Tell me about your current role at Kyriba and how you got there.

I started my career at Standard Chartered Bank in 2010, where I worked in a number of different roles and moved into transaction banking. I was based in both London and Stockholm, supporting European corporate treasurers who were doing business in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This gave me a good grounding in treasury, and I also did the ACT’s Certificate in International Cash Management and built a treasury network.

From there I moved to a startup, which was a real change – I was an early-stage employee at Form3, a payment technology company which has gone on to great things. This taught me a lot about startup culture and wearing a lot of different hats, including sales.

An opportunity came up at Kyriba shortly after my first child was born, and I felt it was a good time to move to a more established company. Given my treasury background at Standard Chartered and my sales background at Form3, it was the perfect combination of both these worlds.

I’ve now been at Kyriba for six years. For the first five years I worked in London, covering our financial services segment that we have built tremendously over the last five years. And for the last year, I’ve been the Vice President of Sales for APAC, which for Kyriba includes India, China and South-East Asia, all the way down to Australia and New Zealand. It’s a real privilege to be representing the company in this part of the world.

How would you describe the treasury technology landscape going into 2025?

On the functional side, we’re seeing a clear move towards real-time treasury, which is underpinned by APIs – particularly when it comes to our fast-growing tech clients. In APAC, many of these companies are looking for a treasury system for the first time, and are leapfrogging more traditional connectivity types in favour of real-time API technology. But we’re increasingly seeing more traditional corporates taking this approach as well.

Going into 2025, connectivity will continue to underpin everything we do at Kyriba – not just with banks, but also throughout our ecosystem. Many of our prospective clients are connected to their banks, and have some visibility there, but they’re not fully connected to their FP&A systems, or to the various ERPs across their organisations. So we’re seeing a real theme across our client base of becoming more connected across the whole financial ecosystem.

On another note, you can’t talk to a customer without AI and machine learning being part of the conversation. This is becoming increasingly central to treasury operations, and high-growth technology companies are already integrating AI in areas such as forecasting and fraud detection.

How has the landscape evolved over the last 12 months?

Since moving from London a year ago, I would say companies in APAC are becoming more open to moving away from legacy platforms and embracing cloud-based SaaS treasury systems. Here in APAC, we’re also seeing a move away from some of the data residency issues that we’ve seen in the past, where certain countries will not allow data to be hosted outside of that country. And another change, which I mentioned previously, is the jump away from traditional connectivity types and host-to-host in favour of API connectivity, which is being driven by the demand for real-time liquidity.

Which challenges and goals will treasurers be focusing on in the year ahead?

In APAC, the challenges tend to be more fundamental than in other markets: companies are focusing on having visibility over their cash, and having connectivity into their banking groups and internal systems. The geopolitical environment is also likely to present some challenges, particularly in light of the recent US elections. In China, there are questions around how President-elect Trump’s proposed trade tariffs will impact supply chains and working capital – and the same is true for ‘China plus one’ countries, such as Vietnam.

How will Kyriba be supporting its corporate clients in 2025?

We’re going to carry on doing what we’ve been doing! Kyriba has had a very successful period in the six years that I’ve been here, and we will continue to do what we do best, which is to connect, protect, forecast and optimise our clients’ cash and liquidity, all within a single platform.

From an APAC perspective, our focus is on growth and expansion. The year 2024 is on track to be our biggest ever year in APAC, and we plan to continue to grow and extend our ability to support our customers in the region, which will include growing the team in specific markets to cater for the interest we’re seeing, and our existing clients. We will also invest in more opportunities in certain markets in the next year or two as we continue to grow.

How do you see treasury technology evolving in the future?

For one thing, AI will increasingly be integrated into daily treasury operations. At Kyriba, we already have some fantastic things in place around natural language processing – for example, you can log into Teams and ask it to show you your bank balances in France – and we’re going to see a lot more of this. However, I want to emphasize that when we talk to customers, we always tell them “You can’t have an AI strategy without first having a data strategy.” That’s something we see a lot when companies decide to jump into AI and then find out there is a lot of work to be done to clean up the data before it is usable by AI.

At the same time there will be a greater focus on making AI more accessible and using it to create a more autonomous treasury. This will include the use of AI tools to make recommendations for routine tasks around executing hedging, optimising liquidity or paying down debt.

Aside from AI, another important trend – both in APAC and globally – is around the adoption of treasury tools by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Treasury technology is becoming a lot more accessible and affordable for the SME market, with specific mid-market packages available. So I think we’re going to see a lot more SMEs taking up cash flow forecasting, payments and bank connectivity options.

Mainly, I expect to see a continuation of the move towards real-time treasury, including real-time cash management, real-time balances and real-time reconciliation. And, of course, we will continue to see the growing adoption of instant payments around the world.