Rapid Fireside Chat with Sam Hunt

Table of Contents:

• What part of the FX trade lifecycle is most overdue for automation?
• How can technology help treasury teams make faster, more informed FX decisions without deep market expertise?
• What's one emerging technology that will quietly transform FX in the next decade?
• How do you balance the push for speed with the need for security in FX tech?
• How will automation reshape the way corporates and fund managers manage FX by 2030?

 

 

1. What part of the FX trade lifecycle is most overdue for automation?

Our CEO talks about a time where he watched a fund manager print out this month’s data and last month’s data, then runs a ruler down the page to compare the data and determine the FX trades that need to be placed. Whilst this is an extreme case, it is reflective of the lack of appropriate tooling available for mid-market organisations to manage their FX.

Typical areas where we see a lack of automation are determining trades to be placed, approvals and limits, executing in competition, trade settlement & reporting, audit of execution quality, integration into up and downstream systems.

To determine the priority area for your organisation, focus on the bottlenecks and risk. What are the areas that consumes the most resource and introduces the greatest risks. Start there, any automation that isn’t at the bottleneck, is a nice to have but will not move the needle until the bottleneck is resolved.

 

2. How can technology help treasury teams make faster, more informed FX decisions without deep market expertise?

When setting up an FX programme, one of the key decisions you need to make is your hedging strategy. What to hedge? How much to hedge? How long to hedge for? Traditionally, for clients that are not FX experts, these questions were the domain of expensive consultants. As a technology first organisation, we look at these questions as optimisation problems and give our clients the tools to make these decisions themselves, without having to pay expensive day rates. 

The art of a great product is to take users on the journey with you. We spend a lot of time testing our designs and creating feature tours to make these tools easier to adopt. We’ve recently started adding AI explainers as well to help translate the findings.

 

3. What's one emerging technology that will quietly transform FX in the next decade?

I believe AI and Agentic will loudly transform FX in the next decade, as it will many other industries. Within this the enabling technology that I think will have the greatest impact but will get less column inches is Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP provides a way for agents to talk to systems, like APIs currently allow systems to talk to systems. This has significant benefits, it will reduce the time to integrate AI enabled systems, and make it easy for non-technical people and agents to talk to systems and data in normal text rather than code. For example, rather than exporting a .csv then wrangling some excel formulars to complete an analysis you'll be able to describe what you want in plain English (or French, Spanish etc). The MCP server will determine which sequence of API calls and transformations are required to complete your request, then will share the results back to you in your preferred channel.

 

4. How do you balance the push for speed with the need for security in FX tech? 

These are often pitted against each other, but the reality is you cannot achieve speed without a high level of quality and security. If technical teams do not proactively focus on these non-functional elements, they will rear their heads in nasty and unexpected ways that derail the functional work. 

The trick is to build these controls into your way of working in an automated fashion. Historically security was a gate point at the end of the project. We embed security throughout the process through early-stage threat analysis, technical security gates in the development process and ongoing security monitoring.

 

5. How will automation reshape the way corporates and fund managers manage FX by 2030?

Currently we see different levels of maturity when it comes to FX and treasury automation. By 2030, the difference between the leaders and the laggers will grow significantly. Those organisations that embrace the change will replace manual processes and a fragmented system landscape with FX intelligence available within their preferred tools. This will dramatically reduce the time spend managing FX and the risks associated with it.