NextGen Treasury: Your Digital Roadmap

[VIDEO 1 TRANSCRIPT] What are some practical considerations for reaching your digitization goals?

Robert Lowther:

Maybe just to set the stage, obviously, if you go back five years treasury, as a function, it was being disrupted. There was plenty of new technology coming into the market. This just isn't for professional services. This is really across all industries. As a firm, we've been growing quite quickly over that period of time. The way we first looked at it from an evaluation perspective was, how do we offset some of these higher transaction volumes?

There's throwing more people at the problem, and then there's looking for tools and technology that can help us manage that challenge. What we did is our team was reviewing what tools and technology made sense for us. Part of the conversation of when we went to BMO was what does BMO actually have available? What new tools are they rolling out? MNP, as I've mentioned, we pride ourselves on innovation. We want to be an early adopter in some of these technologies. That's how we approached the conversation with BMO around the treasury piece.

For the people on this call, part of the evaluation is dependent on what type of business you're in. It's going to be dependent on what resources you have available. A large business is going to have different levels of resources than a small business. Finding the right solution is obviously going to be critical in evaluating what the right setup is. From a leadership perspective, we looked at a couple of different things. I've mentioned supporting the client. That's both internal and external. Then as a finance team in general, accuracy is going to be critical. That's really step one, accuracy, you don't compromise on.

Excellence is something that we talk about as a finance team as well and coming and doing our best work every day, finding new ways to approach problems, and raising issues when you see them. The innovation of our financial processes, again, tying in to some of the specifics I'll go into later on in this conversation. Getting buy-in from the team, it really wasn't a challenge at all. When I think about what our team brought forward, this is really an initiative that was driven by our team and it started from some of the ideas that they brought forward. They've been the driver of the changes. It not only helps the business, but it helps them in their day-to-day work and really the business reasons for these changes is what drove the decision-making process.

[VIDEO 2 TRANSCRIPT] What are some obstacles you should prepare for? 

Robert Lowther:

We would have a segment of our vendors and clients that are 100% on board with moving to electronic payments or would have already been using them, but convincing some of our other vendors and clients to move to different forms of electronic payment was also a challenge.

I think the way we overcame some of those conversations was just talking through some of the benefits that they were going to see. When we think of our vendors, for example, on the electronic payment side, the payment comes through in a more timely manner. You're not waiting around for that check to be delivered in the mail and going to stand in a bank line and deposit those checks. On the client side, obviously, we have more flexibility in that conversation, but we had a lot of successes there too. The clients definitely bought in to the move to the electronic payments.

A few of the other items, I would say just making sure that these new tools integrated with our existing platform whether it's our ERP system or our banking system. We wanted tools that were easy to integrate and that we weren't having to create workarounds in that respect. Then the last piece was training. Our finance team is used to the existing platforms that we have.

Our finance team was relatively easy to train because they're in these tools every day. Where I would say there was a larger challenge in that respect was the people that are only in the system maybe once a month, mainly the approvers that go in and they're trying to assess what the transaction is, what's been process, maybe look at the backup to that transaction and going in and approving it. I would say that the training was a little bit of a hurdle to overcome as well, but after a few months, it was dealt with.

[VIDEO 3 TRANSCRIPT] What’s on MNP’s digital roadmap?

Robert Lowther:

What I can say is, when I think about the entire treasury ecosystem and our finance where it lies within our finance ecosystem, we’ve transitioned to what I would say is a nearly full digital treasury function. I think we still have some work to do. Our real focus has been on the transactional piece. How do we eliminate a lot of that transactional elements and allow our systems and tools to manage those for us? Where we continue to look for ways to improve is really on the longer-term planning pieces of our cash flows.

Some of the other pieces on the receivable side, again, our technology and finance team have worked together with BMO as well, setting up scripts for some of the client deposits that we see, aligning those with our in-house management system. What that means essentially is that when a deposit comes in, the script reads off of a document, and then it would assess if there’s a matching receivable. If there’s a matching receivable, it matches it off and if there isn’t, then it would go into the bank or into the pool for our team to review.

In most cases, those deposits would automatically be matched off with receivables, again, eliminating, maybe it’s 90% of the work associated with that.

I think we’ll always have work to do because technology changes so quickly. We’re really focused on some of the strategic items. How do we continue to automate our cash flows?

How do we integrate it with some of our budgeting and planning tools or forecasting tools? I think there’s a number of strategic projects that we can focus on here to better manage the long-term capital of our business. That’s where I think really where our focus is now that some of the transactional elements have been dealt with.

[VIDEO 4 TRANSCRIPT] How have the changes MNP has implemented impacted their employee experience?

Robert Lowther:

Some of the benefits that I think the team, as a whole, would have seen would be just the speed and efficiency. I've talked a bit about that in a number of instances already, really less manual processes, I think most people appreciate that. The cost savings obviously is a piece of it as well. Really, I talked about Spin Dynamics and the benefits of using that in A2Pay. It's a smart tool, it saves our team time of reentering the same categories or cost information, setting up those rules, simplifying approvals, making our approvers more efficient.

It impacts the finance team, but it also impacts the decision-makers that are approving transactions. It also impacts our regional teams that are trying to deal with clients. The less time that they're spending on administration is more time that they're spending with clients. That's obviously a side benefit of some of this. Not the complete elimination of checks because we still do have some of that, but just the time and material savings having moved most of our transactions off of checks.

You think about the time of processing the check and stuffing the envelope or sending it out, or if you're using a third-party service to do that for you, there's a cost associated with that. Eliminating a lot of that cost is beneficial. Just in the team in general, what I would say is it really allows our team to focus and move from the transactional work to strategic priorities and allows our team to grow with the technology. Allows them to be more involved in trying to drive decisions rather than managing more of the transactional and administrative elements of the business. Like I said, that the team has really been great and led the charge from step one. I think that's part of the good story.

[VIDEO 5 TRANSCRIPT] How do you start digitizing payments?

Matthew Bleecker:

I think goals is a number one thing as normalization to think about and making sure you're studying those. When we think about a couple of those, the number one that I've had since COVID came into play is that increase in working capital. I've heard from a lot of clients talk about that. How do I do that? How can I extend my DPO and what can I do? One of the things that I suggest clients take a look at is what is your payment strategy?

Is this an opportunity to refine that? Or if you don't have a payment strategy currently in place, to develop one. It's one of the key things you'd want to probably take a look at. Other things, Megan, that you might have heard from a goal's perspective?

Megan Kells:

On the slide there, you can see creating infrastructure efficiencies or just creating efficiencies overall. I think Rob highlighted some really good examples today of what he saw on his efficiencies across his organization. I would say digital payments, they don't discriminate. Regardless of the size of company you have, the geographic footprint, the type of industry you are in, there's a role for digital payments or electronic payments in your payment mix. To Rob's point, they didn't continue to totally eliminate cheques.

There's always going to be room for cheques but thinking about how it's part of your mix is important. On the efficiency, I would say you can now look for efficiencies in typical three categories. People, process, and technology. People, we heard today that you can move people from lower-value activities where they're spending time opening envelopes, reconciling checks to hire, order work. In Rob's case, working capital and focusing on cash flow. From a process perspective, when you move to electronic payments, when you're initiating them let's say on your bank's platforms and the most case will be a lot of the steps and the controls are built right into the system.

Those process steps can come out of your manual work because the system prompts you to do those steps in your process. From a technology perspective, electronic payments have a lot of the remittance information that travels with them. That, again, takes a step out of your manual process and creates some efficiencies. Then Rob-

Matthew Bleecker:

I think as we listened to Rob, the other thing he talked about was a cost and recognizing that there's a cost associated with doing manual payments. Oftentimes, those have higher fees associated with them. Along with the labor cost, when you think about that ties back to the efficiency. Can you gain efficiencies and gain that cost savings by having your resources deployed and doing something else? Wires are a very expensive form of payment. If you can remove that and offer a virtual card or an EFT or ACH, those are much lower from a cost perspective.

Depending on the size of your company and you take a look at the number of transactions you are doing on an annual basis, those fees eventually do add up. That's an opportunity to save some of those cost. Along with those different digitized payments, come risks. Megan, what are you seeing as far as some of those payment risks that are out there and changing those, and how do you make sure that you have good controls in place?

Megan Kells:

Yes, Matt, it's a really good question. Oe thing just on the hills of some of the things that Rob mentioned is, part of the risk is understanding where your payment is in the process. When we think about paper payment, some of the risk is understanding the timing. If we just think about things like dependencies on the post office, that is something that's not controllable for any of us. Taking some of that risk out of the predictability of when the payment will go out or when the payment will arrive, I think is key.

Moving to digital or electronic payments, when you are using that format you can mirror the controls for those payment types with the controls you've set up in your own company. Now you just mentioned wire payments. When you move towards something like wire payments, you can set up dual controls, you can set up multiple levels of controls on top of your Maker Checker in the system. You can set up different authority level controls by payment types. You mentioned ACA, EFT.

Digital payments enables you a little bit more flexibility in terms of system-driven controls that marry up to your finance or your treasury controls that you have in your group. It gives you more power and more control on overall reducing the risk in the system.

COVID's really forced us to take a look at that and find ways for us to be more efficient and timely with our payments. At the same time, making sure that we are keeping our staff safe. I think that's a key thing overall. We have a safety concern in regards to our employees and our team members. Rob also mentioned a little bit of he falls into that bucket of one third. They've already been on this journey for a couple of years, however, that journey doesn't end just because you started switching your payments over to digital.

Matthew Bleecker:

Absolutely. I would agree. I think weaving in that, that payment strategy as part of your goals and taking a look at that, and then making sure you share those goals with your banking partners. The more that your bank partners can understand what those goals are, they can talk about helping you from the tactical perspective of achieving those goals, similar to what Rob had talked about when he was sharing his story. Sue, it's back to you, but thank you for allowing us to share some of our best practices and things that we've seen over the time period.

[VIDEO 6 TRANSCRIPT] How can you get suppliers onboard? 

Matthew Bleecker:

Oh, definitely. I think when it comes to that supplier acceptance, when we first started talking about digital payments to suppliers, they were a little bit reluctant and that’s because change is scary. They’re used to getting that check in the mail and at the bottom of the checks tab, had all their invoice information. I think that was primarily what was driving that hesitation to change was will I receive the data that is so critical to close my AR items that are open and for that invoice?

I think Megan talked about that a little bit earlier, the data and the dollars need to travel together. The other piece that has happened is we’ve made it simpler for suppliers to be able to be registered to get a digital form of payment. By removing that, that friction, we’ve seen a higher adoption and we’ll continue to see that adoption rates increase over time.

[VIDEO 7 TRANSCRIPT] How can you transition your customers?

Megan Kells:

I think spending some time to really analyze your payments both incoming and outgoing is also super important. The by-product type, the volume of payments, the value of some of your payments, some frequent offenders in terms of customers who are suppliers or vendors who more frequently issue checks.

If you have some timing concerns, if you have big payments you make at typical intervals during your month, that's really critical to understand. Then you've got really a history and an inventory of what your payment schema looks like. Then you can work with your advisor to figure out what the next step would be. With your goals firmly set up and then much like Rob did understand your time horizon. If you have technology that you can take advantage of whether that's a treasury workstation, an ERP system, whether you're making a change or moving to one, or you're on Excel spreadsheets, that's totally fine too.

How you would back into moving some of your mix to digital. You can move it in increments, once you have a better understanding in the analysis of your payments. You can also think of small or large things you can do to incent your community in terms of moving to digital payments. If people pay on time, can you factor off part of the cost of those payments, et cetera? That would really depend on the mix of payments and the volume and the value, but there's all sorts of alternatives you can do if you find components of your payment mix, where that audience is not as receptive.

Those would be the five or six principles to think about as you start to move down your journey to move to electronic and digital payments.