The Unicorn Treasurer

Creating a centralised treasury model from scratch isn’t easy. But risk specialist Dominic Lynch, Head of Treasury at Austrian EdTech, GoStudent, since 2022 has done it at this firm and his prior company, Bitpanda, an online broker. He likes growing potential unicorn firms and being “in the middle of everything” as a corporate treasurer sitting at the nexus of finance, planning and operations – all of which will be disrupted by crypto, AI and APIs.

Like many in the industry, Lynch entered the profession “by accident” – albeit a happy one. “I started my career in derivative valuations, risk and hedge accounting consultancy for the Reval Center in Vienna, latterly owned by Ion Group. This then created an opportunity in New York as a financial analyst.”

From there, Lynch’s derivative and hedging experience led him to see the wider portfolio and risk aspects of corporate treasury and banking, not just the cash management element. In fact, he was only really exposed to the bread and butter of treasury’s role when he was approached by Bitpanda to return to Austria at the turn of this decade.

Lynch, who has a “passion for risk”, explains that the Bitpanda investment platform was focused on cryptocurrencies, precious metals, and commission-free stocks in the neo broker field.

As a relatively young company, the brokerage wanted to tap his risk expertise and knowledge of hedging operations to build out its framework for the launch of its fractional stock trading, covering best execution and the buy and sell functions across different liquidity markets. Bitpanda was also seeking support in adhering to the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) and spotting opportunities arising from it.

With this in mind, Lynch initially tackled asset and liability management (ALM) and early-stage risk mitigation procedures and reporting at Bitpanda, before going on to create its treasury function. This is a feat he later recreated at GoStudent, a €3bn business that already has over 11 million families learning on its platform after less than a decade of operation. And there were many lessons learned along the way.

Treasury start-ups

One of those main learnings was the need for adaptability. Implementing Bitpanda’s ‘greenfield site’ treasury, in co-operation with vendors and banks, meant Lynch needed to take a tactical and collaborative approach – in large part to mollify partners’ natural compliance concerns about what was a new field for them. 

“Compliance teams had never worked with a crypto company before. It was still new, even in 2020, so it was important to take time to explain it to banks and vendors,” he explains.

Even the tech side needed collaboration, based on the conservative reluctance towards crypto firms. With APIs used to smooth connectivity, support data exchange mechanisms, and optimise the functionality of Bitpanda’s new TMS and database services. Lynch introduced management dashboards, for example, to aid decision-making on excess liquidity and intraday asset position, while also assisting in funding rounds and other treasury and finance functions.

Thinking outside the box and looking to encourage more young people into the treasury profession, he also built a relationship with the FH University of Wiener Neustadt, while at Bitpanda in Austria. This led to internships and four people joining to expand the business. He remains convinced that encouraging newcomers into the profession is a “crucial obligation” and urges such collaborations. “It’s been rewarding watching their careers develop from afar,” he enthuses.       

Future skills    

The university link-up helped Lynch fill requirements for “staff with data and programming skills” at Bitpanda. Specifically, he was looking for candidates with SQL, Python and R understanding, “or at least a willingness to learn it”. Indeed, he believes these skills will be more in demand in treasury functions across the globe as digital and intelligent treasury tools become commonplace.

“As a profession, treasury needs to be more hands-on in taking data, querying it, and building out reporting and risk services off the back of it,” continues Lynch. “Knowing programming can also reduce problems with messaging and bank communication, in relation to payment files.” 

This is crucial, especially as AI will increasingly automate more payment and cash management tasks in the future. “AI frees up the treasurer’s time to carry out the strategic challenges of risk mitigation, optimisation, core product projects and other vital tasks,” he notes.

Data science needs to be added to treasurers’ CVs as a future skill set, insists Lynch. “Treasurers used to complain about banks being behind the curve in terms of offering data-led services. But now it is treasurers and TMS providers who are on the back foot in properly harnessing data.”

Maximising technology

And as AI-driven automation expands, treasurers will increasingly focus on risk mitigation and data mastery, as AI will enable cash management procedures to be executed with the minimum of human intervention – provided the technology and procedural groundwork has been completed properly.

“AI is definitely going to cause a major wave of change on the treasury sea,” predicts Lynch. “But APIs will do so as well.” APIs will enable easier data connectivity, information exchange, and co-creation of apps and services, allowing financiers to gain better control of their data, payments, and workflows.

“But the elephant in the room is the TMS, which still needs an investment upgrade, in my opinion, to fully harness the AI- and API-led capabilities that are arising as technology advances. Otherwise, banks will take over the role of a TMS provider themselves as they increasingly pivot towards tech and data-led services.”

 OpenAI’s collaboration with Microsoft, and Google’s generative AI chatbot, Bard, have attracted a lot of attention recently. “These and other AI tools will enable us to take a deeper step into the core of treasury, which is, in my opinion, liquidity risk management,” says Lynch. “For instance, I could create an AI model trained on reconciled transactions, understanding the behaviour of each category to give more accurate liquidity forecasting, especially if I closely aligned it with FP&A expectations, user groups and other known expected exposures. It will identify deviations from historical and live datasets to improve the forecasting capabilities.”

The pain points that Lynch believes AI can alleviate are:

• Upstream data changes and conflicts: payment failure identification could be optimised, for example, before it becomes an issue. AML and other types of compliance could also be enhanced by AI and impediments to efficiency more easily removed. 
• Data mastery ease-of-use: AI large language models (LLMs) mean treasurers can easily enter questions against a dataset and receive results and suggestions quickly, without necessarily having to be an expert. Treasurers could therefore interrogate cross-border hedges, liquidity structures, and so on more easily in future.
• Automation: Organising data shared around the finance function via share drives and emails will be the job of AI in future, even if it’s as simple as sharing meeting notes and action points. Efficiencies will accrue. 

“I understand people fear for their jobs with AI,” says Lynch. “But I don’t think treasurers are going to become obsolete anytime soon,” he notes. “It’s like moving from the Walkman to the iPod. We’re just talking about a new tool that can give us more and be our companion to upskill.”

Lynch continues: “The treasury role will become much more data-analytics focused, as banking systems, TMSs, AI tools, and automation coalesce. If you have a rolling hedging strategy, for example, it’ll be a few less clicks to analyse and execute it. You can dive deeper into the data, present the findings with less time consumption which will have a larger impact on the company. The role of a treasurer will become much broader and strategic.” 

Future integration  

Alongside AI, crypto assets, digital certificates, trade finance instruments, and blockchain technology will all contribute towards a merging of capabilities in a digital data-centric future, suggests Lynch.

APIs, which are already delivering new ways to transact and connect cross-border more cheaply than has previously been the case, will also contribute significantly to this future state. Indeed, Lynch says APIs will also deepen customer commitment to a secure ecosystem. This can be easily accessed via their ID-controlled mobile smartphone, with attendant payment functionality and data-tracking capabilities.

“But with crypto there are positives and negatives,” warns Lynch. The underlying blockchain technology can enhance tech and finance integration and data tracking. “This could be a game-changer. We’ve already seen the likes of Ripple, for example, disrupting cross-border payments [in competition with Swift] and crypto coins that can be used in FX transactions, the supply chain and elsewhere [for example the dollar-denominated JPM Coin digital token]. Reconciliation of transactions and event driven settlements will be solved by blockchain.”   

But blockchain can also present a compliance and malfeasance challenge. “Blockchain is still a ‘black box’ in too many instances, where the governmental procedures, clarity, and liabilities of its workings are lacking,” asserts Lynch. “There are current criminal investigations with previously big sector players. The regulation is an issue too.” 

That said, the regulatory challenges of the digital data-centric future that Lynch envisages may be helped by the recent EU Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) rules covering token issuers and digital asset trade exchanges. There is also the imminent EU AI Act – likely to come into effect in 2026 –covering that emerging field. Similar regulations are in the pipeline in other countries, such as the US and the UK, of which treasurers should be aware. 

With central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) ahead, Lynch believes that corporates should feel much more comfortable with crypto-based and other blockchain innovations in the future. These and other emerging technologies and data trends, such as widespread open API usage, will “undoubtedly have an impact on corporate treasury”.

Treasury’s lasting appeal

This constant change within the treasury profession is one of the elements that keeps Lynch hooked. “But what attracted me most to corporate treasury in the first place is that it is the heart that pumps the blood [aka cash] around any organisation,” enthuses Lynch. “The tasks may differ, but the centrality of the role remains. We enable a company to carry out its day-to-day business. A treasurer is in the middle of everything.”

Having now set up the function at GoStudent, Lynch currently focuses on core corporate treasury remits, such as banking relationships, liquidity planning, cash and transaction management, and risk management.

But it’s the variety of the role that appeals to him most. One of his first GoStudent successes was the formation of a new payments infrastructure for tutor and student AP/AR, improving transaction management. He also oversaw the design of product and cross-functional teams around credit control, while working with banks and debt capital markets (DCM) to fund the firm’s acquisitions and growth plans.

Additionally, he set up a centralised group treasury model from scratch at GoStudent. Now he can concentrate on optimising the supporting technology with product management still further and free up data and build out new risk services that will aid the efficient operation of the business. He has already introduced liquidity planning, standardised cash and risk management operations, and brought greater insights to the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function.

“Corporate treasury is an ever-changing environment and it requires the wearing of many hats,” concludes Lynch, citing its variety of strategic and operational duties. “On one side, you are carrying out forward guidance. risk management and working with FP&A and Investor Relations on corporate finance. Then you can be supporting operations, moving cash around the business to ensure the delivery of products or services. Treasury deals with micro and macroeconomic factors. That is why I like it. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”