Transformative Innovation: A Treasurer’s Guide

Innovation is not about inventing new for the sake of it; it is about combining existing ideas to create solutions that add real value. How those solutions will be adopted in the future, however, is anyone’s guess and may be more about opening the mind to the possibilities.

When innovations are introduced, it isn’t always clear what the impact will be and how they will evolve. Take the smartphone, or QR codes, and the myriad applications that have mushroomed since they were first launched.

Now we stand at the beginning of a similar journey with realtime payments, APIs, generative AI, and other technologies. It is exciting to envision how they will be adapted, and what they will eventually look like.

Anticipating the final outcome is a bit like origami, where a single sheet of paper can be transformed in multiple ways; the art of the possible is really only limited by one’s imagination.

Throughout their careers, treasurers will take many paths and will be expected to handle vastly different situations. Throughout, they must have a growth mindset and be adaptable. This guide details how these qualities have been demonstrated by how treasurers, and their banking partners, responded to the impact of Brexit, for example. Likewise, flexibility has been a feature
of liquidity management structures to make them resilient in a macro environment that has been, and still is, full of uncertainty. These ideas are explored in greater detail in this insightful guide.

This guide features many case studies that demonstrate how innovative thinking is being applied to treasury, and the tools that are being implemented, such as a card-acquiring solution or an AR facility.

The guide also highlights the issues that were discussed in the Treasury Lab by 60 leading industry professionals, who shared their insights on what transformative innovation means to them, and comment on how it is currently unfolding in the world of treasury.