AFP2023 San Diego in Review

Digital RFPs and Treasury Optimization

The Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) organized another outstanding annual conference from October 22 to October 25. Over 6,000 treasury and FP&A professionals attended the conference in San Diego, which included over 300 sessions and 200 exhibitors consisting of banks, financial service providers and technology providers.

Digital Request for Proposals (RFPs)

Cugavadi’s Chris van Dijl led a very successful session and panel discussion on the new emergence of online platforms facilitating the issuance, scoring and selection of RFPs for transaction banking transactions and treasury management systems. The highly interactive session showed that there is significant interest of corporates, banks, consultants, and corporates in moving the RFP process online.

What did come out of the discussion was that it is expected that banks will initially resist providing their information, especially their pricing, on an online platform. It is up to the corporate treasuries and consultants to advocate for and push banks into adoption of the new technology. It is expected that early adaptation of a digital RFP platform will be by the treasury management solution providers, as well as for single transaction RFPs such as: bank deposits, letters of credits and procurement cards.

Treasury Optimisation and Efficiency Solutions

A conference like AFP2023 is always a great opportunity to spot new solutions in the market that could provide interesting opportunities for streamlining treasury operations. Two companies that stood out for me were Ramp and Datasnipper.

Ramp is a card solution that stands out because not only do they issues visa charge cards globally. Although that charge cards do not let you carry over a balance, this is something that treasurers are not interested in anyway. Moreover, Ramp offers a very extensive expense management solution that rivals SAP Concur. With the usage of cards growing as a tool to improve working capital management at an organization, Ramp could be a very good option for a varied number of companies and industries.

Datasnipper is an Amsterdam-based fintech that can assist corporates and consultants with efficiently transferring data from many types of documents into Excel. Datasnipper takes information from an underlying document and places it in Excel while storing the documents in the worksheet creating a cross-reference for audit purposes. This can easily increase efficiency and improve data integrity when moving data onto Excel.