AFP Boston Overview 2025
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Michael Kane: It's been a great experience, a lot of connectivity out there with certain finance professionals. Some of the banking folks have been great to connect with. I think overall, everyone's very open to conversation. 

Ali Curi: Hi everyone and welcome to Treasury Conversation. I'm Ali Curi at AFP Boston, treasury and finance leaders came together at a time of growing complexity and uncertainty. Across a series of conversations recorded during the conference, we asked attendees what stood out, what challenges are top of mind, and how expectations around technology, data and leadership are evolving. As a longstanding partner to treasury teams globally, ION spends a lot of time listening to these conversations. This overview brings those perspectives together using the voices of attendees themselves to capture what mattered most at AFP Boston and what it points to next.

Let's get started.

One theme that came up immediately was pressure on treasury teams to do more with less. 

Steve Coglianese: I would say probably one of the main things I keep hearing is around automation, so a lot of our clients, a lot of treasury teams are lean. They're small teams that are tasked with doing a lot of various functions to help support cash management throughout the organization.

And so because they are tasked with doing a lot of things and don't have a large team, they're looking at automating the more manual tasks that they have to perform each day. And so we're hearing a lot of clients coming in asking us, what can you do for us in terms of relieving some of the manual work. 

Ali Curi: The topic that came up most often, of course, AI. Let's take a listen. 

Ryan Leacock: Yeah. So early in the morning, yesterday, I attended a session on Agentic AI. And I think for me personally, it was the understanding of like, when you're bringing on agents into your workflow that you would actually treat it as if it were a junior employee joining for the first time.

So one of those things is context is key. So providing whatever that data is, whatever that context is, in order to get that agent up and running you should have that in a good, clean state and in order for it to produce something of value.. And then the second one would be like guardrails. So like guard rails are non-negotiable.

In that session they were discussing like, you have sub-agents that are keeping the agents that are actually providing the value on task and there's validation and show your work and the background of like, how did you get to this answer? How did come to this conclusion and how did you execute whatever that workflow that task is.

And the third one speaking of it as if it were like a junior employee, it's start small and then scale from there. Being with like low risk, things that you know the answer of, things that you've done, hundreds of times that are repeatable and you send the task to the agent.

Ali Curi: That same practicality that attendees discussed about AI also showed up in conversations about forecasting. 

Ryan Dame: Yeah, I think one of the big takeaways was when you think about your forecasting process and what you're trying to achieve, you need to really think about making sure you have the right questions upfront.

What are we trying to achieve? What are our bolts? A great point that was made was, I have a forecast and it's pretty accurate. Maybe it's 90% accurate if I want to get 2% more accurate. How much is that gonna cost? How much am I gonna have to spend in maybe technology or effort to get that 2%?

And how much would it actually cost me if I didn't get that 2% accurate? So I'm actually leaving a bit more cash as a buffer, or maybe I have to borrow in an extreme case, how much is that costing versus the spend to get that extra 2%? And thinking about that upfront. And it was a good point because you can always analyze and go through and refine processes and spend more on technology, but at the end of the day does it matter?

Do you really need to go that far? 

Ali Curi: Looking beyond day-to-day execution, several conversations focused on where the market is heading. 

Laurens Tijdhof: I think the area of treasury and and risk is really developing in the last couple of years. And if we move forward and if we look towards 2030 and beyond, we really see three big trends happening in the market.

First one is about digitalization, second trend is about tokenization. And the third trend is, of course, the elephant in the room about AI. So if we dig a bit deeper in these three trends, then first of all, digitalization. It's an ongoing trend, eh? We see a lot of clients working on automating their organization processes and implementing new systems really to get the basic right first, as a development for the things that are happening in the future.

And the things we see in the future, on the one hand, we see tokenization. So in the US we have seen the genius acts implemented quite recently. And I think that made a big shift in the markets towards stable coins, digital assets, a lot of things that will be happening in the treasury space in the coming years.

And we see our corporate clients as well as financial, institutional clients being responding to that trend. And last but not least, of course, AI. I think since the big introduction of Chat GPT, I think a big move is happening in the market. Everybody wants to understand what it is and how to prepare it for this future, and we are helping a lot of clients in these areas correctly as we speak.

Ali Curi: Across all of these themes, one idea kept resurfacing, leadership. To close out this overview, we look ahead. Here's Derek DiPerna, Chief Revenue Officer at ION Treasury on what he's hearing from treasury teams and what it means going forward.

Derek DiPerna: It is a great event. There's many different attendees. There's a lot of traffic on the floor, there's a lot of traffic at our booth, and I see common themes coming throughout.

Some of those themes are the needs that all of the different professionals here need the challenges they have both present and future. And then clearly where they're going in the future with their different the products and business they support.

On the needs side, there's a few key themes that are coming out. In a treasury system, the need for real time visibility for different payments and cash management. There's need for AI driven analytics and forecasting. There's different needs for payment management. And then of course a really interesting theme when you sit and you have a coffee with a customer, a partner, a prospect, is the leadership sometimes in, in times of volatility, geopolitical volatility, the leadership teams need to lead and they need to come together. They need to set a vision for their company and for their treasury systems and really show where we need to go from here in times of uncertainty. 

Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their perspectives at AFP Boston, including Laurens Tijdhof from Zanders, Michael Kane from AON, and members of the ION Treasury team.

And thanks to all the attendees whose conversations shaped the themes you heard in this overview. Thank you for listening.