It was an enormous pleasure to facilitate a truly interesting discussion at the last session of the ACT conference 2025. As someone had pointed out to me the night before, at the excellent new-style networking event, anyone attending a roundtable at 2.30 on the last afternoon either really wants to join the discussion... or had booked the wrong train. I’m pleased to say from the engagement in the room that it was certainly the former that prevailed.
The session was entitled The Intersection of Strategic Treasury Planning and Technology and the key theme is that, as treasurers, we are largely unsupported by any form of technology solution in the critical planning role that we perform over the three- to five-year time horizon. A show of hands at the start of the session revealed that all of the treasurers in the room currently use Excel for this business-critical function.
With the support of Ian Chisholm, a former ACT president who spoke to us about his experiences handling the £70bn Shell/BG M&A deal in Excel, the ever-ebullient ACT council member Peter Matza, ACT policy and technical associate director James Winterton and representatives from companies such as Shell and Compass in the room, there was quickly a lively debate.
Some of the issues covered were the pain of constant reforecasting and the need to define variance analysis across multiple scenarios, the question of what actually strategic treasury means, and the danger of assumption buried within models and often easily overlooked. It became clear that as a profession we all face the same challenges in this area. The word “nirvana” was mentioned wistfully several times.
So where does technology serve us in this area? Unfortunately, provision in this area is non-existent and to date all the tech focus has been around short-term cash management, control and forecasting. The nirvana is the provision of a model that locks down the process, creating automation in a controlled environment, while offering flexible scenario and variance analysis and it should be achievable in this day and age. Two routes to this solution were discussed: the traditional software platform route, and now of course generative AI.
James Kelly from Your Treasury contributed a slide explaining how AI now provides a genuine answer to this challenge, coding the solution for you with the right prompts. But how many of us would take the leap with AI if a more “reassuring” traditional software product were available?
There was genuine consensus that the profession could spend more time optimising the funding plan, balancing risk with interest cost and contributing more meaningfully towards the overall business strategy, if we could free up time, resource and reduce potential error count by moving away from Excel in this area.
The session finished with a vision of the treasury of the future. Picture a treasurer, a dog and a computer. The computer does all the work. The treasurer is reading the paper. And the dog? The dog is there to stop the treasurer touching the computer!
Ben Walters FCT, who facilitated the session at the ACT annual conference 2025, has many years working in the field of treasury strategy. He would like to thank Ian Chisholm and James Winterton for their contributions to making the session a success. If you would like to follow up with any points in this area, please get in touch with Ben Walters on LinkedIn.