4 Treasury Challenges – 4 Artificial Intelligence Solutions
Nikolai Diekert is a Director of Product Management at Coupa Treasury. A certified corporate treasurer, he spent nearly five years at BELLIN in presales and then in product management before joining Coupa. He designs board games (Plutocracy and €uro Crisis) in his free time and holds a degree in mathematics.
Does artificial intelligence add value to corporate treasury? Finance professionals are on the fence. Technology for technology’s sake? A threat to treasurers’ livelihoods? Or tremendous potential to finally focus on what really matters?
What unites all factions is a desire to resolve certain challenges that hold them back. No matter which side of the fence you’re on – if these are also your challenges, it is worth taking a closer look at the options. We have pitted 4 main challenges against 4 artificial intelligence solutions.
1 Challenge: time-consuming routine tasks
Much of a corporate treasurer’s work life is routine. They need to reconcile planned cash flows and transactions, manage cash pools, match deals and more on a daily basis. This is time-consuming and keeps treasurers from more strategic responsibilities.
Can AI solve this challenge?
By leveraging machine learning, AI can perform such tasks with greater speed and accuracy than any human ever could. It makes the explicit instructions redundant that treasury management systems today still rely on. As long as providers can guarantee transparent processes, AI is ideally suited to tasks that require minimal decision-making and human intervention.
2 Challenge: unreliable and outdated forecasts
Treasurers struggle to produce the accurate and real-time cash flow forecasts they need to ensure liquidity and guide their businesses on strategic decisions. Hand-crafted spreadsheets are notoriously unreliable and quickly outdated, and the amount of data a non-AI enabled treasury management system can process is limited.
Can AI solve this challenge?
AI can process much larger sets of data. This enables it to register hard-to-spot patterns and provide a consolidated view that would be too time-consuming for any human analyst to produce. However, even AI is not yet able to predict long-term factors and poor data quality can prevent viable results.
3 Challenge: making the right decisions
Treasurers influence vital company decisions, such as investments, financing or even mergers and acquisitions. But too often, the picture they base their recommendations on is incomplete, and decisions are made with unreliable and outdated data as guidance.
Can AI solve this challenge?
AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data and draw conclusions from it helps treasurers establish a sound footing for any guidance they provide. That said, considering as many scenarios and angles as possible in a decision is not the same as actually making the decision. Experience and intrinsic knowledge should not be neglected, as they’re absolutely necessary to making an informed decision.
4 Challenge: falling victim to cyber fraud
Companies worldwide of all shapes and sizes lose millions to cyber fraud every year. It is one of the most common points of attack and something that must be balanced against with every new digital tool that is introduced.
Can AI solve this challenge?
AI is a powerful tool in fraud prevention and reduces false positives, identifies fraud cases and helps prevent attacks. Built around trend-based insights, AI responds to variances in data and behavior, even in cases where traditional, rules-based logic and models fail. However, this should not come at the expense of other basic fraud prevention measures and processes.
Shaping the future of AI in treasury
Treasurers are right to hope for AI support for some of their main challenges. They’re also right to remain vigilant and to question the way in which this technology is introduced. The way forward is to become informed and to actively engage in the process. Together, we can all work towards an AI-enabled treasury that elevates the discipline, rather than replace it.
Coupa Treasury empowers treasurers to help shape their own future. The more you know, the better you can prepare and make the most of your options. Learn more about the potential, limitations and opportunities of AI in treasury – so you can act, rather than react.
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