What are your responsibilities in your current role?
WPP is the largest marketing services company in the world, operating in over 100 countries, so it’s quite geographically diverse. As group treasurer I head up the global treasury team in London, which is responsible for areas such as funding, risk management, cash management and treasury operations.
How important is technology for your treasury? To what extent do you plan to harness new technologies?
Technology is absolutely paramount for us. We’ve got just under 30 people in the treasury team, and without automation it’s hard to see how we could effectively manage all the different markets we operate in around the world.
In terms of our technology landscape, the company is currently in the middle of a big finance and ERP efficiency project, which is due to finish in around 2026. So, there’s a real opportunity for treasury to leverage this to enhance its use of technology in the medium term. We use IT2 for our treasury system and I’m working with my team to move to a more global operating model and achieve standardised controls and processes around the world. We’re also a very active user of Swift, using Finastra for our payments and statement connectivity through to IT2 and the new ERP programme.
As a company, we’re very interested in new tech. On the commercial side, we are already empowering our people with AI-based tools to augment their skills, produce work more efficiently and improve media performance.
We’ve started looking at how we can follow suit in Finance and Treasury and already use a private version of Microsoft Copilot internally, which we use for things like transcription and minute taking, and the creation or summarising of content.
Which specific treasury challenges do you expect technology to solve in the coming years?
Payments is an area that continues to evolve. In the UK, systems like BACS and CHAPS are very old – but if you look at places like India, they’ve managed to take a developing economy and revolutionise their payments landscape with technology. So, I think we’ll see more examples of countries skipping the base steps we’ve seen in other countries.
The most basic areas where technology can help include cash forecasting and the use of intelligent tools like machine learning and AI. If you’re looking at invoice matching, for example, it can be used not just to tell you whether an invoice is matched or unmatched, but also to indicate a highly probable match and give you some recommendations or suggestions to choose or override.
I think it’ll be a while before we start seeing a real game changer, though. In theory you could probably train an AI brain on IFRS and get it to do accounting for you – but in reality, there’s always the need for the human layer, and to have someone who’s accountable and able to make decisions.
Looking at the treasury space as a whole, there are a lot of good treasury systems, but they’re mostly still doing the same things that they were doing 20 years ago – there hasn’t really been a revolution in that space. I’d love to see some of these fintech capabilities come into our world a little more, but I guess the challenge is getting the critical mass.
How much focus should the modern treasury team place on building technological skills?
I think it’s really key. We’ve gone from being able to deal FX on the phone to having everything running through multi bank platforms with straight through processing. I do think that people need to get more and more technical – when something goes wrong, you need to be able to understand the technical moving parts, propose solutions and iteratively improve things.
I remember a while ago when the advice for people coming into their careers was to learn Chinese and coding, but we’re now at the point where we’re potentially going to have universal translators on a real-time basis, and coding is done through creative AI. We’ve already got new roles internally for prompters, who can write effective prompts to get the best out of AI, and it’s likely that those roles are going to be more important in the future.
What sort of factors might hold treasuries back from adopting new technology?
Risk, for one thing – treasury is high value, low volume, so you don’t want anything to go wrong. In my experience, treasury systems are normally ‘tier one’ systems in IT terms, meaning it’s always in the top layer of importance for organisations.
It can also be challenging to build a really good business case for investment, but I think that’s changing – there are fewer ‘big bang’ deliveries, and growing availability of more modular software products based on APIs. At WPP, we’re big users of Power BI: we have a great multidimensional database, which you can use for things like pivot tables, live queries and dashboards.
In the future, I think we will see more of this approach, with more components that you can use to create a best-of-breed system with different pieces coming together. An enabler of this is the ability to do lots of smaller, iterative steps of things which have demonstrable value, rather than a big all-singing, all-dancing project.
A final observation is that while I’m a great believer in technology, it’s important not to move too fast when implementing it. You’re better off stabilising and testing processes – even using something like Excel – so that you can then invest in a new solution once you’ve reached a certain maturity level.
