What’s Happening at AFP 2024?

Announcer  00:05

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.

Jonathan Jeffery  00:19

AFP 2024 is underway at the time of this release. We’re recording this the week before. Maybe you’re listening to it after you got back. Today, I wanted to go through some of the key insights from AFP in previous years, what Craig expects to see this year, and a few other points. Joining me today is Craig Jeffery, managing partner of Strategic Treasurer. Welcome to the Treasury Update Podcast, Craig.

Craig Jeffery  00:41

I’m glad to be here. Jon.

Jonathan Jeffery  00:43

So you’ve gone to AFP for how many years now?

Craig Jeffery  00:46

I don’t know how many years I’ve been to the AFP. I’ve been to quite a few.

Jonathan Jeffery  00:49

So you’ve been as an attendee, a practitioner, and an exhibitor. Throughout the years, what have you seen help people be effective at AFP conferences? What should they know?

Craig Jeffery  01:00

Well, I think the key thing is, you want to network, you want to develop relationships as part of networking that you can build, not only year to year at the event, but maintain connections throughout the year, as well as get educated. Get educated by talking to different exhibitors in the exhibit hall and going to the educational sessions. These are vital. The challenge is, if you’re an introvert, all of a sudden it’s just so many people for so much time. But you got to push through those days to engage and connect with people.

Jonathan Jeffery  01:31

Yeah, there’s no rest at the AFP.

Craig Jeffery  01:33

No, there isn’t. There is, there’s not much time for sleeping at the AFP.

Jonathan Jeffery  01:38

Yeah, long, long days. Last year, we did a podcast before 2023 AFP.  One of the things that you said in that podcast was that we are at the very beginning of payment growth, and you were referring to payment hubs and a couple other things. How do you see that this year? Have we moved on from the beginning of it? Are we still in those beginning stages?

Craig Jeffery  01:53

We’re still we have a lot of runway ahead. We have at least nine years, maybe 10 years, of adopting more payment hubs and seeing payment growth happen from from different areas. So it’s it’s not super rapid. We’re still at the beginning stages, or may not be exactly the beginning. A couple other themes that seem to be emergent and happening are fraud continues. Same thing with the focus on forecasting. Those are always one and two on people’s list, but we see quite a bit more on artificial intelligence. Discussions around, around how are we preparing for that? How are we using it? How will we use it? And then payment security. There’s been a massive uptake on people concerned about, how do I protect payments after years and years and years of increasing losses and increasing sophistication of criminals? So I know that’s a lot of different topics, but those are things that we’ve been talking about people have been talking about to us, and we expect to have conversations at the AFP on those topics.

Jonathan Jeffery  03:01

Yeah, more on that fraud. There’s been a couple of big fraud cases this year, and you just mentioned payment security being a big hot item for companies. Do you think that will be one of the larger topics this year, or just kind of on the side.

Craig Jeffery  03:15

It’ll have to be one of the larger topics. It’s been one of the major topics. Nothing will diminish that this year, probably next year. We’re in that zone of payment fraud and concerns about security. There’s quite a few sessions you can see. There’s a number of vendors exhibiting on the floor. There’s training. We’d love to talk to people about that too.

Jonathan Jeffery  03:37

What do you think will be bigger: payment growth, fraud, AI, forecasting, payment security, or something else?

Craig Jeffery  03:43

Fraud, and forecasting to be number one and number two. I’m not sure that’s the exact order. Fraud will be a bigger issue. People want to talk about fraud. What you do to solve fraud is have better security. And payment security is one of the vital areas for that. But people flock to fraud sessions and content. They love hearing about cases. They’re a little less vigorous and energetic about hearing about how to protect yourself from that. We’ll see if you’re right on that. As a company, what do you gain from AFP? As an exhibitor for us, it gives us lots of opportunities to talk with our partners, our corporate client partners, to talk about what they’re doing, engage with existing customers, to talk to prospects, figure out what’s going on, what are their plans to re-engage and advance those conversations. So this is a great time to talk and catch up with many people all at once. On the vendor side, we do a lot of work with different banks and different fintechs, and there’s a whole mass of them there. We get to catch up with a lot of them. What are they doing? What are they planning on seeing? There’s usually a link to content, thought leadership that we create and work and partner with them. Everything, everywhere, from research to executive guides and other content that help engage the market in a way that’s educational, informative, and then the benefit of having engaged conversations. That is, you’re there when they need something.

Jonathan Jeffery  05:14

So where can people find us on the exhibit floor?

Craig Jeffery  05:16

So if you go to the exhibit hall on the floor, we’re in Booth 609. That may not make any sense to people, just to think about numbers, but the numbering goes from left to right in terms of columns. And so we’re the sixth row over. We’re on the middle aisle, the aisle where AFP is. So on the left side, six row, 609 we have a 30′ by 30′ booth on the main aisle. I’ll just say I’m not sure where it is actually on the from directional standpoint, but south, as you look at the map on the bottom side of that map, on the center aisle.  We have plenty of places to catch up in our booth. We have Ky will probably tell you all about some of the prizes and games we have to capture information and make it fun to get a useful giveaway. And there’s some fun stuff. Some things focused on payment security, bank fee management, then some of the other services that we have.

Jonathan Jeffery  06:11

Let’s hear from Ky on more about what’s going on in the booth. Ky, welcome back to the Treasury Update Podcast.

Ky Casanova  06:17

Thanks for having me, Jon. I do this once a year.

Jonathan Jeffery  06:20

Yeah, once a year against your will, before we get into what’s going on this year. Last year, we had some hiccups with the game. Do you want to describe it?

Ky Casanova  06:29

We had a little delay in shipping. The item I was waiting for was delivered a week after AFP, even though I had ordered it in April, so it has arrived 50 weeks early for this year’s conference. So we will be bringing a lotto machine to our booth this year.

Jonathan Jeffery  06:46

Yeah. So for anyone that wasn’t in the booth last year, we ended up changing the game from the lotto machine into.

Ky Casanova  06:54

Like a coin capsule machine like you that you remember from a kid that used to spit out a prize in a little two piece capsule, so, but this year, we’ve got the real machine. There’s a bunch of foam balls in the lotto machine. We started off with ping pong balls, and then we realized that the lotto machine is quite loud, so we kind of had to change plans a little bit, and we found foam balls at work. So the lotto machine will be filled with foam balls. People will reach in and grab a ball at random as it’s blowing around. And there’s special prizes on those. We’re giving away gift cards, and then also a couple of lucky winners will walk away with Bose earbuds.

Jonathan Jeffery  07:32

That’ll be a pretty cool prize. What else in the booth can people come and see?

Ky Casanova  07:37

So we’re gonna have our business development team there and our senior consultants that’ll be there to answer any questions for you. We’ve got a brand new hot off the press, 2024 Analyst Report, great report this year.  Eighteen vendors in the analyst report covering the latest in treasury tech. We’re going to heavily be promoting a upcoming webinar on bank fee management and kind of being in the dark. So we got some special prizes around that too, if you stop by, we’ll be shining a light on bank fees.

Jonathan Jeffery  08:07

Cool.

Ky Casanova  08:07

That’s a little hint.

Jonathan Jeffery  08:09

Well, you sound like you’re pretty excited for AFP.

Ky Casanova  08:11

I’m ready. Let’s do this Nashville. Here we come.

Jonathan Jeffery  08:15

Craig, do you have any final thoughts?

Craig Jeffery  08:17

if you’re at the AFP and you’ll listen to this now. Come see us at both 609. If you’re not, please contact us to have conversations. We have a lot of people who are happy to catch up on what’s going on. If there’s anything that we can work on together now or sometime down the road, would love to just catch up so that we’re ready to support you when you might need it. You can see that information in the show notes.

Jonathan Jeffery  08:39

And if you’ve listened to this while you’re at the AFP and you come talk to Craig, tell him you listen to this Monday’s episode, that will bring him a lot of joy. Thanks for listening.

Craig Jeffery  08:48

Thanks for bringing me joy.

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