant to finance and treasury, reveal which companies are using it now and its impact on cybersecurity.