This episode features an interview with Benjamin Seal, Vice President of Treasury Services at Cenveo. He is an experienced Treasury Professional with a demonstrated history of process improvement. He’s skilled in Management, Variance Analysis, Financial Analysis, Finance, and Accounting. In this episode we delve into how Benjamin uses digital approaches within treasury to become a strategic business partner across an organization at all levels - being able to stay forward focused at ensuring Cenveo has the capital needed to manage day to day operations. Benjamin discusses his digital first vision that embraces technology to cut down on work time and elevate efficiency, reliability and flexibility. We learn how Cenevo’s innovative approach has optimized enterprise liquidity through a digital transformation of their treasury solutions and practices, allowing them to make small and meaningful adjustments on a regular basis and gather input from teams more quickly, effectively, and with cost savings.
This episode features an interview with Benjamin Seal, Vice President of Treasury Services at Cenveo. He is an experienced Treasury Professional with a demonstrated history of process improvement. He’s skilled in Management, Variance Analysis, Financial Analysis, Finance, and Accounting.
In this episode we delve into how Benjamin uses digital approaches within treasury to become a strategic business partner across an organization at all levels - being able to stay forward focused at ensuring Cenveo has the capital needed to manage day to day operations. Benjamin discusses his digital first vision that embraces technology to cut down on work time and elevate efficiency, reliability and flexibility. We learn how Cenevo’s innovative approach has optimized enterprise liquidity through a digital transformation of their treasury solutions and practices, allowing them to make small and meaningful adjustments on a regular basis and gather input from teams more quickly, effectively, and with cost savings.
Quotes
*“Mike Tyson always said everybody had a plan until they get punched in the face. And the same concept applies to business as well. Every business has a plan until something goes awry, which is exactly what COVID has shown us as treasuries. This is why treasury is a key strategic business partner. We partner with individuals throughout the company, from the operations, to the purchasing department, to shared services, to even then down that lower level plant level, to stay forward focusing, ensuring that the company has the capital it needs to manage the day-to-day operations. You know, the thing I like to say is without treasury? It would be similar to walking in the woods at night without a flashlight. You might get there, but it's going to take a lot more.”
*“We're constantly looking. We're looking at the past. We're looking at the future. I mean, you know, during the pandemic, everything changed for us. We didn't know if some of our customers were going to continue their sales or when those sales were actually going to come back into the company. So we were kind of consistently reforecast and forecasting. So, one of the big things we had done was we embraced technology as a whole, which allows us to continually adapt. We have anywhere from three to four models at any point in time going in, which we're going to continue to do, because you just don't know if another COVID-19 is going to hit or if some other impact of the business is going to be right around the corner.”
*“What I would recommend to the next generation of finance leaders is to just stay up to date on the technology because it's ever changing and you need to embrace that. And not only becoming innovators, you know, always challenge the norm and you can do that now. Constantly look into your company and avoid the phrases of “it's always been done that way,” or “don't fix something that's not broken.” Constantly question, constantly look for those solutions for the question that no one has asked yet, because eventually they're going to. And, if you have that solution already, that's going to put you one step above.”
Time Stamps
*[4:37] Opportunities and Flexibility in Treasury
*[5 :27] Treasury is a Key Strategic Business Partner
*[7:25] Wide Focus on Past, Present, and Future to Learn and Grow
*[9:00] Kyriba is a lot More than Just Cash Forecasting
*[15:22] Time Saving Means More Money
*[19:15] Risk Management
*[21:30] Recognizing and Addressing Fraud
*[22:40] Focusing on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
*[27:36] Recommendations for Next Generation of Finance Leaders
*[28:56] AI as a Partner to Treasury and Finance Leaders
Sponsor
The Invisible Vault is powered by the team at Kyriba, the global leader in cloud treasury and finance solutions, empowering CFOs and their teams to transform how they activate liquidity as a dynamic, real-time vehicle for growth and value creation. To learn more visit www.kyriba.com
Links
Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn
Benjamin Seal: We're constantly looking. We're looking at the past. We're looking at the future. I mean, you know, during the pandemic, everything changed for us. We didn't know if some of our customers were going to continue their sales or when those sales were actually going to come back into the company. So we were kind of consistently reforecast and forecasting. So, one of the big things we had done was we embraced technology as a whole, which allows us to continually adapt. We have anywhere from three to four models at any point in time going in, which we're going to continue to do, because you just don't know if another COVID-19 is going to hit or if some other impact of the business is going to be right around the corner.
Narrator: Hello and welcome to The Invisible Vault.
This episode features an interview with Benjamin Seal, Vice President of Treasury Services at Cenveo. The company is a leading global provider of print supply chain solutions for mid to large sized enterprises. Cenveo handles many aspects of the process, from the manufacturing and distribution of print products, to managing business-critical supply chains from start to finish.
Benjamin is an experienced treasury professional with a demonstrated history of process improvement. He’s skilled in Management, Variance Analysis, Financial Analysis, Finance, and Accounting. Benjamin has spent more than 9 years at Cenveo, working his way up from being a business analyst to vice president of treasury services. Prior to his time at Cenveo, Benjamin was both a respiratory therapist and corporate accountant.
In this episode we delve into how Benjamin uses digital approaches within the treasury to become a strategic business partner across the organization at all levels. Benjamin discusses his digital first vision that embraces technology to cut down on work time and elevate efficiency, reliability and flexibility. We learn how Cenveo’s innovative approach has optimized enterprise liquidity through a digital transformation of their treasury solutions and practices, allowing them to make small and meaningful adjustments on a regular basis and gather input from teams more quickly, effectively, and with cost savings.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsor…
So please enjoy this interview between your host, Daniel Shaffer, and Benjamin Seal, Vice President of Treasury Services at Cenveo
Daniel Shaffer: It's my pleasure to welcome Benjamin Seal to the Invisible Vault. Benjamin is the vice president of treasury services at Cenveo worldwide limited, a leading north American provider of customer labels envelope solutions supported by a broad product portfolio, diversified business model and expansive geographic footprint.
Ben is a star to watch in finance and treasury. His team at Cenveo were recently named as a finalist for the 2022 treasury and risk Alexander Hamilton awards for their innovative approach to optimizing enterprise liquidity through a digital transformation of their treasury team solutions and practices. Benjamin,
welcome to the invisible vault
Benjamin Seal: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be.
Daniel Shaffer: So, Benjamin, before he became an award-winning treasury leader, you had some interesting ideas about where you would land. Can you tell us about your initial career path?
Benjamin Seal: Yeah, I started off taking classes actually in high school as for a bookkeeping class. And then that developed with Excel. And then I ended up landing a position as an accounts receivable analyst. And from there I've always been focused on efficiencies and improving change. I've never been in those individuals that have focused on we've always done it this way, or if it's broken, don't fix it.
So along that way, with that desire to learn and grow both professionally and or personally and professionally, it led me into various positions within organizations up to credit manager. And. lead to a director of treasury position. About four years ago, I always thought I would be a plant controller one day.
That's what I was primarily focused on, but you know, my current boss saw the opportunity and the drive I had and offered me a position, either a plant controller or a treasurer position within Cenveo. And I chose treasury what I perceive to be the greater learning opportunity, as well as having a greater impact on the company..
Daniel Shaffer: That's a great segue into my question. I thought what's really special about being a treasurer. There's a lot of aspects and finance that, you mentioned controller accounting, treasury at plant manager on a higher level organizational management position. what stood out for you, as being a treasurer?
Benjamin Seal: Well, I think treasury, especially finance provides a greater degree of opportunity and flexibility and you become a strategic partner within the business, you know, allowed me to hone into my creativity while strengthened relationships with our vendors by producing win-win compromises. Whereas, in previous positions it was always focused on just a win situation.
So I liked the opportunity of branching out and working with other companies, like I said, in win-win compromises and having a greater impact on the company as a whole.
Daniel Shaffer: Yeah. So you really have the ability as a treasurer to partner with other business leaders reach across the organization. And as a global organization at Cenveo, that reach extends pretty far. Tell me do you enable your business peers, in terms of really owning that role of strategic partner to the business and individual business units.
How does treasury do that? And how do you envision that as a leader of treasury?
Benjamin Seal: I'll quote Mike Tyson for a minute. You know, Mike Tyson always said everybody had a plan until they get punched in the face. And the same concept applies to business as well. Every business has a plan until something goes awry, which exactly what COVID shown us as treasuries. This is why treasure is a key strategic business partner.
We partner with individuals throughout the company, from the operations to the purchasing department to shared services . To even then down that lower level plant level to stay forward, focusing, ensuring that the company has the capital, it needs to manage the day-to-day operations. You know, the thing I like to say is without treasury?
it would be similar to walking the woods at night without a flashlight.
You might get there, but it's going to take a lot longer.
Daniel Shaffer: I like the Mike Tyson analogy. Everything changes as soon as you get punched in the face. It really is true. you don't know what you are able to produce, until you have that shock until there's something that dramatically has changed the direction velocity of your life or your career or, of the business.
And what we saw just in the last couple of years was one of those massive and unprecedented shocks. We're all coming out of it now with a little bit more understanding. And I think our next section really helps us address So this next section is called cash crossroads. Benjamin. How do you leverage data differently now versus maybe one, two, or even just as soon as five years ago?
Benjamin Seal: we're constantly looking. We're looking at the past. We're looking at the future. I mean, You know, during the pandemic, everything changed for us. We didn't know. You know, some of our customers we're going to continue their sales or when those sales were actually going to come back into the company. So we were consistently reforecast and forecasting.
So one of the big things we had done was we embraced technology as a whole, which allows us to continually to adapt. You know, we have anywhere from three to four models at any point in time going in, which we're going to continue to do, because you just don't know if another COVID 19 is going to hit or some other impact of the business is going to is right around the corner.
So we have, like I said, three to four model forecast, which is an ultra conservative, and expected which is going to be the norm based on what we is for what's really going to happen. And then an aggressive model. And we present that to management to kind of give them guidance on how we foresee the future is going to happen in the next quarter to year..
Daniel Shaffer: So it sounds like you have a vision for technology to enable your teams to produce multiple scenarios. those are just my words, but can you help me understand in your words, how your technology vision is?
Benjamin Seal: yeah. In the past we used Excel, like let's say probably still a significant number of companies, especially smaller companies, which really hinders the use for data modeling, especially when you want to do scenario analysis for larger amounts of data and or several different models. So we're continued to leverage the Kyriba platform for cash forecasting, which allows me to quickly adapt within, call it less than 10 minutes to change a forecast based on a perceived change.
And we're going to continue to leverage that and build different models and just change trying to move everything from what we're doing in Excel into Kyriba. one of the things we did too, was we were measuring our outstanding checks in Excel. And we were always off by variance. since then I've created a different report into Kyriba to capture my outstanding balance of checks at any point in time.
That way I know if all those checks come due today, what our true liquidity is going to be. And that's key, you know, continuing to leverage and continuing to look for ways to improve the technology that you have in place is
ideal, especially for going forward.
Daniel Shaffer: You talked about moving from Excel, Benjamin to some manual processes, I'm assuming, to a more digital platform and that enabled you and your team to provide more. What if scenario analysis.
And you also talked about cash forecasting. Can you tell me how important that cash forecasting element has been for you, your team, at Cenveo in addressing some of these recent shocks, like COVID-19 that you mentioned
Benjamin Seal: I'll take a step back to everything we had done in Excel, but Kyriba was a lot more than just cash forecasting. We leveraged the accounting platform of it, the cash accounting, where instead of having an individual, basically download everything from the web portal into Excel and then hand key it again.
You know, if you utilize the platform where it automatically connects to our ERP, and it gives that opportunity for that individual to just review the GL transactions versus constantly manually approving or manually entering them. This is key because it reduced that person's time from call it eight hours down to less than an hour, that gets imported into our ERP system and converts that person from being a data entry.
You know, key entry person into a person that's reviewing these transactions. So it increases the professionalism so we can utilize them elsewhere as well. And then it also increases our audit controls on that before you only had one person reviewing what this other person was manually doing now, Kyriba for the cash
accounting is utilizing the logic to, to assign the codes. And this individual's just reviewing. And then approve it. And then you still have that edit feature of the person that approves that as well. That's one that piece, the next piece, which is really key for us in achieving that 650 hours that we saved, and it continues when we continue to look like that, it looks like it's going to be a little bit more as well.
But the key to that was our payment processing. Before we used JD for Oracle or JD Edwards. And what we had to do was we'd run the program in the ERP and then we'd have to convert it several times from text to Excel and do multiple V lookups. And then at the end of the day, the key personnel would actually have to hand key that back into the ERP to pay.
And then that's when IT got involved to transmit the file to our bank. As you can see, it's a very manual process and time consuming.. What we do now is it's transmitted directly, almost automatically into Kyriba where we can identify the individual, invoices that we want to pay. And then we pay it.
I mean, we've got it down in the our first time doing it. I'm so excited about this. The very first time was less than 30 minutes from start to finish our very first day. And we can get this thing on good days under I'll call it 10 to five minutes. I mean, that is amazing for the amount of time savings.
And as quickly we can see exactly the impact on liquidity, which is key for everything. From this it does drive into our cash forecasting model and it updates that every single day, whereas everything we're doing in Excel previously..
Daniel Shaffer: that's amazing. And I mean you talk about going from a manual process to a digital process on a high level and you saved a 650 hours on an annual basis that you could rededicate to more strategic work, but it's that day-to-day input that you're enabling your team to be a little bit more strategic and kind of up-skill
their talent, what they really studied, not just being a data entry type of a person, but someone who actually brings value to the table and has happens to be able to unlock more strategic decision-making for the company. you talk about your cash forecast, the importance of putting that data from the ERP into your GL and allowing it to hit the cash forecast, on a regular basis.
Something that took multiple hours is reduced down to just five to 30 minutes. What is that significance of having that kind of, that data, that readiness at hand, in such a short amount of time to be able to impact your cash forecast on a regular basis?
Benjamin Seal: yeah, for the cash forecast. And like I said, it, you know, it comes over from the bank portal every day and it's uploaded, very quickly. I mean, you can call, like I said, . Like five to 10 minutes. That allows us to pivot where we need, whether we need to borrow right away or we can pay down, or we can look at other opportunities where we can take advantage of additional discounts.
You know, a lot of companies don't have that necessarily that flexibility because they don't have that vigilant to their cash almost instantly. Which we do. And it's a key resource that for management, because that was always a, I guess, a sticking point for them is they would ask about the liquidity for the day and we would have to wait and say, okay, you know, in between three and four, we can tell you and now we can tell them, you know, by 10 o'clock we know what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.
And we can make those recommendations and become that, that partner or strategic, source to make recommendations. On what we can do with idle cash.
Daniel Shaffer: that's really powerful The importance of making decisions in the same day and moving quickly in this economy seems to be underscored by the amount of people who, and companies who are moving to a digital transformation and a digital first vision for their company.
Benjamin, are you seeing benefits already in the short amount of time that you've been leveraging technology in this new way?
Benjamin Seal: oh, absolutely. I mean, it's the time saving your time has always money. And we look at those as to the soft savings that we had, but what we did with those soft savings at that time is we took on additional projects. You know, one of the biggest thing was, we ended up receiving $1 million from our COVID-19 business interruption claim that we had.
I mean, that was key. this wasn't a project that was a previously thought is a lost cause wasn't going to happen. But treasury took it on with the ability of the challenge. Let's look into this. We have the time we have the resource let's do this. And we received $1 million in Q4 this year for it.
I mean, that's just one small project. The next project, you know, treasuries, they might necessarily look at it, but if you're processing credit cards, diving into that net effective rate. I mean, that's a huge driver in savings and we were able to take on a project that is going to net out, a hundred thousand dollars in, savings on credit card processing this year for one of our subsidiaries.
I mean, it's massive amount of time that, we can dive into those nuances of credit card process and identify what we're doing wrong to improve it. And we wouldn't be able to do that if we didn't transfer to the digital platform.
Daniel Shaffer: so the digital platform has really giving you that ability to make those small, but very meaningful adjustments on a regular basis with inputs that enable your teams to move forward quickly, more effectively, and with a lot of cost savings, that's a great value and an excellent a justification for any CFO. I know you had your own approach to bringing the technology on board.
Could you share with our listeners maybe what you would advise, a CFO on the value of investing in and making tech decisions in real
Benjamin Seal: time?
If you're going to propose this to your CFO or your management team, you know, Krupa has a great value engineering team that can help you put a business case together to show you the ROI. We had the benefit of COVID at the time, management saw that we were doing, I'm going to call it up to 30 different forecast at any point in time.
And we were beginning our day, you know, four or five o'clock in the morning. And as late as 10 11 o'clock at night. trying to provide these models to our management. So they could update constantly with a board. They were having board calls. I believe it was week to update them on this.
So we did have that benefit to that. So our CFO was highly embracing the technology that change. The key to was that the fact, the value engineering team was able to provide an ROI to show our business case. So we could show what the benefits were that necessarily they weren't seeing that was outside of just cash forcasting.
Daniel Shaffer: Oh, that's fantastic to have a team partner up with you and really be able to take your vision to the next step. the value engineering team, as you were saying is benchmarking against a broad range of company. So just wasn't Cenveo data, but it was a global spectrum of thousands of data points that enabled the CFO.
To make a better, more informed decision at one that he had with, he could do with confidence. what we're going to go into now is what we call the playbook. And in the playbook, we get a little bit into some of your personal experiences, whether it's here at Cenveo or other companies in the past, that you were able to address certain areas within your profession around risk around fraud, and really how you were able to manage through that, challenge.
Benjamin, what does risk management mean to you?
Benjamin Seal: To me, risk management is identifying, monitoring and controlling possible threats to the business. It's a sense that essence is safeguarding and assets. It's looking for those vulnerable areas in the company to make sure that you're not vulnerable when you're protecting the company against these vulnerabilities or exposures, what areas of the business or within treasury or within finance, are you most concerned about?
you know, within treasury or within a company, there's several different areas of fraud, but most of the time what I'm really focused on is the ones where, people are, I don't want to say hacking, but they could possibly hack into the system, but basically what they're changing the bank account information, and they're transmitting that out.
Or, you know, you've got the possible for collusion. You know, those are the two items that are highly important to me, just to make sure that we're paying our vendors to the bank accounts that they need to be paid in. And that we're not we're paying exactly who we're expected to pay.
Daniel Shaffer: I don't know what the number of payments you're making on a monthly basis. Are you able to give any context to that without giving away too many of the family secrets?
Benjamin Seal: (laughing) we make daily payments and you know, some of those payments are as large as $1 million and as low as you know, call it $5,000. it's an astronomical number, to be honest with you that we look at on a daily basis. I want to say we review at least over 500 invoices each day, if not more than that.
So on an average, I would say, you're looking at, probably 300 plus if not more on a daily basis.
Daniel Shaffer: Oh, that's a huge volume of payments. And not only in, in terms of the quantitative, value of those payments, but also just the throughput and the number of payments that you're looking at. you mentioned fraud, how do you and your team really, take a deeper look at the potential threats to ensure that fraud is an issue for the company.
Benjamin Seal: well, when I first came on to treasury, you know, four years ago, one of the big things was fraud, updating the policies that themselves hadn't been looked at for quite some time, neither had the procedure. So that's the very first to tackle is to update those, to know what is expected.
Next is. Truly reviewing it with your treasury team and even your AP team, even the AR team to make sure everybody understands what the policies are, And then the next step is to periodically test that. And I don't mean that like, you know, back in grade school when you're, answering ABC, I mean, truly do a scenario test to see if you can create your own fraud.
and that only goes so far because ultimately the fraudsters, they have the focus on trying to create the fraud, for their gain. And so you're trying to eliminate those opportunities for them. So the next step is to look at your systems to make sure that you're compliant using the multi-factor tools.
And then, you know, you have to look towards technology to see if you can eliminate some of the more risks. You can only go so far with the.
manual process.
Daniel Shaffer: So in terms of looking at some of those tools to help you eliminate risks, do you find that AI and machine learning are technologies that are helpful, today, in your field? Or are you looking at other opportunities to just add people, and have more hours on the job as opposed to technology, finding a solution for you.
Benjamin Seal: Adding more people in hours never the solution.
In my opinion, anyway, the focusing on the machine learning with AI is key, and that's what we're looking at doing now. Actually this month, we'll be implementing a fraud tool from that Kyriba has. It's the only way to truly, save the company money without incurring additional expenses related to it.
And that's always an easy sell to management. I mean, not trying to disclose too much, but for that fraud tool, it doesn't just look for the fraud itself. It looks for accidentals, I'm going to say, but duplicate payments. And we had an incident in, I believe was October of this year that we had a duplicate payment go through.
And it was, you know, thousands of dollars. Actually over a hundred thousand dollars. So, so we lost some money just on the, on that just for the time value of money and then some fees as well. And luckily our vendor, notified us almost immediately and we were able to get that money back, but there's a savings, if your vendors aren't honest, that could have cost, you know, Cenveo time and money because we didn't catch it right away.
And that's what this tool is designed to do. Not only just for fraud, but also just human error.
Daniel Shaffer: thanks for sharing that example. I think that I've heard many examples like that, and those are the ones that they're aware of, as in your career, I'm sure you've heard from your peers and colleagues at different conferences that you've attended that, there's been write downs at the end of the year, where there really wasn't a good explanation for why or where that money went.
And when you have technology, that's able to track, trace and alert, you and your team to those payments and to confirm any suspicious payments or duplicate payments, what a relief that must be.
Benjamin Seal: Yeah, it's interesting. I was able to attend AFP conference in Washington, DC in November, and Kyriba actually had a great presentation on fraud. And, that was I guess the consensus around the room was, you know, you're definitely not the only one that's happened to this and they're focusing on policies
and proper procedures to do it. And one of the things that we did as a company, and this is just like, so just the manual step was, I would say two years ago, we ended up having a fraudulent email that resulted in the banking change and our AP team at the time did a wonderful job still trying to mitigate this by calling the individual company up.
The problem is that use the email or the phone number in the email. And never raises a question. So what we did at that point was, you know, it requires two individuals peoples to confirm on the phone and you can not use, obviously the phone numbers in an email. You have to find it through Google. You have to use also the invoices that you have from previous times that you've paid, they've gone through, perfectly, but, you know, that's an example of, you can put all the policies and procedures in place and it can still happen to you.
It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when it's going to happen. So, embracing the technology, that's going to help you catch these one-offs and to confirm that everything's been done accordingly to the policies is key
Daniel Shaffer: Yeah, I think to your point and the AFP has been a great organization to help treasurers and finance professionals throughout the years to stay vigilant and to have kind of best practices showcased not only in training, but also in thought leadership. I think a recent report they put out on fraud, indicated that over 80% of all companies, will be the victims of attempted fraud with a very high success rate.
And, that's a daunting number. I know everyone's aware of it and have heard it over the. Probably one that they hope never happens, but like you said, it's really not an, if it's just a when. So being vigilant and having technology to help you protect your system is probably a better place to be than not.
I'd love to hear more about your vision, about the next generation of finance leaders.
And in this section called the report from the future.So here's a couple of questions for you, Benjamin, on your peers and those folks coming up in the ranks. What does the next generation of finance leaders need to become a treasurer?
Benjamin Seal: you know, I'm still, I still consider myself a young professional. I've only been in treasury for going on four years now I have obtained my CTP and continuing to look towards embracing more certifications as well then to stay up to date. But all what I would recommend on the next generation of finance leaders will just stay up to date on the technology because it's ever changing and you need to embrace that.
And not only that becoming innovators, you know, always challenged the norm and you can do that now, constantly look into your company and avoid The phrases of it's always been done that way or don't fix something that's not broken, constantly questioned, constantly look for those solutions for question that no one has asked yet, because eventually they're going to, and if you have that solution already, that's going to put you one step above your peers.
Daniel Shaffer: Oh, that's great advice. And I really appreciate that theme and thread of continuous process improvement in your personal and professional career. It sounds like it's the north star for you and one that's helped you and your teams have become an award-winning treasury team. How do you feel the.
Kind of artificial intelligence as it relates to finance. I know you've shared with us a little bit about your thoughts about AI and ML related to fraud. Do you see an opportunity for AI to be a partner, to treasury and finance leaders in the future?
Benjamin Seal: absolutely. I mean, it's partner now and it's going to continue to be a partners as it continues to grow and more technology is developed in that area. It's not going away. That's the key is it's not going away. You need to embrace it because, you know, like I said, we need to be innovators and be on the forefront of that technology because that's, what's going to drive the efficiencies in the company.
Daniel Shaffer: Are there other. Emerging technologies, Benjamin that you think will make a significant impacts for finance.
Benjamin Seal: there's technology advantages emerging every single day. And like I said before, as the AI, you know, when you're looking at robotic processor or RPAs, you know, specifically, I would say intelligent automation, you know, those are. I mean with intelligent automation includes the machine learning or the natural language processing where,
It depends on the algorithms that have the ability to learn and to gain experience. I don't think it's quite there yet, but it is going to be key in driving efficiencies within the company improving. Like I said before it's not going away. We need to embrace it, but I definitely am interesting to, to watch that one.
grow..
Daniel Shaffer: awesome. Love it. Listen, a let me just ask an easy softball question for you. What's your favorite podcast?
Benjamin Seal: Obviously it's the visible vault.
Daniel Shaffer: I love that answer. Excellent.
Benjamin Seal: then y'all, I'll throw this one into, yeah, obviously it's invisible vaultI do like the information to stay in front for the technology, but on the second one, I do love the lore. I love the, just the information and the history of it. So
Daniel Shaffer: that's great. I haven't heard of that one. I'll definitely check it out. What is the future of digital currencies? Are we going to use Bitcoin or are we going to look for cash as the permanent king in this situation?
Benjamin Seal: you know, I definitely think currencies are beginning to be in developed and it's going to, I don't know if it's going to be something, be the digital currencies with Bitcoin and so forth. I think in my opinion, there's still a lot to be developed in that area. And it'll be interesting to see how things change, but it's not going away either, it's just, how's it going to be involved with treasury and finance?
Daniel Shaffer: Yeah, we're not trading on a digital currencies at the moment, but being prepared to do so in, in the future seems eminent.
I don't know how you're going to trade on or exchange a digital currency that fluctuates so rapidly, that'll definitely require technology to manage that.
Two more questions for you. Whose primary role is the ownership and optimization of liquidity and finance.
Benjamin Seal: It's treasure of the company and the CFO in my opinion we've been talking about a, like a chief liquidity officer as a future role and function and. Comes back time and time again, to exactly what you just said, Benjamin that, depending on the size of the organization, it could be the treasurer. And most likely it's the CFO. I will be interesting as a a focus in your words.
Daniel Shaffer: To continually challenge the status quo and have a new practice around the optimization of liquidity. Do you see that as a possibility or do you feel like that is already being done on a regular basis?
Benjamin Seal: There's always room for improvement. And I definitely liked the idea of the chief liquidity officer. It would definitely kind of, definitely be additional resource for, you know, the board directors and your CEO was, I could definitely see that being a possibility in the future. I mean, it really is.
Especially as companies grow larger, they want, they need that. I guess that information in that, that individual who can effectively communicate what they're seeing in the future
Daniel Shaffer: all right. Last question for you, Benjamin are treasurers in your industry, peers or competitors?
Benjamin Seal: Peers, I never look at so as someone's competitor, because, you know, we should always be sharing the information and the resources that we have to build each other up. It's the only way we get ahead and to stay up to date is by communicating and working together.
Daniel Shaffer: Benjamin. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you today, learning about your continuous process improvement and your interest in challenging the status quo. Not just for the sake of being different, but really to find a better way to solve a problem at hand. And also, as you said to be prepared when someone else asks you a question that hasn't been asked, if you've already done the work you're ready to go and you can move forward without a pause.
Congratulations again, on your great treasury and risk Alexander Hamilton award. It's been a pleasure talking with you again. Thanks Benjamin
Benjamin Seal: Thank you, Daniel. It's been a pleasure as well. And I said, I'm grateful to be able to be on the invisible vault. Thank you so much again.
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