Corporate Treasury Driving Green Performance
In today’s virtual commercial world, adopting and deploying the right communications technologies has become mission-critical for businesses both large and small. And nowhere is this more true than in the treasury arm of major corporates, whether operating exclusively in-house or with the support of a third-party consultancy.
Treasury professionals responsible for managing organisations’ cash efficiently typically operate round the clock – whether ensuring availability of funding, protecting cash flows from economic or regulatory risk or carrying out their pensions or insurance responsibilities – and are typically geographically dispersed across multiple time zones. As a result, the ability to know what is happening around the globe in real time and react appropriately is especially critical, with delays being costly.
In response, today, most corporates have deployed conferencing tools to some degree within the business, though extending usage to the desktop across the business in departments such as treasury has typically been rather slow. This has been due in part to security concerns, an issue now effectively addressed by the development of today’s solutions.
At the same time, there is no doubt that, for large UK manufacturing and service businesses in general, environmental issues are now significantly moving up the corporate agenda when considering expenditure on enhanced internal and third party communications.
Equally evident, though its contribution to reducing an organisation’s overall carbon emissions will almost certainly form part of any investment discussion, the ultimate decision to purchase a communications or other IT solution will rest on economic issues around cost savings and operational efficiency.
A recent independent survey undertaken by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Genesys Conferencing found that more than two-thirds of UK’s large corporates are failing to match fine words with positive action in putting in place green policies throughout the business.
Finance-oriented organisations were highlighted as something of an exception to this rule, with 44% of respondents believing that their companies were moving strongly or very strongly in the direction of implementing environmental initiatives. This is in contrast to manufacturing industry, for example, where only 28% believed their companies were actively seeking to reduce their carbon footprint.
There is a greater commonality of purpose looking ahead, however, with momentum set to increase across all sectors. Around one in five businesses already have dedicated ‘green Czars’ in place to drive future improvements in environmental performance enterprise-wide.
Reinforcing this, a further 40% of businesses confirmed that functional heads such as chief technical officer, chief operating officer or their equivalents have responsibility for spearheading such enterprise-wide change. And in a parallel survey undertaken on behalf of Genesys in the US, more than half of those questioned believed their companies had taken ‘meaningful steps towards more green behaviour’ over the past 12 months.
What is equally clear, however, is that ‘going green for green’s sake’ is some way from establishing itself on the corporate agenda, as cost efficiency and compliance remain the two principal pressures in adopting green policies. Yet critically, pressure from shareholders and, in particular, customers is rising fast and this is reflected in the UK survey as the third strongest driver for change.
In particular, it is interesting to note that, once again, the financial community is among the more enlightened in recognising that operational efficiency and reducing one’s corporate carbon footprint are not mutually exclusive, with 40% of respondents anticipating environmental initiatives to generate cost savings, with only 22% expecting an adverse effect on costs.
In looking at where the greatest and most immediate impact can be had in achieving such savings, at this relatively early stage the primary focus overall continues to be on such tangible and well-established areas as recycling and waste policies, reducing heat and light usage and IT consumption.
The survey found that, to date, travel remains some way down the list travel. Yet here – and particularly relevant in the context of treasury departments – virtual collaboration tools can deliver the advantage of making more efficient use of staff time, cutting car, train and air transport costs and the associated impact on the environment.
It is often said that ‘knowledge is power’, yet this is of little value unless it can be shared. And this has become increasingly important – and, at the same time, inherently more difficult to achieve – as today’s global businesses operate inside an intricate and fast-changing web of relationships spanning multiple countries, time zones and cultures.
In addressing this issue, audio conferencing has been commercially available for three decades. Yet in bringing together voice, video and the web, modern multimedia collaboration technologies provide the opportunity to communicate much more powerfully and effectively, by providing the facility to share documents and make presentations, for example, in real time and with simple point and click commands.
In so doing, such technology is not designed to fully replace face-to-face meetings but, rather, to complement these by enabling treasury and other financial staff to work more efficiently between physical meetings. As such, it has become a key part of the corporate toolkit in maintaining effective dialogue, both internally and between customers and other third party intermediaries and stakeholders.
As a result, forward-thinking corporates are using such tools to communicate more effectively both within and beyond the enterprise, for example in managing liquidity and identifying, quantifying, mitigating and reporting financial risk.
And, unusually for such technological advances, the ability to improve the organisation’s environmental performance improves in direct proportion to the level of operational improvement and cost savings by reducing the time and cost of travel to meetings.
Yet, however sophisticated and attractive the underlying technology in achieving these desirable goals, in order to be fully effective in encouraging maximum use of virtual meetings across the business, collaboration tools must be easy both to deploy and use.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery, for example, offers quick and easy deployment with no up-front investment. Furthermore, as a business, you only pay for what you use. IT doesn’t have to manage capacity, performance or maintenance and it is easy to extend use to partners, suppliers, customers and other users outside the organisation’s firewall.
Historically, a major barrier to the broader adoption of collaboration services was the need for a Java Machine (JVA) or download onto each participant’s PC. By contrast, today’s technology offers simple ‘click to join’ functionality, making it easy for participants to use, both within the organisation and with third parties via desktop VoIP, PSTN or audio streaming – without the need for additional software or plug-ins.
Another area of concern that has hindered the speed of take-up of virtual collaboration tools in the finance sector in particular has been that of security. In response, modern conferencing solutions provide a level of security that meets the demands of such data-sensitive applications.
A well-recognised corporate truism is ‘what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done’. In this context, therefore, it is important that, in improving internal efficiencies, virtual collaboration can also make a tangible contribution to the organisation’s green performance. In today’s world of tight budgets and rapid, demonstrable return, ‘carbon calculators’ can determine the precise savings in CO2 emissions in parallel with the cost savings achieved through a reduced level of travel.
Multimedia conferencing technologies can impact significantly on the way corporate treasury teams operate in a number of ways. Most obviously, solutions that enable remote collaboration replace the need for many of the journeys undertaken to attend meetings with colleagues, partners and clients.
At a company level, not only does this cut costs but in an ever more environmentally conscious age also helps the company measurably reduce its carbon footprint and so demonstrably enhance its green credentials as a good corporate citizen. At an individual level, within treasury departments as elsewhere, this improves both operational efficiency and the increasingly important issue of work/life balance. By reducing reliance on car, train and air travel, such companies significantly decrease their contribution to the creation of greenhouse gases – a high-profile issue to which they can no longer afford to pay lip service to or ignore.