AFP Blogs

Busy corporate treasury and finance professionals may find it hard to get out of the office for a conference these days, but one event that is definitely worth the trip is the AFP Treasury Management Forum, April 21-23, in Washington, DC.

Take a look at the companies speaking at the Forum:

•  AOL
• Bank of America Merrill Lynch
• BNY Mellon
• Citi
• Coca Cola Enterprises
• Costco
• Custom House, a Western Union Company
• Ford Motors
• General Mills
• Industrial and Commercial Bank of China
• J.P. Morgan
• McCormick
• REI
• SWIFT
• Towers Watson
• U.S. Bank
• USPS
• Zappos.com

Senior executives from these companies will cover your most important treasury concerns:

• Working Capital
• Risk Management
• Technology
• Globalization

Plus, two Members of the House Financial Services Committee have confirmed to speak as well:

• Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn. Worked at Goldman Sachs for 12 years, rising to Vice President. Worked extensively in Latin America and headed its telecommunications technology group.
• Rep. Gary Peters, D-Mich. Vice President of investments for Paine Webber from 1989-2003. Before that, he was with Merrill Lynch.

The AFP Treasury Management Forum also is approved for CTP recertification credits and CEP credits. Register now!

There’s been a lot of talk on AFP discussion lists about remote deposit capture risk management. With that in mind, the next issue of AFP’s Risk newsletter delves into the topic. In the meantime, Bob Meara, a senior analyst with Celent who authored a report on RDC risk best practices, offers some advice for corporate practitioners:

o Establish a deposit review process if dollar amounts warrant. Most solutions allow separate scan and review/submit user entitlements.
o Use reporting, particularly available reporting that invites review of items that have been corrected.
o Safeguard original items until destruction.
o Use RDC to reduce the number of required DDAs and bank relationships, if applicable.
o Consider use of remote cash capture alongside RDC for businesses that receive meaningful cash to achieve the reduction in bank relationships, reconciliation costs and cash transportation charges.

Your firm just suffered its worst year in history and you’re scrambling to improve risk management. What’s the solution? Spend more on IT.

That’s a key suggestion from a report by the Senior Supervisors Group (SSG), a gathering of regulators from the U.S. (including the Fed, OCC, SEC and the New York Fed Bank), Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and the UK:

Overall, the crisis highlighted the inadequacy of many firms’ IT infrastructures in supporting the broad management of financial risks. In some cases, the obstacle to improving risk management systems has been the poor integration of data that has resulted from firms’ multiple mergers and acquisitions. This problem has been seen as affecting firms’ ability to implement effective transfer pricing, consistently value complex products throughout an organization, estimate counterparty credit risk (CCR) levels, aggregate credit exposures quickly, and perform forward-looking stress tests. Building more robust infrastructure systems requires a significant commitment of financial and human resources on the part of firms, but is viewed as critical to the long-term sustainability of improvements in risk management.

This is an utterly predictable regulatory response. Sure, some firms have IT gaps that prevent them from properly measuring and mitigating risk. But that’s a symptom of the underlying problem, not the problem itself. Until senior management and boards focus on risk management, IT departments and corporate treasury won’t worry about installing better IT controls.

So why does the SSG report address IT spending (in fairness, it also addresses board and management failings)? Regulators tend to struggle when it comes to getting management and boards to listen, and sometimes the company even has a well-crafted risk management policy that nobody follows–Enron being one example. It’s quick and easy for regulators to demand more technology and hope the latest software catches the next problem.

Has the job market improved for treasury and finance professionals? According to some headhunters, large and even some midsize financial-services institutions have begun hiring, although not at the pace they were a couple of years ago. (more…)

With virtually no NFC-enabled “smart” phones available in the U.S., according to Mercator Advisory Group, what’s the next best thing?

Stickers, of course. The upcoming issue of AFP Payments profiles two vendors whose stickers turn cell phones into mobile payments devices.

Look for July AFP Payments soon. | Current Payments Issue | Join Payments mailing list

On May 29, 2009, President Barack Obama released the results of a 60 day review of Federal cybersecurity policy and a list of action steps to be taken by his administration….

For the full article, see  President Obama Announces Major Cybersecurity Reforms