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Condoleezza Rice, 66th Secretary of State of the United States

AFP is pleased to present a world renowned leader and best-selling author at this November’s AFP Annual Conference in San Antonio. With her unparalleled expertise on global affairs, national security and education, we are pleased to announce that Dr. Condoleezza Rice will share her experiences as Secretary of State as our Opening Keynote Speaker. Malcolm Gladwell, our Tuesday General Keynote Speaker and best-selling author of Blink and Outliers, will take new ideas in the social sciences and make them understandable, practical and valuable to business.

Condoleezza Rice

The AFP Annual Conference Task Force, made up of treasury and finance professionals from a variety of industries, recently met to put together an impressive program addressing the issues most strongly impacting their organizations. Choosing from a record number of session proposals, this team focused on relevant topics that include risk management, payments issues, technology, global expansion, capital structure and markets, and working capital management.

I hope you’ll join us in San Antonio, November 7-10 for what is sure to be the most important event for treasury and finance.

The Association for Financial Professionals invites corporate treasury and finance practitioners, consultants, experts and bankers to apply to lead an educational session or workshop at its 2010 Annual Conference in San Antonio, TX, November 7-10.

The AFP Annual Conference is the most important event in corporate treasury and finance. More than 4,000 CFOs, VPs of finance, controllers, treasurers, assistant treasurers, finance directors, cash managers, financial analysts, service providers, bankers and product managers attend over 100 sessions and workshops. The AFP Annual Conference provides unbiased content for attendees to learn best practices from their peers and top experts.

Topics include:
• Bank Relationship Management
• Working Capital Management
• Trade and Supply Chain Finance
• Cash Flow Forecasting
• Cash and Liquidity Management
• Credit
• Capital Markets
• Investments
• Capital Structure
• Pensions
• Accounting
• Technology and Innovation
• Career Development

To apply, click here. Deadline for proposals is January 10, 2010.

A trio of bankers just finished taking questions from AFP Chairman Ira Birns and several crowd members at AFP’s 2009 CTP Luncheon here in the Moscone Center. One question we found particularly interesting here came from a crowd member. A treasury professional at a middle-market business, he asked what steps he could take in the current credit environment to proactively protect his banking relationship and successfully seek new credit. This is definitely a topic we want to explore further in our newsletters and Exchange, the monthly magzine AFP publishes, but, in the meantime, here are couple pieces of advice:

1. Do your homework. It’s as important as ever, perhaps more important, to prepare your story and be prepared for a difficult run in landing affordable funds.

2. Leverage relationships. Banks value customers with whom they have a history.

The panelists were: James DeNaut, head of global banking, Americas, at Deutsche Bank; James Graham, an executive vice president at PNC Financial Services Group; and Todd Maclin, the head of commercial banking at JPMorgan Chase. Now we’re off to the China Symposium, a couple sessions for treasurers doing business in China.

Only 11 percent of CFOs, treasurers and other treasury and finance executives representing companies of a median size of $1.5 billion in annual revenues believe that the U.S. economy is out of the recession, according to an onsite survey of 982 attendees conducted Monday at the 2009 Association for Financial Professionals’ Annual Conference in San Francisco. Just 20 percent of survey respondents believe the recession will end before of the year, while 69 percent expect the recession will continue well into 2010.

“AFP members have played a critical role in maintaining the financial stability of their organizations through the recession,” said Jim Kaitz, president and CEO of AFP. “As we look ahead, AFP will continue to work with policymakers to ensure that financial regulatory reform is balanced and represents the needs of financial professionals. We are confident that responsible regulation will foster stable and secure financial markets.”

Twenty-two percent expect company payrolls to shrink further while just 14 percent anticipate that their organization will resume hiring over the next six months. Just 21 percent of financial professionals anticipate their organization will increase capital spending in the next six months.

One bright spot from the survey: access to capital. More than half of respondents indicate that their organizations’ access to capital stabilized over the past six months, and 31 percent of organizations have had improved access to debt markets over the past six months. Access to banking lending has improved for 22 percent of respondents while a similar percentage report improvements in raising capital in the equity markets.

Before the downturn, consumers accounted for more than 70 percent of GDP, with debt fueling spending. But falling home values, job losses, underemployment, plus the increased need to stock money away for retirement have made consumers less powerful as economic stimulators. So what will replace them to facilitate a sustainable recovery? Exports, new markets, technological innovation? That question was central to Robert Reich’s speech this morning at San Francisco’s Moscone Center in front of hundreds of AFP Annual Conference attendees. In the end, admittedly, he had no easy answers.

In the short term, government can be an effecitive spender of last resort, said Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former Labor Secretary under President Clinton. But government economic stimulus won’t last forever.

“When does government exit,” Reich asked, “That’s the real question. I’m worried that it may be too early. If you do this thing too quickly you go right back down into recession because you don’t have enough aggregate demand.” Reich pointed to health care, education and environment as three sectors that should harbor growth and create jobs. Still, Reich said he expects a robust recovery next year as we make up a lot of lost ground to give way to “slow and tepid” growth as the economy finds new footing.

And now for a  bit of off-beat news coming out the speech: Turns out Reich is very funny. Understanding the political implications of advocating for government stimulus, Reich acknowledged about halfway through his talk that, “Some of you may be Republicans in this room. I respect you….I don’t like you but I respect you.” Later, when answering a question from the crowd about health care reform, Reich said that “At 80, my father started walking 5 miles a day. He’s now 95 and we have no idea where he is.” So despite the often sobering nature of his remarks, everyone in the room was kept well entertained.

Find more conference highlights here. Videos, including some tape from Reich’s speech, will be added shortly.

A new survey from AFP’s Annual Conference floor in San Francisco offers a clear “indiciation of the cautiousness” of financial professionals as economic instability continues, AFP’s President and CEO Jim Kaitz told CNBC this morning. Here is the video link from CNBC:

CFOs Dispute End of Recession Call

Of the 982 finance and treasury executives that responded to a Monday survey, just 11 percent believe the U.S. has emerged from recession. The survey’s respondents include CFOs and treasurers from companies with median annual revenues of $1.5 billion. Find more of the survey’s results here.

Copyright © 2009 | Association for Financial Professionals, Inc. | All rights reserved.

We’re back at the Moscone Center this morning, revived and refreshed, for a another day crammed with exciting AFP Annual Conference fare. Robert Reich more or less gets us started  at 8:15 a.m. as Tuesday’s general session keynote speaker in Hall E. Reich comes to AFP with an excellent reputation as a leading economic thinker and commentator. Currently a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, Reich is the author of 11 books, an economic advisor to President Barack Obama and a former Labor Secretary, under President Bill Clinton. Check back later for a bit on his comments.

The other headliner today is AFP’s Certification Luncheon, an event held each year at conference to honor attendees who have earned AFP certification. There’s been more than 20,000 certified since 1986. The 789 who have received certification since December 2008 will be recognized at the event, as will the all-important volunter corps that has helepd AFP maintain the CTP exam and the Body of Knowledge. The event, taking place from noon to 1:45 p.m. in Hall E, features a panel discussion on “The Current State and Future Direction of the Banking Industry,”  to be moderated by AFP Chairman Ira Birns.

Also today: the Executive Institute continues with a session titled “Creative Strategies to Meet your Company’s Financing Needs.” Two treasurers  and a senior banker will discuss promising markets. Then there’s the few dozen more educational sessions on topics ranging from de-bugging electronic payments to multicurrency notional pooling.

Stay tuned!

Simon Mendelson, managing director and COO at investment management firm BlackRock, jumpstarted AFP’s 2009 Executive Institute with a luncheon speech at the Annual Conference in San Francisco this afternoon, offering an often sobering review of market events in the last year. Mendelson went on to praise government efforts to guarantee money market funds, crediting the intervention with halting a run on funds last September as the economy fractured.

Mendelson also articulated an interesting conumdrum today’s treasurers face: recent market chaos could breed extreme investment conservatism, Mendelson pointed out. At the same time, an incredibly low interest rate environment could lead some to become aggressive, taking on a significant amount of risk for some degree of satisfactory return. Achieving balance, and avoiding the pitfalls of each approach, is the challenge. “You will be tested,” Mendelson told the audience.

2009 Executive Institute

Two experts from the Federal Reserve, alongside two corporate practitioners, just finished taking questions from a packed session crowd here in San Francisco about looming Fedwire format changes to support remittance information. Implementation is expected in the fourth quarter of next year. The panel has discussed how corporates can convince their banks and software vendors to adjust to the new format to support greater information and evaluated case studies from three corprorations that showed low straight through processing rates on wires.

On the panel at the session are Anita Patterson, the treasurer at Manheim, and Susan Boeri from the treasury department at GE, as well as Ken Isaacson from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Hank C. Farrar of The Clearing House. Read more in the October issue of Payments. Find out more about the format change here.

Permit me to backtrack briefly for those of you who think AFP’s Annual Conference is all educational sessions and exhibit booth presentations. 

Conference attendees (as well as some AFP staffers) descended on San Francisco City Hall last night for a tremendous welcome reception featuring a pair of jazz bands, a pasta bar, flowing beverages and impressively sprawling tables of food. (Crowd favorites included the Black Angus Sirloin, the Danish meatballs and the Roast Loin of Smoked Pork.) And yes, there were guys playing violins on a great staircase out front. Good times.

AFP's 2009 Annual Conference Opening Ceremony in San Francisco's City Hall