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welcome and thank you for joining our session adapting to new payment types and interfaces while balancing the need for speed and security we hope that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy and appreciate you taking the time to join us today 2020 has introduced several new and unprecedented in corporate Treasury operations which have accelerated many payment initiatives already in the works today our presenters from axletree solutions Treasury strategies and travelers insurance will dive into these challenges and the payments and connectivity improvements needed in 2020 our presenters today included Larry Mills VP and assistant treasurer at travelers insurance and Ruggero SVP strategic solutions at AXA tree solutions and Jeff Diorio director & co head of Treasury strategies a couple of housekeeping items before we get started this session will be about an hour long with time for Q&A at the end we encourage you to ask questions using the Q&A window at the bottom of your screen and we will respond at the end of the session if time allows or via email after the session this webinar is also being recorded and you will receive a recording link and a copy of the presentation following the session with that I will turn it over to Jeff thank you so much Katie and thank you everybody for joining I know in this new reality we're all living in it's hard to get good information and good content and at the same time there's so much information and content out there so thank you for joining us today as Katie mentioned we've sort of brought three very different points of view to this topic Larry's a practitioner he's a treasurer one of the good guys and we'll we'll bring the travelers perspective to things as well as he's he's very well networked with other treasures so he'll bring in just a general treasury perspective and he's a technologist I've known Andy a long time and you know his specialty and his firm's specialty is in payments and connectivity so he's got the technology approach and I'm an advisor and - can - Treasury's helping them with both their strategic plans for how they're going to execute on these things and then the execution of those plans so we think throughout the presentation you're going to get three you know different perspectives to really help frame this this well while we're presenting the information we really do want you to participate we're going to have a few surveys so that people can give their thoughts we're also going to take Q&A because we hope that there will be some follow-on from this for all of you with that our agenda today is to go over some of the drivers that are causing people to focus on this then we'll step into the the connectivity or the the communication protocols and the formed payment format landscape so so options that you have then Larry will talk about the perspective of a treasurer with respect to this and some of the viewpoints that he has finally we'll get to conclusions in QA we really do hope that you will take advantage of the Q&A and we will try to address your questions so drivers in 2020 at the beginning of the year Treasury strategies every year has been doing a state of the Treasury profession study and we do both an online survey and then a whole bunch of interviews and bring some other ideas into it this year as we were doing it we presented you know we sort of prepare in December January in February and we were just getting into covent pretty heavy duty in the United States when we did the presentation the initial slide we're looking at here is around what forces were impacting Treasury and Finance and I find it very interesting because you know there were geopolitical factors like ovid which had definitely reared its head by the time we did the presentation but you can see recession concerns well I think we're beyond recession concerns at this point but one of the top eight was new technologies a lot of focus and attention especially proactive attention was on new technologies that were out there new payment technologies new ways for communicating messaging and and so top eight it was a top eight item and some of these were a higher level than others for instance the liable replacement this year most organizations were really focused on identifying where they were exposed to liable and next year they're going to be working on what the replacement is all about another item to touch on on the on the right hand side here is corporate actions have changed but but they do cause a lot of organizations to focus on improving their payment technologies and of course fraud attempts and bad actors are another very very important concern so no matter what you're thinking of with respect to faster payments the need for speed security and control have got to be a predominant part of your thinking here and you're gonna be pushed and I think Larry you're gonna talk about this but you're gonna be pushed by your organization's to adopt certain things and they're great I mean there are very very exciting things going on around payments but at the same time you need to maintain some level of control because the bad actors are just champing at the bit to find ways to get your money and and so that always has to be factored in one of the things we did as part of the study was to ask treasurers hey what are you focused on in 2020 and and this was really interesting because this was done just you know we started the surveys in December we just started hearing about kovat by then and and so a lot of these items were given to us not with the filter of while working from home and you know I've got distributed Treasury and Finance operations at this point in time and you can see that we've we've highlighted some areas here you can see that many of these areas do pertain to faster payments but they were in place it was almost like treasures were prescient and and you know to finance CFOs repression in what they were focusing on and what we found is that the pandemic has essentially injected rocket fuel into many of these initiatives so while it's it's not a very nice reason why they've become more important I think a lot of organizations are focusing on doing things better that we're on the Shelf and those initiatives it became apparent why they were more important you can see here we've got new technologies highlighted a lot of people were focusing on working capital improvements and looking to leverage some new technologies around that and that would be for pasture faster payments and faster receivables moving away from paper being a big big part of it but also validating that you know the monies were in the right place and then there's a slew of new technologies and I think every aspect of what we heard in the new technology side is pertinent to this conversation you'll see API is in here that comes up a lot changes to payments well it was it was you know one of this one of the five categories that people talked about you can see it's the longest list real-time payments are something that everybody's focused on non-bank payments are becoming more and more popular and both popular and challenging so I think I think there's that's very much doulas sword where it's great but it also comes with some concerns and I think Larry and Andy can talk to that and then and then on Treasury as a key business partner Treasury and Finance are being asked the Treasury more so to to be an adviser organization-wide in the payments and risk mitigation and they think it's very important to recognize that there's a very positive aspect to some of the new technologies and new capabilities and there's higher risk associated with them especially with the fact that we're moving to real time and once you press that button the money's gone in many cases so you know with some of the older established methods for doing things you you you had the opportunity perhaps if you figured out something was going someplace it shouldn't go to get the money back but with the newer technologies you've got to spend a lot more time and focus upfront making sure that the right things are going to happen because after the button is pressed in many cases the money's gone Andy and Larry any thoughts on this yeah this sandy is so certainly as you mentioned around the new payment technologies you've seen over over the course of time over probably from the emergence of the odd last year and a little bit beyond that a lot of these non payment technologies is coming to the fore right you seeing them here in terms of N Moselle PayPal which typically been a peer-to-peer p2p type of type of payment solution but those are also expanded into the world of treasury of Finance right because the need there is to is obviously attained speed right you know we want to be able to pay pay our customers quicker and also be paid quicker right but as you said a bit earlier on we need to obviously temper that we've kind of some of the checks and balances that we need to have in place to make sure that even with speed we also don't give up the concept of control right very good point yeah yep I just Larry hey go ahead Larry just I wanted to add as far as just from a from a travelers perspective I think everyone on this on this webinar is on a transformation journey and travelers is no different our CEO has talked a lot about we have to perform and we have to transform and with that transformation or an innovation journey we know that we need to be customer focused so a travellers we when it comes time to our custom focusing on our customers in simple terms we want to pay them the way they want to be and we want them to be able to pay us the way they want to pay us so that's we've embarked on a significant journey to achieve those objectives and looking forward to sharing more as we go through the webinar on that and that's interesting that you say that Larry because I mean in terms of you know being able to pay your customers the way they need to be paid and being paid that you want to be the way you want to be paid I mean that's obviously driving down the path obviously you want to be paid quickly right and your customers want to be paid quickly and they wonder if you want to also make sure in many cases that your suppliers as well right that your suppliers that you're you're paying are paid on time because you know if you have one of your suppliers who who are having challenges with their finances that really doesn't help your business right especially if it's kind of one of your your-your-your predominant suppliers so it's very interesting that you that that initiative has been being launched at travelers I think it's gonna is a very very bold initiative thanks Andy very good very good so and then of course Cove it happened and we did a follow up series of studies and analysis and webinars on the topic and this is a slide from one of them and in the beginning a lot of organizations were focused on getting as much liquidity as they could we sort of moved beyond that a lot of organizations then we're focusing on working capital management because in many cases working capital turned upside down we have many clients Salieri's you know with and insurer I've talked to a lot of the hospitals and other organizations out there and you know they've done what they had to do fortunately many of our clients are in ok shape they're not thrilled with what's going on but they're also going but but finally organizations were focusing on addressing the risks and we're well into this at this point and this is where the rubber meets the road because so many companies figured out that the paper was causing them a lot of issues and they were finding ways as quickly as possible in a secure and intelligent way to move away from paper and I know the bankers have been very very busy helping their clients do this and some of the other services out there so I think while it's been a remit that organizations have focused on for a long time now we're really seeing it gets some some traction and some acceleration and so another reason why we're doing this webinar is to make sure that you're fully informed as to many of the options that are out there ok now we're going to talk about what the landscape is for both the communication tools for you to communicate with so we're calling those communication protocols and the message formats and and the reason we are distinctly splitting those two up is sometimes the conversation gets muddled and and so Andy please take us through this part of the presentation thank you thanks Jeff and so as we have just mentioned this is where we're talking a little bit more about the landscape in which you know actual tree ourselves operates in I'm quite heavily so the connectivity protocols and we're not just going to be talking about you know a bank connectivity and non bank connectivity we're also going to be talking about some of those those formats and some of the latest slides that we have to we have to consider so when we talking about connectivity protocols it says in the name right he's basically trade and connecting from from you as a customer to your bank and most recently to non-bank communications but when we look at the top right here so the SFTP so that's kind of been your traditional traditional communication between a corporation and a bank and that's usually been establishing a one-to-one communication between between a corporation and a bank and kind of be more of a legacy if you like a means of communication if you follow the yellow line here over to to just to sweat swifters basically in one of those networks where all of your banks can plug into and that was the purpose the concept there and the purpose was to move away if you like from some of these these are host the host or direct connections to the banks because at the end of the day from an efficiency standpoint it was the the corporation that had to maintain those right and you know just some of the stories that that I've heard of over my career about you know the SFTP is down we need to restart it those are things which are basically added an overhead writes an overhead in terms of efficiencies and so as we drive towards um towards swift swift was there to is there and it's been around for you know 45 50 years now it's basically providing a network in which all of your bank's can can connect and as we go down and to the right here that darker blue blue arrow we've seen over the course of the last few years the emergence of api's so a number of banks have launched these api's which allow you to allow a customer to connecting to a bank that either send or receive data that could be your balance reporting it could be sending and receiving payments and notifications through those those connections but what that does require it requires someone to also maintain maintain those API connections that we'll talk talk a little bit more later on in the slides about you know some of the challenges that you may face in terms of doing that right but api's have kind of emerged as a means of a getting away from that that token centric platform that people have to log on to that your team has to log on to to actually pull down statements or upload payments it also allows you to move away from that that concept of of SFTP so dropping a file into a secure file transfer location but what does that also do it does add some challenges or of maintenance right and as Larry said in in the prior slides here and we seeing the emergence of of the the non-bank and communication where you're basically good utilizing that that peer-to-peer network we use them as an example that was basically created an entire network where the banks themselves are plugged into it right so where you can basically send and receive money instantly but is through the Zell network rather than through through the banking network so we've seen to the emergency of some of these these technologies are kind of operating outside of the banking network right also the likes of blockchain emerged over the last few years in terms of in terms of providing a network that can communicate our payments more from the cross-border payment standpoint but certainly that has been emergent and some of the household names that we we've come to know such as MasterCard even they have in that space right and so we've seen kind of that shift in terms of the landscape in terms of how we're how we're able to communicate a without banks and B with the castles on the other side of of those banks in terms of initiating payments any thoughts you have there Larry or or death on any of these items hi it's Jeff you know it is interesting so I go back gosh I go back to the old modem days where you were dialing up a bank now there were somewhat standard formats but it was an individual connection the SFTP is very very popular because it's somewhat inexpensive and not that difficult to put in the problem does become you have multiple connections that have to be maintained and that's where Swift came in as a very nice way to have a secure communication with your banks over a well respected network and it was a single-point api's are you know both how do you connect with the bank's API which is what we're talking about here and then in the formatting section we'll talk about what's in the API that's moving us back towards more of a point-to-point connection which while providing hopefully a very secure way to do things in it the api's could use something like blockchain as as a mechanism but it is a complicated framework to consider all the options and since most of you listening are probably being pushed towards some of these non-bank payments you have to consider how you communicate with them as well and that's a very pertinent part of this conversation I think we're going to get into some of the considerations for this in the next slide Larry do you have anything to add before we move on oh you covered a Jeff Thank You great so as we go to the next slide here we've got a bit of a Venn diagram here but it's basically some of the considerations that you need to take into account when we're whenever selecting any type of protocol right and so we have to consider in terms of its reliability we've seen that over the course of of our engagement with our customers that they that volume volume and performance is always a consideration particularly when you start talking about initiating payments that are high in volume may not necessarily high necessarily be high in terms of in terms of value but there's a lot of volume so you're thinking about your AP things they are penguins things of that nature so you want to have a systems gonna be highly reliable right so it's going to be able to perform in a way that you want it to perform also from an availability standpoint you want that percentage of of uptime to be very high you want to send payments when you want to send payments you don't want to have to have to wait to send your payments because again that's chewing into your ability to be efficient as we talked about earlier at the top of the top of the call in terms of security we want we need a solution of security because those bad actors as Jeff rightly puts it out there kind of waiting and looking for an opportunity I mean those bad actors are opportunists so any sort of loophole that they can exploit they will go ahead and exploit it going a bit over to the right here when we're talking about controls right you want to be able to have have exert some level of control in terms of who has access to to that particular protocol how do we maintain access how do we audit who's doing what on our on our particular payment platforms or solutions right and so that's also something that you need to consider when you're looking at any of these types of protocols that you're going to adopt you're certainly to take those into consideration and then finally down to the maintenance is how they be maintained is there are they certain windows of maintenance in terms of being updated how are you basically receiving those types of updates because again you don't want to be in a situation where downtime is affecting your ability to be efficient yeah and I also look at maintenance as - depending on upon which which channels you use you know your your internal maintenance requirements for keeping them functioning and setting them up and of course is new banks or new providers are connected you need to add and maintain them so there there could be a fairly significant requirement there which impacts cost but it also all of this is tied in with Larry's point about it's it's all part of the need for speed you need it to be fast but at the same time you need it to be secure and not overly burdensome to mean a mean game and also top of that I mean when we talk about that maintenance just as we were talking about that kind of maintenance of of the other individual API connections we'll talk about this in a little while and on this particular webinar but that may not necessarily be something that a corporation will want to do themselves right and so so that's also needs to be considered if we happen to there's a bunch of api's out there I mean there's an API for pretty much everything so you know being able to maintain those in an efficient way so that you could leverage the at the right and proper time is also a consideration you need to take into account great and now we move over to formats Andy so we've talked about how you communicate with between yourself and your counterparties the banks and others and besides the communication but this is the formatting part what our message types are you using absolutely so so you know we've talked about the we talked about the the how now we're talking about the what oh sorry I've done something silly okay let me move backwards here perfect now we're talking about the what right so so this is basically the the the file formats of message formats that you'll be communicating with with a with your your banks and so if you took go to the top left here again through that SFTP connection is typically a file centric a false entry means of communication right the format you'll be communicating is some level of fun you see that we've added a couple of examples here right the Pai EDI those are typically a domestic kind of domestic type of file that you would be dropping into an SFTP SFTP site for either communicating backward or forward right between yourselves and your banks now I'm gonna go down to the left here with the MT because the empty message which is you know message type which is more of a switch centric message type basically allows you to communicate messages over the Swift Network utilize that a standard format so it's a standard suitable format right and you can see with IDs examples here of the MT 100 series support no more of the payment initiation the MT 906 series it supports all of the balanced reporting but those are structured messages so they have to be defined in a particular way for it to even be added to the Swift Network transportation now also through Swift you can sir instant files I won't get into necessarily the swift thin and firelight protocols but you can also transmit files all over Swift but when we're talking about kind of the MT message that is a specific stretch format that's a structured type of message up and to the right here this yellow yellow arrow this is basically been the emergence right the emergence over the last few years of a more of a global standard so if you look at the the left-hand side of the file and Mt the ISO 20 or 22 is basically in a standard that's been emerging as that Universal standard that should be and will be used to replace some of these legacy formats yeah Andy and I want to point out that these are formats so you can a lot of banks were like you know when they're saying send us payment type they can accept any of these over any channel and and then of course we get to the the api's and that's something I think that is that is exciting and it's new so it's a little embryonic and and I'm sure you and especially Larry have some thoughts around api's yes certainly I mean I should we say hey with the concept of api's and and some of those new new initiatives they're driving towards that ISO 20 or 22 right that's basically the standard of choice when communicating any sort of message it's richer in nature right then then you'd then empty right so you get a lot more information as you said at the top of the the call where you had some of your early slides where you were looking at um business intelligence and dashboards being a driver right you know if you can get more richer data some richer data on which you can build your dashboards or do some business intelligence that allows you to actually have better insights right into basically what's going on as it relates to the API is I'd say the API is right now mix back there mixed bag of the types of formats so while they're driving towards ISO you're still you know I'm able to send some of the legacy formats through the API so you know I don't want to use the determinant we've talked about the Wild West but you know it is really going back to sort that embryonic like you've mentioned an evolutionary on stage or state when it comes to to API so I think that is definitely going to consent in you in the trajectory that is going in terms of evolving but there's still work to do I feel in that particular area Larry your thoughts on API yeah I mean I was gonna say Jeff is is especially in the space of what we call it travellers financial transactions or transmitting payment instructions I mean as I've learned more about api's and I've heard our experts talk api's are really in some regard nothing new when it comes time to an application programming interface between systems where it gets interesting is when there are payment instructions being transmitted and this is new and the risk is bigger my my background prior to Treasury was enterprise risk management and we focused a lot on operational risk and three classic reasons or exposures for operational risk according to Basel or change complexity and complacency and so you just we at travelers are going in with eyes wide open that we understand the exposures what we're exposing our company to as we make this change and and create another way to submit instantaneous payment instructions to our bank as you said Jeff at the beginning once you hit Send it's gone yeah now I'm very excited about api's because a lot of people are telling me that they they're really looking forward to the richer data and communication that it provides and that you know they felt somewhat constrained before but the banks will be able to give them back information and we're hearing this both from the bankers and the treasurer's there's there's a tremendous opportunity to have better communication and information especially around of all aspects not just payment initiation but all aspects of communication on the topic at the same time it becomes you know the the other side of it is that it's almost like a one-to-one format you're going away from something nice and standard like an EDI or or an ISO 20022 and and and you might be going back to a institution by institution format which is something that both provides extra value in some cases but it also adds a lot of complexity and on that point I think it will change the slide now on purpose and talk about some of the considerations Andy absolutely so when you are considering some of those formats one of some of the things that you need to take into consideration is basically the source so what data you're getting from your source system and that in many cases could be a legacy system and we certainly know with them with the banks that the banks themselves have have a number of legacy systems where they're slow to change right it's gonna be love to change and so it makes it difficult to to obviously model make modifications in those particular systems and then you also need to consider the destination and this is where you're starting to make that bridge if you like between collectivity like we talked about earlier formats and then the ability to transform data from one one format to another in all to achieve that straight through processing but also one of the considerations that has emerged more more and more now is the longevity right if we look at just the concept of the of the MT messages they they have a a life cycle where they're going to be decommissioned in the next four or five years right and then the emergence of the MX or the ISO twenty or thirty two is gonna take effect right but in terms of the the longevity you should consume you should consider how long any of these formats are going to be in place for because this type of exercise isn't something that any organization wants to do often in terms of having to transform if you like from from one system to another so it's something that should definitely be enough in ours no it's not in the back of your mind is probably not necessary in the forefront it's kind of in the center where you should be considering in terms of the the formats where it's coming from where it's going to and how long that type of format is going to be available yeah yeah and I'm sure Andy's gonna talk a little about payment hubs and that sort of thing cuz many companies are talking about that all lay the groundwork here for it Larry with a with softball I know of one of the cities one of the significant financial institutions that was urged by the Federal Reserve and others to really put some better systems in place and they put a payment hub in place where absolutely every payment globally for that organization ran through this thing and it was a massive multi-million dollar multi-year project and investment and by the time they got done putting it in place and it is truly incredible by the time they got done putting it in place it it was already out of date and so the longevity of the investment is something you need to think about agreed in your ability to truly control all your payments through that hub I mean there are pros and cons to centralization versus decentralization and that that's an everyday thing that large complex corporations have to balance as far as just the viability the feasibility and I love the word longevity just the sustainability as we're living in a very innovative world that if you're a customer-focused then you have to be prepared to adapt and change and be nimble quickly so rethinking what's maybe a more hybrid approach makes it makes a lot more sense very good so so moving to the next slide and we want to get to Larry's portion so we're going to step through some of these we figured a picture's worth a thousand words so we've tried to summarize the concept of formats versus data transmission channels on this slide and this is not complete this is not this is a really good indication of the sorts of things you need to think about but it's certainly not absolutely every format in every transmission channel you could have any Andy any summary thoughts on this well I mean I think you've covered it actually I mean it is it does give you a kind of a good synopsis of kind of the topics that we're talking about right but you know I think it as we said that we need when you're considering some of these these initiatives you need to take these things into account right I mean on the top right here where you've got XML you've got ISO 2022 which is really gonna be that emergence tender that's going to all things being equal be either the standard of choice but when you're also looking at the data transmission that's that's gonna continue to grow that's not necessarily an all-encompassing and slide at all but as we talked about is gonna be more of these non-bank type of type of initiatives that are coming up just to think of the lives of squared or wallah those are some of the names that to mine but but I think you've been encapsulated and everything quite nicely and succinctly in this particular slide yes and you'll be able to download this after the event okay I think it's very important to talk about the challenges of the data transformation that has to happen so Andy that's the softball to get you perfect on this slide thank you thank you thank you so so mean when we talk about data transformation we talked about it in a couple of slides prior we were talking about source systems and destination systems so if you think about the left hand side here where you see the ERPs and a TMS and and the manual inpu s that's basically your inputs coming into coming into your your transformation engine or integration solution as we called it here and the end state is to actually be able to send out through the relevant communication rail or protocol the actual payments and also receive statements and notifications back so you see those on on either far side of the the actual Venn diagram you have here but right in the middle here is key right so the key part in here is where you have like payments that need to be transformed into a format that the bank or the non-bank will accept right and so you see along the the the top the top part of the semicircle here the purple area where you is basically taking an input from a system and we talked about those legacy systems right you talk about legacy systems providing that input of the of the the payment message or payment file that then will need to be transformed to one of these destination formats that will be going out to your to your bank or your to your non-bank and then right in the circle here are some of the considerations that integration solution will be doing on your behalf so it will be bringing in the the actual payment the payment message or file and then doing some level of validation transformation rich in the data if the data is not whole then provide some level of approval workflow and then basically route that to the the correct rail which is that bottom part a semicircle here and the Swift or Natura blockchain as we talked about real-time payments and even there's more as we talked about the the other types of non Bank solutions so routing this out to your to the respective institution whether it's by an SFTP or mq through an API or Swift it's basically allowing you to to select the correct rail to to actually transport that that message over to to your to the respective institution and also and also you know when we have data that's coming back from that institution in a terms of notification for the game we want to be able to not just send out payments or messages you want to be able to receive back a notification that says it actually happened and Larry mentioned this earlier on about with real-time payments when it's gone it's gone so you want to know when if gone is gone and they've gone gone to the the right person the right institution and so this is allowing you to actually take away some of that burden of that decision making and have a solution right there in the middle that's doing that that time decision-making for you yeah I you know and in Prior careers have worked for an organization that offered reconciliation solution and trade settlement solutions and we had all kinds of technology in house we also advise people on on the architecture of how they should adopt this stuff in is as Andy talked about legacy systems banks suffer with this I guarantee you insurance companies suffer with it we all suffer with it there are so many systems that you have to interface with that have to output or digest the information and being able to translate it from the format's that variable output or into the format's that they require for input is a critical part of your decision on how to move into these frameworks and so I am a very big proponent of having a layer that does this for you and not worrying about altering absolutely everything inside your world so this circle in the middle could be a layer that you add or that you enhance one you've probably already had something like this and you may be looking to enhance it now remember one of the tools we had an ETL tool actually had plug-ins for the different formats there was a library and they would update them so you didn't have to worry about it they provided it as part of the service and and you know but it is it also has to be fast and secure so talking about that let's move on to the next slide which talks about some of the considerations we've brought up already but I think it's a more complete set of considerations absolutely and so you know some of these these considerations you've seen it seen already such as reliability security maintenance and availability and those like absolutely and when you're considering communication protocols you know your integration solution is exactly that is also a communication protocol that you're leveraging right to communicate with your your systems internally and externally but as we start seeing some of the added values that an integration solution will provide you it will provide that ability to do the validations and checks of your of the the messages going inbound and outbound as we talked about allow you to enrich that data if it needs to be enriched before being transported out to the respective rail the other item here is and his key is to be able to alert and when when an error happens if there's some error that happens to be able to alert and take take the necessary corrective action so that again you're making sure that your your message don't inbound outbound is whole and then finally obviously auditability there's certainly from a level of data retention as well as being able to see who what's occurring within your integration solution and at what times is occurring within your integration solution and you've seen down here some of the attestations that some companies need to go through in order to make sure that they can in compliance so those are obviously absolutely some of the considerations you need to take into account when you're also considering an integration solution very good and now we'd like to get to a survey question so we're hoping for your participation so please let us know kind of two questions so what communication technologies are you focused on and then what message formats are you focused on it's a multi choice you can pick a few and what we'd like for the panelists to do is sorry that the participants in this call to do is to tell us you know what's your predominant communication technology that you're focused on using is it you know using bank portals do you use STF SFTP are you all in on api's you know is there some other non-bank that you're focused on and then on the messageformat side what formats do you concern yourselves with are they all custom or they just filed based custom formats are using EDI standards which is you know a traditional US standard have you moved into you know are you predominantly using the Swift standards either empty or iso 20022 or you all in an api's and the message formats as well please answer we'll give you a few minutes and while we're waiting I don't know Andy and and Larry do you have any predictions here I have the thought that we may see I mean to see how many still lived in Bank portals I'll be very interested to see how many are going on the ISO format mm-hmm it's relatively newer right okay so here are the results we can see that more almost 50 percent are using Bank portal so that's the winner and but you know host-to-host swift and API are all kind of bouncing around there as close seconds and the non-bank is very low as far as Bank protocols go so I'm interested on the protocol side to see how high api's are because I would have predicted that they would be lower than the number we're seeing yes I agree I agree I mean it's it's encouraging I give it that it's definitely encouraging but I would have predicted I was gonna be be lower but you know with at the 50 percent being the bank portals that that's kind of in line where I mean probably a bit lower than I expected but is in line with what I would anticipate that there's still quite a considerable number of companies are still doing the bank portal connections and utilize in the SST peter to drop files into into into their banks yeah and then the other interesting item on the formatting side is to see that the standard formats are not as widely adopted as the file or custom formats are so that is interesting well they're not i mean clearly they're there I am encouraged to see the the mix between Mt versus ISO 20022 you know right Larry that's that's encouraging yes that's higher than I thought very interesting results absolutely yeah yeah well thank you everybody we're gonna have another survey question a little later on to help us do a little market research and maybe get you some better intelligence on the information so now we'd like to hear from Larry specifically about the treasurer's point of view with respect to these sorts of things and what what challenges that you know what's important and what are the challenges hey thanks Jeff and I'll talk just for a few minutes here and I'm just gonna step back and my comments will be in the context of the pandemic and really starting with what we call the travelers promise we've we've been focusing a lot in travelers on mission and purpose and our CEO has talked to a lot about our mission and purpose and we talk about our purposes the travelers promise where we take care of our customers our communities and each other and these are words that we want to live by and they're not just platitudes that we can put on a website and as you talked about the rubber hitting the road during the pandemic that's where we had to step up step up and and deliver during a pandemic and we found out that we needed to get our customers money because a it's always important but at this time when people were getting unemployed and having other significant challenges it was significant that we got folks their money and that that need for speed like we talked about became more and more important that we couldn't wait for checks even if we had if we could get the check out the door or get it processed checks were gonna take too long we had workers compensation recipients that needed their money now and couldn't wait for a check maybe it wasn't getting delivered or or they couldn't get to the post office whatever the case may be so we were focused on the need for speed and the need for instantaneous payments so we knew that our focus back to what I talked about at the beginning of this customer focus we talked about getting rid of paper and we need to be digital and it needed to be fast and then this is something that I've changed my tune on a little bit prior to the pandemic I was I we were questioning how fast is fast enough because there's a cost for everything and these faster payment types are more expensive from a transactional cost perspective but we've seen seeing the need for speed and hmm that has changed our perspective has to be secure our customers and talking with our chief customer officer customer experience officer he tells us all the time it's just presumed that it's secure the customer just assumes all your systems are wired up and integrated and connected if they assume that their payments and their personal identifiable information is secure that's that's the level of expectation that we have to meet and that is a very very high bar to just assume that we've talked a lot about control around governance around reconciliations around audit ability again going back to the presumption that it's secure you have to trust but verify and it takes a very robust governance an audit process to ensure that informative we need the data we're we're a data rich company this data is is beneficial and we need to harvest that and use that and help that help us with our predictive analytics that just helps us provide the products to our markets understand and control risk better which then creates value for our shareholders and finally we have to be liquid we all saw in March as the markets were note nose-diving and seizing up and there was a lot of stress in our markets the need for liquidity the need to know where your cash flows are at all time and to be able to stress test those cash flows in an accurate manner and these have been our areas of focus we've talked about workflows we've talked about operational risk and we've taken a serious look at our hubs I we don't have a central hub at travelers and we we never never will we are a swift shop which is our standards so we have that centralization from a connectivity we have the standardization for the most part through Swift but we're seeing as I mentioned earlier a need for a more hot hybrid approach and how we manage our payments in and out and we are consolidating into multiple hubs but it will never be a central hub so that's that's what I had done well thank you Larry and I know at the beginning of the year you were very much focused on payment hubs because of the challenges of multiple payment systems and putting good workflows in place and of course kovat has really thrown things up in the air but at the same time you've adapted right you've you focused on providing value to your customers and I know many of your peers are focused on the same thing and they feel that that need to you know provide in this is time that we're in and it's making a difference they're saying that customer satisfaction has really gone up with some of the faster payment initiatives and the move away from paper and and I think more and more people are accepting of that what in the past some people still want to get a check but at the end of the day it's really all about getting the money right so moving on because I want to get through conclusions and then ask our questions you know we've covered a lot today and to wrap up these are some of the conclusions and recommendations you're going to hear from Larry and Andy and myself so there's there's a lot of reasons that you should focus on these things there's really some positive capabilities of doing this and doing it right so you can enforce a workflow if you do it right and that's very important when it comes to minimizing bad things happening you can add control right to both the same sides of the conduct of the process there if you do it well you can minimize bank access and you can automate manual processes by minimizing breaks in that in the straight through processing but but the need for speed sometimes fights against these things Andy your thoughts on the integration yeah I mean as we talked about with the integration you know that creating that bridge between your legs systems and the communication channels you could see that as the need for speed as we've kind of coined that phrase becomes more more prevalent than that's also something that that we we encourage people to look at in terms of creating that bridge with their leg between their legacy systems and and the communication channels and to have some level of flexibility that whatever solution you have in place is going to need to be flexible and need to be something that kind of has a maintenance overhead if for whatever term and then when we look at the balance of speed reliability and some of the other things that we we talked about earlier on we need to basically make sure that we have those levels of controls in in our mind because if you go to kind of the mantra of travelers and kind of their direction these are all things that that are definitely being considered right or taking into account when going forward with with their initiatives and a payment up so I don't think he said them an industry-wide consideration for one of it yeah yeah and then so's Andy pointed out it's a balancing act Need for Speed is there you have to do that your customers need it so many organizations have scrambled to put in something that will get them away from paper the either they couldn't print checks during this pandemic or they couldn't receive and process them unless somebody went to the office and gathered them and went across the street to the bank so whereas other they had it covered they moved the check printer out and they they had to remote deposit all set up and everything was hunky-dory but but you know it's it has accelerated this drive at the same time you absolutely cannot ignore security controls in fraud detection the fraud attempts have multiplied during this time in so whatever you put in place while it has to be fast it has to be something that isn't unbelievably painful for you to maintain it also has to have controls and fraud detection built into it and finally the non-bank payment solutions are really stepping up a lot of organizations are looking at this this is much more of a business to co sumer scenario in most cases but but you know it's something that you need to consider so what we'd like to do now in the last minute is to get some information from you we're gonna pop up a quick poll because what we'd like to do is to follow up this webinar with some more thought leadership so what areas are you interested in hearing more about we've had an internal debate here and so we figured we just ask you are you interested on this topic with respect to the technology solutions and the challenges of those technology solutions are you interested primarily in what the banks are offering as far as vehicles and tools and utilities are you interested in non-bank payment types it sounded like some of those were a lesser consideration in our prior poll and then would you like a white paper would you like for us to put out a white paper detailing these options and considerations and issues or is that just something that you wouldn't even read and finally is there something we forgot to ask that you would be interested in so there's an other and you can contact us but you've got our emails earlier on in the session and we would like to hear from you we would we would very much like to hear what's important and what's what's top of mind for you on this topic Andy and Larry we're at the top of the hours any final thoughts no I think there's a excellent session I think he's actually very timely in terms of in terms of oversee the effects of kovaydin and understanding how this affected our community I mean that the business community so I'm really glad that we had a chance to do this I'd like to thank you Larry and also you Jeff for or participate in this session I I agree was well and my I guess my parting advice was just know going in eyes wide open and understanding what you're what you're doing and what you're getting yourself into and that you have the appropriate governance and control mechanisms in place and and and in real cohesive strategies and use cases for these different types these different connectivity and you know with that you can you can put together a holistic package that will serve your customers and your your enterprise and you can create value in your enterprise very good I want to thank everybody for participating thank you so much we realize you have a lot of choices we hope this was informative and we will be very happy to follow it up with some other thought leadership clearly Larry Andy and I care dearly about the topic thank you so much thank you you're going you