Treasury Today Group’s second Global Sustainability Study reveals a swathe of encouraging progress on ESG integration. Indeed, in one standout statistic 61% of our 2021 respondents are new to the survey and didn’t participate in 2020 in a reflection of the growing importance of ESG amongst the treasury community. Elsewhere, we saw a spike in responses from Latin American corporates and find treasury everywhere is spending more time on sustainability.

There is a sense that the concept of sustainability – the idea that through positive action now, we can ensure a viable future for generations to come – is so vast that surely the individual can have no meaningful impact on the outcome. There is a corresponding feeling that, as a truly global issue, isn’t it best just to let ‘other’, better qualified, agents take care of it?

Most modern organisations visibly promote sustainability in some form or other. It’s what their stakeholders – from employees to investors – expect of them, and it’s increasingly what the public demand. For many, it’s also the right thing to do. For treasurers sitting at the financial heart of these businesses, ensuring the organisation is financially sustainable remains sacrosanct. But with many now seeking to uphold the principles of sustainability too, does it have to be a battle of value versus values? In this Talking Treasury Forum, a panel of experts, drawn from the worlds of finance and treasury, explore this theme.

We are living through a period of unprecedented change driven, primarily, by the continual advancement of technology. The biggest impact has undoubtedly come from the proliferation of internet access, which has given rise to the hyper-connected world that we live in today. For businesses, this has created a tremendous opportunity to tap into a bigger consumer base and find new and substantial pockets of growth by selling goods online. Today, with the power of the internet, any business can be a global business.

Technology and digitisation is having a profound impact on all of our lives. We now live in a world interconnected by bits and bytes, and one in which personal handheld devices – often boasting more computing power than NASA had for the Apollo missions – now outnumber people.

The first SIBOS event was hosted by SWIFT in 1978 in Brussels, five years after the society was founded. There were just 300 participants. In 2012, the last time the conference was held in Asia, over 6,000 delegates travelled to Osaka in Japan. Back in Asia this year, Singapore is a perfect venue for the conference as the country celebrates 50 years of independence.

Technology is changing the way we live, the way we communicate, and the way we do business. In fact, technological innovation is changing the world as we know it and at an extremely rapid pace. Year-on-year growth in the 12 months from January 2014 saw the world population increase by 1.6%, yet over the same period, the number of active internet users soared by 21%, whilst social media accounts accessed by mobile devices increased by 23%.