Editor’s note: In today’s A Day in the Life, Vincent Casanova (pictured), general manager APAC and member of Global Executive Management Team at GTreasury, shares with FutureCFO audiences his recent interesting and engaging discussion with CFOs revolving around AI and how long-distance and endurance running is essential to his balance and performance.
FutureCFO: What does a typical day look like for you?
Vincent Casanova (VC): As General Manager for APAC region, I lead cross-functional teams spread out across our three regional offices in Singapore, Manila and Sydney.
Typically, I front-load early in the day all our internal calls to review ongoing negotiations with clients, our current live implementation projects progress and potential roadblocks and finally a general check-in with each of my team leads to get a daily pulse on how well all our APAC functions (Sales, Pre-Sales, Implementation, Support, Customer Success, Product & Engineering) collaborate together and see where I can help to facilitate discussions.
I limit, as much as possible, the duration, frequency, and audience of internal calls so as to give back as much time as possible to my teams to serve our clients.
This allows me to dedicate the rest of the day primarily to interactions with CFOs of both our existing customers (we have 200+ clients spread across APAC), potential prospects interested to adopt our Treasury Management Solutions.
Because of my generalist background, as I used to work as a Management Consultant focusing primarily on Digital Transformations, I try and focus these client discussions on the business drivers of a TMS – in other words how our Solutions can help you meet critical business/financial KPIs.
Indeed, while the advanced technical specs of our treasury solutions set us apart in the TMS industry, what really matters to CFOs are critical business questions: such as (1) How can I reduce persistent gaps between my actual & forecasted cash-flow to optimise my Working Capital allocation and avoid trapped cash pockets? or (2) How do I optimise my FX hedging strategy?
Finally, after a sports break late afternoon, I like to carve out one to two hours at the end of the day when needed to align and exchange with GTreasury’s Global leaders, act as the voice of APAC and make sure our priorities in terms of investments and client local requirements are considered in our investment strategy.
My APAC team knows the market inside out and I can rely on them 100% to provide me with local insights.
FutureCFO: What excites you the most when you work with the Finance Function?
VC: My role involves daily interactions with APAC CFOs – clients and prospects alike.
In general, I get a real kick out of discussing and understanding gaps and major pain points within their treasury processes, such as liquidity management and cash forecasting.
Vincent Casanova, general manager APAC and member of Global Executive Management Team, GTreasury
In Southeast Asia in particular, mid-caps and even major corporations are still running all their key processes off a set of disjointed, decentralised and misaligned excel sheets and this is a major generator of inefficiencies, errors and in the most extreme cases breaches of compliance and audit failures.
What I find most exciting in this region is that since many corporates still run their key treasury operations (budget, forecasting, accounting) on Excel , the scale of the impact of our scalable solutions is exponential and realised within three months of go-lives.
More recently, the most engaging and interesting discussions I had with CFOs all revolved around AI and how it is revolutionising treasury.
It is helping us accelerate implementations, automate customer support and streamline connectivity – but also enabling our clients to anticipate anomalies or fraud, drive insights to improve decision-makings based off complex data sets and rely on query-based chats to immediately get accurate answers to complex topics.
CFOs have shown increased interest for AI-enabled solutions – in fact over the past six months, this has now become criteria #1 or 2 in their decision-making process when selecting technologies for each of their functional teams/processes: treasury, FP&A, accounting, etc.
FutureCFO: Can you share an experience which was key to your professional growth?
VC: My professional background is primarily in management consulting where you learn quickly the ropes of strategic advisory to CxOs across multiple industries.
While this was incredibly valuable to best understand how to design go-to-market strategies, change management programmes or cost cutting initiatives across APAC, you never really feel on the driving seat and rarely see through all your recommended actions implemented and witness their impact.
What was key to my professional growth is my move to a GM position with full APAC P&L ownership and team oversight at GTreasury.
That dual KPI ownership of delivering both on APAC hypergrowth targets while maintaining healthy profit margins is motivating and challenging at the same time and we built the right high-performing team to achieve this.
GTreasury, with its highly decentralised ownership culture and core 100% focus on local client needs and regional initiatives, is a great place to grow as a GM and develop your team and client portfolio.
FutureCFO: Is there anything outside work—such as a travel experience, a book, participation in a sport event or any volunteering experience—that serves as an important inspiration to your work or life?
VC: Long-distance and endurance running is essential to my balance and performance.
I regularly take part in Marathons and Ultra-Marathons across APAC, even if less frequently than before due to my new role.
I try and run every two years the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc a 170km / 10,000m D+ trail race held in Chamonix in the French Alps.
Besides the thrill of competing, this type of extreme efforts helps me focus on resiliency and persistence, which I fund useful in work situations when it is tempting to take shortcuts and choose the easy way out.
These races are also a way for me to reset my mind and try and improve my focus when I am back with my APAC team – a group of very talented & experienced people with a unique culture of client servicing and high-performance.
