The ACT Annual Conference took place in Liverpool on 10-11 May, bringing the treasury community together for this highlight of the treasury calendar for the first time since 2019. Themed to ‘The Year of the Treasury Tiger’ the event focused on Trust, Innovation, Growth, Excellence and Resilience. Sponsored by HSBC and NatWest, the Annual Conference welcomed over 900 delegates from 19 countries as well as 67 sponsors and exhibitors. More than 90 speakers took part in sessions over two days.
“The ACT has had another big year, and it remains at the heart of the profession. And our priority will always be you, the community. And we appreciate the treasury tigers: they’re trusted, innovative, focused on growth and excellence and have shown themselves to be hugely resilient, particularly in the past two years.”
“Simple rules and principles of leadership do not necessarily serve one well in complex situations, where there are no right answers, but limited choices between the least wrong ones. So, clarity of thought, adaptability and vision exemplify the strategic leader as much as resolution and determination. And that includes the ability to live with ambiguity and have the capacity to take calculated risk for the longer term and the greater benefit.”
“The pace of economic change across a whole range of sectors is only increasing; and that means we’re living in an age of uncertainty. There was always going to be a cost-of-living crisis in the UK because our productivity is too low to maintain our living standards, and we depend on the rest of the world for our exports. And remember: real income growth in the past decade has been the lowest since Napoleonic times.”
“It's going to be a difficult year ahead: we’re going to have falling living standards, rising interest rates, rising inflation, a bursting of the housing bubble. But I don’t think we’re looking at a major recession.”
“The creation of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) is the necessary step for the tokenisation and settlement of those assets. As a corporation, if you get involved with a digital asset, being aware of the underlying settlement mechanism is very important. If that happens to be a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum, you want to be cognisant that you are in some way exposed to that as an asset itself. And that is the beauty of the stablecoin or CBDCs – it becomes much more accessible when you think about the settlement rails for tokenised assets.”
“We’re seeing more interest from treasury management systems and enterprise resource planning providers who are increasingly approaching us, interested in integrating application programming interfaces and other open banking components. But it’s very much a changing landscape; if there’s more demand from corporate treasurers for these kinds of the solutions, then we’ll see more interest from the platforms to make their solutions easier to use. The platforms are opening up to the fact that customers have signed up to services and they want them to be easy to use.”
“This is a candidate-led market. Lots of people have moved and that’s left us with a smaller pool of candidates who are open to making a move. Added to that, we’ve got a tier of treasury professionals that are feeling really upskilled at the moment – they’ve crammed into two years what would normally take five or six years to acquire. So that’s definitely got people thinking about the next step in their careers.”
Christian Doherty is a freelance journalist and former editor of The Treasurer The 2023 ACT Annual Conference will be held on 16-17 May 2023 in Newport, Wales, UK and you can register your interest to attend here: https://www.treasurers.org/events/conferences/annual-conference-23
