Issue 89
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CONTENTS
CEO & Editor In Chief Varun SASH Managing Director Mayha Das Managing Director Martin Murphy Editor Barnali email: editor@gbafmag.com
editor
Editor Regional Shaharban T
Dear Readers’ Welcome to Issue 89 of Global Banking & Finance Review.
Project Management Megan S | Raj G
This issue explores a theme increasingly shaping business and financial decisions: how can organisations strengthen resilience, improve efficiency and create lasting value in a rapidly changing environment?
Assistant Operations Manager Anupama KU Director of Operations Babitha G Digital Sales Rohit D Nominations Adam L | Sarah F Research Varshitha K | Jyothi P Video Production & Journalism Phil Fothergill Graphic Design Shiva K
Our cover story, “Why Repair and Reuse Are Becoming Operating Decisions,” examines how businesses are moving beyond sustainability commitments to consider the commercial value of extending product lifecycles. From repair and refurbishment to inventory management and resource efficiency, the article explores why sustainable practices must also make operational and financial sense. Technology and operational resilience are equally important themes. We examine the growing role of industrial edge computing, digital identity and business continuity planning, highlighting how smarter infrastructure, stronger controls and a clearer understanding of critical dependencies can support better business outcomes. Our featured industry perspectives bring these challenges into focus. Jodi Neiding, Vice President of Global Banking Hardware Solutions at Diebold Nixdorf, explores how financial institutions can improve cash management through intelligent forecasting, automation and more efficient ATM operations. In our banking feature, Derek Kwok, Chief Executive – Treasury & International Banking at Ahli Bank Q.P.S.C., discusses treasury management, digital innovation and the bank's approach to serving clients in Qatar.
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We also feature Emanuel Silva, CEO of IMGA Portugal, who shares insights into investment management, digital transformation, responsible investing and the importance of maintaining a disciplined, clientfocused approach in evolving markets.
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Elsewhere, we explore how APAC finance leaders are responding to credit risk and cash flow pressures, why payment terms influence supplier resilience, and how faster payments and changing deposit behaviour are reshaping financial decision-making.
Global Banking & Finance Review is the trading name of GBAF Publications LTD Company Registration Number: 7403411 VAT Number: GB 112 5966 21 ISSN 2396-717X. The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources the publishers believe to be correct. The publisher wishes to stress that the information contained herein may be subject to varying international, federal, state and/or local laws or regulations. The purchaser or reader of this publication assumes all responsibility for the use of these materials and information. However, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter contained herein no legal liability can be accepted for any errors. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior consent of the publisher.
Together, these articles reflect the importance of balancing innovation with sound financial management, operational strength and long-term thinking. Thank you for reading. We hope Issue 89 offers valuable insights and fresh perspectives to help you navigate the opportunities and challenges ahead.
Barnali Pal Sinha Editor, Global Banking & Finance Review
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Issue 89 | 03
CONTENTS
Inside... FINANCE
BANKING
18
Derek Kwok,
22
How Payment Terms Shape Supplier Resilience
36
Why Payment Timing Is Becoming a Bigger Finance Decision
BUSINESS
Chief Executive - Treasury & International Banking
Ahli Bank Q.P.S.C., Best Bank for Treasury Activities Qatar 2026
20
Why Repair and Reuse Are Becoming Operating Decisions
32
Why Business Continuity Depends on Knowing Your Hidden Dependencies
FINANCE
10
Emanuel Silva, CEO, IMGA
TECHNOLOGY
28
Where Industrial Edge Computing Creates Measurable Value
40
Why Digital Identity Is Becoming Business Infrastructure
Best Fund Management Company Portugal 2026
BANKING
TRADING
16
Growth Is Not the Problem, Cash Flow Is: Why APAC CFOs Are Rethinking Credit Risk in 2026
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44
Why Deposit Stability Is Becoming a Closer Test of Bank Strength
48
How Banks Can Measure Resilience Across Shared Technology Providers
CONTENTS
BANKING
06
Jodi Neiding,, Vice President, Global Banking Hardware Solutions,Diebold Nixdorf
Stop Moving Cash. Start Managing It. Issue 89 | 05
BANKING
Stop Moving Cash. Start Managing It. Cash remains essential to consumer trust, financial inclusion and everyday banking, and consumer behaviour suggests it will remain relevant for years to come. But the economics of managing cash have changed. Cash-in-transit (CIT) costs continue to rise, higher interest rates make idle cash increasingly expensive and cash demand fluctuates in ways that fixed schedules and historical assumptions cannot always predict. At the same time, customers still expect cash to be available whenever and wherever they need it. This creates a difficult challenge for financial institutions (FIs): how do you reduce the cost of cash without compromising availability, customer experience or operational control? The answer is not simply to move cash more efficiently. The greater opportunity lies in reducing the amount of cash that needs to be moved in the first place — while managing the remaining cash with far greater intelligence. This means ensuring the right amount of cash, in the right denominations, is available at the right place and time. For years, many ATM networks have relied on fixed replenishment schedules and standard cassette configurations. That approach may feel predictable, but it often leads to hidden inefficiencies: excess cash sitting idle in devices, avoidable emergency replenishments, cash-outs that undermine customer trust, prematurely filled deposit cassettes and unnecessary cash-handling interventions. These friction points translate into costs that may not be visible in a simple transportation invoice but accumulate across the network. By combining cash automation with cash intelligence, FIs shift from simply moving cash to actively managing it. Reducing the cost of cash starts with visibility FIs need automated, real-time monitoring of cash levels, order status and exception conditions across every cash point. With accurate data down to the cassette, denomination and device level, operations teams can detect risks earlier, avoid unnecessary manual checks and make better decisions before availability is affected. Better visibility provides the foundation for a more efficient cash ecosystem. The next step is smarter cash order planning Once institutions have accurate, real-time visibility into cash levels and usage patterns, they can move beyond monitoring cash and begin optimizing it. AI-powered forecasting can analyze transaction history, seasonality, holidays, special events and recurring patterns
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to predict cash needs for each ATM. Instead of overfilling machines “just in case” or reacting to shortages at the last minute, FIs can right-size cash inventory, plan replenishments more precisely, optimize CIT schedules and reduce both idle cash and costly emergency visits. The benefits extend beyond transportation savings. In today's interest-rate environment, any cash sitting idle in an ATM network represents capital that could be deployed elsewhere. More accurate forecasting helps reduce excess cash holdings while ensuring cash is positioned where and when customers need it. Cassette configuration is another powerful lever While forecasting determines how much cash is needed, cassette optimization helps ensure that cash is used effectively within each ATM. Cash usage patterns — including transaction volumes and denomination mix — can vary widely by device and location. This means a one-size-fitsall cassette strategy rarely delivers optimal results. By aligning cassette roles and denomination mix with actual usage, FIs can reduce the number of banknotes moved, extend replenishment cycles, improve uptime and provide customers with better denomination choice. Even relatively small configuration changes can generate meaningful operational improvements when applied across an entire ATM estate. Technology also matters The capabilities of the ATM itself represent another important optimization lever. Modern ATMs with higher cassette capacity can remain available for longer between cash services, especially at high-volume locations. When cash recycling is enabled, the impact is even greater: deposited notes can be validated, stored and reused for withdrawals, allowing consumer and small business deposits to replenish the ATM locally. This shortens the cash cycle, improves the utilization of available cash and reduces dependence on external replenishment. Instead of operating primarily as a cash drain, the ATM becomes an active part of a more efficient cash network. Cash recycling delivers benefits beyond operational efficiency. Improved cash and deposit availability create a more reliable self-service experience, strengthen customer confidence in automated channels and help drive adoption of lower-cost, self-service banking transactions. Every cash-out is more than an operational issue. From the customer’s perspective, it is a service failure. Customers do not distinguish between a forecasting error, an inefficient cassette configuration or a delayed replenishment. They simply encounter an ATM that cannot complete the transaction they need. Improving availability therefore protects both operational performance and customer trust.
BANKING
Jodi Neiding,
Vice President, Global Banking Hardware Solutions, Diebold Nixdorf
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BANKING
Treat Optimization as a Continuous Discipline These capabilities are most effective when managed as part of an ongoing optimization strategy. Cash optimization is not a one-time exercise. Demand patterns shift, interest rates change, cash usage evolves and ATM estates are modernized over time. Leading institutions therefore treat cash management as a continuous improvement discipline. They regularly reassess forecasts, inventory levels, cassette configurations and service schedules to reflect changing customer demand and network conditions. The benefits are substantial. FIs can improve service reliability, lower working-capital requirements and gain greater operational control across the network. Fewer cash-handling interventions mean not only a lower total cost of ownership but also less operational disruption, lower risk exposure, and more time for branch and operations teams to focus on higher-value work. The value extends beyond operational and financial performance. By reducing unnecessary cash movements and transportation activity, FIs can lower fuel consumption, reduce emissions and support broader sustainability objectives while creating a more efficient cash ecosystem. Realizing these financial, operational and customer-experience benefits requires more than a single technology or isolated process improvement. It requires hardware, software, data and operational expertise working together. An End-to-End Approach to Reducing the Cost of Cash Diebold Nixdorf brings together the capabilities banks and credit unions need to manage cash as an integrated ecosystem. DN’s end-to-end approach combines market-leading ATM technology, cash recycling capabilities, AI-powered forecasting, optimization expertise and operational support. This includes DN Series® ATMs with advanced recycling and high-capacity cassette technology, Vynamic® terminal software that supports note authentication, cash recycling and intelligent cash handling, and the Branch Automation Solutions portfolio for forecasting, cassette configuration advisory and managed services expertise. Together, these capabilities help FIs improve cash utilization, increase self-service availability, reduce unnecessary interventions and gain greater control over network-wide costs. Just as importantly, Diebold Nixdorf’s approach is CIT-agnostic. FIs retain the flexibility to work with the CIT provider that best fits their strategy, while benefiting from the independent advice, technology, data and processes required to optimize cash utilization across the network. The goal is clear: higher availability, lower costs, stronger customer experience, and a more resilient cash ecosystem. Cash is not disappearing, but the economics of managing it are changing rapidly. Institutions that continue relying on traditional replenishment models will struggle to balance rising costs with growing customer expectations. Those that embrace cash intelligence can transform cash from an operational expense into a strategic asset, reducing costs, improving service availability, and unlocking value that has long been trapped within their ATM networks. The future of cash operations is not about more trucks. It is about more intelligence — and Diebold Nixdorf is ready to help FIs get there.
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BANKING
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FINANCE
Best Fund Management Company Portugal 2026 1.What do you believe were the key factors that contributed to IMGA being recognised as Best Fund Management Company Portugal 2026, and what does this award mean for your organisation? We receive this recognition with great satisfaction, but above all with a deep sense of gratitude and responsibility. It is an award that truly honours us and one that we see as a reflection of a collective effort, built consistently over time. This journey would not have been possible without the dedication, expertise and commitment of the entire IMGA team, as well as the trust that our clients, partners and shareholders have placed in us. Their support is what challenges and inspires us every day to do better, to uphold the highest standards of rigour, and to respond to our clients’ needs in a responsible and attentive manner. We believe that the experience of our teams, the discipline of our investment and risk management processes, the diversification of our offering, and our ability to adapt to different market environments have all contributed to this recognition. At the same time, we are very conscious that our achievements are always the result of a shared effort and of relationships of trust built over many years.
Our investment philosophy has evolved gradually and in a disciplined manner, reflecting changes in financial markets and, above all, the evolving needs of our clients. We remain firmly committed to the principles that have always underpinned our approach — rigorous analysis, active management, strong risk management discipline and a long-term perspective — while complementing them with greater diversification of our strategies, the continuous strengthening of our investment capabilities and a strong focus on innovation. This evolution enables us to serve an increasingly diverse investor base. In the retail and private banking segments, we seek to offer transparent and diversified solutions that provide investors with access to different asset classes, geographies and investment strategies. Institutional investors naturally bring additional requirements, particularly in terms of the robustness and consistency of investment processes, risk management, portfolio monitoring and reporting. The growing interest from institutional investors, particularly international institutions, has therefore been very significant for IMGA. For us, it represents not only an opportunity to diversify our client base and further strengthen our international presence, but also a validation of the robustness of our processes and the ability of our strategies to meet the demanding standards of professional investors across different markets.
Being named Best Fund Management Company Portugal 2026 is therefore, above all, an opportunity to thank everyone who has been part of this journey. We receive this award with pride, but also with humility, knowing that such recognition brings an even greater responsibility: to continue earning that trust and working every day to create sustainable value for our clients.
Rather than changing our investment philosophy for each client segment, our approach is to evolve it consistently, preserving the principles that define us while adapting our offering to the specific needs of different investors. Our goal is to continue strengthening our capabilities, broadening and diversifying our offering, and deepening our international presence, while always maintaining the rigour, proximity and sense of responsibility with which we manage the assets entrusted to us by our clients.
2. IMGA has established itself as one of Portugal's leading independent asset managers. How has your investment philosophy evolved to help meet the changing needs of both retail and institutional investors?
3.The investment landscape continues to evolve rapidly. How is IMGA adapting its product offering, portfolio management approach, and client solutions to respond to changing market conditions and investor expectations?
IMGA has traditionally focused its offering primarily on the retail and private banking segments, providing diversified investment solutions tailored to different risk profiles, investment horizons and objectives. At the same time, we have seen growing and increasingly significant interest from institutional investors, particularly international institutions, which we regard as an important recognition of the quality and consistency of the work we have been developing.
Financial markets are evolving at an increasingly rapid pace, shaped by changing macroeconomic conditions, technological developments and higher investor expectations. For an asset manager such as IMGA, operating from a relatively small market like Portugal, we are very conscious that our scale and resources are not comparable to those of the largest global asset managers. This makes it even more important for us to remain focused, agile and disciplined in the areas where we believe we can genuinely add value for our clients.
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FINANCE
Emanuel Silva, CEO, IMGA
Issue 89 | 11 Photographer : Vitor Duarte
FINANCE
One of the areas where we are making a considerable effort is the ongoing digital transformation of our business. We continue to invest in improving our systems, processes and analytical capabilities, with the objective of becoming more efficient and strengthening portfolio monitoring and risk management. We see technology as an important enabler rather than an end in itself: it should provide our teams with better information and tools to support sound investment decisions and improve the quality of the service we provide to our clients. At the same time, we strongly believe that our people remain our most important asset. We are therefore making a significant and continuous investment in the training and professional development of our teams. In an industry that is changing so quickly, we need to remain humble about what we know and constantly willing to learn. This means keeping our teams close to developments in financial markets, investment techniques, risk management and new technologies, while encouraging a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous improvement. From a product perspective, we are also continuously looking for new and innovative investment solutions that can complement our existing capabilities and respond to changing client needs. Given our scale, we need to be selective and pragmatic. Our objective is not to follow every market trend or replicate the breadth of the largest international players, but rather to identify areas where we believe we can develop relevant and well-structured solutions, with a clear investment rationale and appropriate risk-return characteristics for our clients. Our portfolio management approach continues to be based on active management, disciplined investment processes and robust risk management. Particularly in periods of greater macroeconomic uncertainty and market volatility, we believe it is important to combine the ability to respond to changing conditions with a long-term perspective. We remain focused on fundamental analysis and careful portfolio construction, while recognising that markets will always challenge our assumptions and require us to continuously reassess our views. Client expectations are also evolving, whether in retail, private banking or institutional markets. Investors are increasingly sophisticated and rightly expect greater transparency, stronger risk management and access to a broader range of investment opportunities. Our responsibility is to listen carefully to those needs and determine where we can genuinely provide value, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. Ultimately, our ambition is to continue improving step by step. We know that we operate in a highly competitive global industry and that there is always more to learn and develop. Our focus is therefore on making the best possible use of the resources and talent we have, investing in technology and our people, and remaining open to new investment ideas, while, above all, preserving the discipline, proximity and sense of responsibility with which we manage the assets entrusted to us by our clients.
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4. Innovation continues to play an important role in asset management. How is IMGA leveraging technology, data analytics, digital tools, or operational improvements to enhance investment management and the overall client experience? As mentioned earlier, innovation and digitalisation are part of the journey IMGA is undertaking. We are approaching this transformation gradually and selectively, with a clear understanding of our scale and the resources available to us. We do not seek to replicate the level of technology investment made by the largest global asset managers. Instead, our focus is on identifying where technology, data and process improvements can genuinely contribute to better investment decisions, greater efficiency and an enhanced service for our clients. Our strategy is also very clearly built around specialisation. We do not aim to be directly present in every market or to develop every capability inhouse. Our ambition is to be a specialist in those areas where we have the knowledge, experience and capabilities to build clear and, above all, relevant competitive advantages for our investors. It is in these areas that we continuously seek to deepen the expertise of our teams, enhance the quality of our research and strengthen our investment processes. At the same time, we recognise that there are markets and asset classes where we do not have the same level of local expertise. In those areas, our approach is to establish partnerships with highly reputable and recognised investment managers with proven expertise in their respective markets. These partnerships allow us to complement our internal capabilities with specialist knowledge, local market insight and investment expertise that would not necessarily make sense for us to replicate internally. In doing so, we can provide our clients with access to a broader and more diversified range of investment opportunities. Technology and data should support this strategy. We seek to direct our investment towards tools and capabilities that deepen our understanding of markets, enhance investment analysis and risk management, and improve the efficiency of our processes. For us, innovation does not necessarily mean doing more or following every new market trend. It means doing better in the areas where we have genuine expertise, while knowing when to work with the right partners to access complementary capabilities. In this context, the principle of proportionality is particularly important. Increasing technological, operational and regulatory requirements across the asset management industry require significant investment, and the relative burden of these costs is naturally greater for small and mid-sized asset managers. We believe that an effective application of proportionality is important to maintain a level and fair competitive environment, without compromising the high standards of investor protection, risk management and operational resilience that should underpin our industry. Our direction is therefore clear: to deepen our areas of specialisation, complement our capabilities through high-quality partnerships, and use technology in a disciplined and selective way, investing where we believe we can genuinely create value for our clients. We pursue this with humility regarding our scale, but also with the conviction that the combination of specialist expertise, market knowledge, agility and access to leading partners can provide a meaningful competitive advantage in an increasingly global asset management industry.
FINANCE
5. Responsible investing is becoming increasingly important for investors worldwide. How does IMGA incorporate sustainability, governance, and long-term risk considerations into its investment decision-making process? Responsible investing has become an integral part of asset management and is a clear priority for IMGA. Today, more than 80% of the funds managed by IMGA are classified as Article 8 under SFDR, reflecting the growing importance of sustainability considerations across both our product offering and our investment processes. This evolution has required a significant adaptation effort across the organisation, not only within our investment teams, but also across risk management, compliance, reporting, systems and data. The integration of ESG factors increasingly requires the ability to collect, analyse and monitor relevant information and incorporate it into investment and risk management processes, always with a long-term perspective. We believe that environmental, social and, particularly, governance factors can represent financially material risks and opportunities and should therefore form part of the analysis of the companies and assets in which we invest. The objective should not simply be to comply with regulatory requirements or achieve specific classifications, but rather to understand how these factors may affect the sustainability of business models, the quality of management and, ultimately, the long-term value of investments. That said, we cannot overlook our concerns regarding the increasing complexity and lack of stability of the regulatory framework in this area. Asset managers have been required to make significant investments in systems, data, processes and specialised resources to meet new requirements which, in some cases, are subsequently revised or amended, resulting in further adaptation efforts and additional investment. For small and midsized asset managers, the relative impact of these requirements is naturally even more significant. We fully support the objectives underlying the transition towards a more sustainable economy. However, we believe that regulation will be more effective and credible if it is simple, clear, stable and proportionate, with requirements introduced progressively so that asset managers, investors and the wider economy have sufficient time to adapt in a consistent and sustainable manner. Sustainability represents a structural transformation and, like any transformation of this scale, it requires time, investment and, above all, a gradual increase in awareness and engagement at a global level. We cannot transform the world in a single day. If we attempt to accelerate this process excessively through requirements that are overly complex or frequently changing, there is a risk of
achieving the opposite of what is intended: increasing complexity, making sustainable investment more difficult for investors to understand and, ultimately, undermining the credibility of sustainable investing itself. At IMGA, we remain committed to pursuing this journey in a responsible and pragmatic way, progressively integrating sustainability, governance and long-term risk considerations into our investment processes. We believe that a gradual and transparent transition, supported by simple, clear, stable and proportionate rules, is the most effective way to enable meaningful adaptation across the industry, preserve investor confidence and contribute, within our sphere of influence, to long-term sustainability objectives. 6. With a broad range of investment solutions across multiple asset classes, how does IMGA ensure that its products remain aligned with different investor objectives, risk profiles, and long-term financial goals? The diversity of investors we serve naturally means that their needs, objectives and risk tolerance can vary significantly. At IMGA, we therefore seek to ensure that the development and ongoing evolution of our product offering starts, first and foremost, with a clear understanding of those different needs, ensuring that each investment solution has a well-defined objective, risk profile and appropriate investment horizon. Our range is designed to cover different levels of risk and multiple asset classes, allowing us to address the needs of investors who prioritise capital preservation and lower volatility, as well as those who, with a longer investment horizon and greater risk tolerance, are seeking higher return potential. In this respect, diversification of our offering is not an objective in itself; it should enable us to provide solutions that are consistent with our clients’ different financial objectives. To achieve this, we seek to maintain a balance between two complementary approaches. On the one hand, we offer internally managed solutions in areas where we have deep market knowledge, experience and differentiated expertise. On the other, we complement these capabilities through a rigorous selection process of specialised international investment solutions and partners, giving our clients access to markets, geographies and asset classes where we may not have the same level of in-house expertise. This combination enables us to provide a broader and more globally diversified offering, while maintaining an important discipline: each product should have a clear purpose within our range and address a specific investor need. Our objective is not simply to increase the number of products available, but to ensure that our offering remains understandable, complementary and appropriate for different risk profiles and investment horizons. Naturally, this is also an ongoing process. Market conditions change, investor objectives evolve, and new opportunities and risks emerge. We therefore regularly review our product range to assess whether it continues to meet our clients’ needs, introducing new solutions or adapting existing ones when we believe there is a clear rationale for doing so.
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FINANCE
Ultimately, our approach is relatively straightforward: first understand the needs of our investors and then identify the most appropriate investment solutions, relying on our own capabilities where we have genuine expertise and complementing them with leading specialist partners where they can provide deeper knowledge and experience. In this way, we aim to offer a sufficiently diversified range to address different objectives and risk profiles, while maintaining a long-term perspective and keeping our clients’ interests at the centre of our decision-making. 7. Looking ahead, what are IMGA's key strategic priorities for strengthening its position in Portugal and supporting future growth across the broader Iberian and European asset management markets? Looking ahead, our first priority is to continue consolidating IMGA’s position in Portugal, our home market and the market where we have built much of our expertise, experience and long-standing relationships. We want to continue earning the trust of our clients by strengthening the quality of our investment management, the consistency of our processes and our ability to develop solutions that meet their needs in an increasingly demanding financial environment. Building on this foundation, we believe there is scope to pursue a gradual and sustainable international expansion. We do not aim to compete on scale with the largest global asset managers, nor do we seek to be present in every market. Our strategy is to be selective, identifying markets and client segments where our capabilities and investment solutions can be differentiated and where we believe we can genuinely create value for investors. In this context, specialisation will remain one of the key pillars of our strategy. We intend to deepen our capabilities in areas where
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we believe we have relevant knowledge and experience, with a strong focus on building consistent track records and clear competitive advantages. In markets or asset classes where we do not have the same level of expertise, we will continue to complement our internal capabilities through partnerships with highly reputable and recognised international investment managers, allowing us to broaden our offering without losing the focus and discipline that we consider essential. The Iberian Peninsula is naturally an area of particular interest, given its geographical proximity and the size and sophistication of the market. At the same time, we intend to continue developing IMGA’s presence among international institutional investors, where we have been seeing encouraging levels of interest. Any broader European expansion, however, should be approached selectively, prioritising markets where there is a clear fit between our capabilities, our investment offering and investor needs. Supporting this growth will require continued investment in the organisation. This means progressing with our digital transformation, strengthening our analytical and risk management capabilities and, above all, continuing to invest in our people. Ongoing professional development, our ability to attract and develop talent, and a culture based on high standards, responsibility and continuous learning will be essential to ensuring that we can grow without compromising the quality we seek to maintain. Naturally, growth must also be consistent with our scale and with a responsible allocation of resources. In an increasingly competitive European asset management market, characterised by significant regulatory, technological and operational requirements, proportionality will remain an important consideration in ensuring that small and mid-sized asset managers can continue to innovate, invest and compete on a level playing field, while maintaining high standards of investor protection and risk management.
FINANCE
Our ambition, therefore, is to grow sustainably, rather than to pursue growth for its own sake. We want to consolidate what we do well in Portugal, deepen our areas of specialisation, continue to build high-quality partnerships and progressively bring our capabilities to other markets where we believe we can add value. We approach this with humility regarding our scale and with a clear understanding that internationalisation is a long-term journey, but also with confidence in our teams and in IMGA’s ability to build, step by step, a more relevant presence across the Iberian and European asset management markets. 8. Finally, what message would you like to share with your clients, business partners, and stakeholders following IMGA's recognition as Best Fund Management Company Portugal 2026 by Global Banking & Finance Review? Our strategic priorities start with continuing to strengthen the quality and consistency of our investment management, deepening our capabilities in areas where we have genuine expertise and seeking to build clear competitive advantages through specialisation. We want to continue developing a relevant and diversified product offering that responds to the needs of different types of investors, while remaining focused and disciplined in the allocation of our resources. In parallel, we aim to progressively expand our international presence, particularly across the Iberian and broader European markets, but in a selective and sustainable manner. We do not seek to be present in every market. Instead, we want to identify those markets where our investment solutions, expertise and management capabilities can be genuinely differentiated and recognised by investors.
Another important priority is to strengthen our distribution capabilities and deepen our relationships with clients and partners, including international institutional investors. We believe that sustainable growth requires not only strong investment solutions, but also long-term relationships built on trust, a clear understanding of investor needs and the ability to provide a consistently high level of service. We will also continue to develop new investment solutions, combining our internal capabilities with partnerships with highly reputable specialist managers whenever these can provide additional expertise, access to new markets or capabilities that complement our own. Supporting this evolution will require continued investment in our people, technology and processes. The quality of our teams, continuous professional development, our ability to attract and retain talent, and the ongoing modernisation of our organisation will all be essential if we are to grow without compromising investment discipline, risk management or the quality of service we provide to our clients. We have ambition, but we are also very conscious of our scale and of the highly competitive nature of the European asset management industry. Growth must therefore be gradual, disciplined and supported by results. We do not want to grow simply for the sake of growth; we want to grow where we believe we can genuinely add value and where our capabilities can be recognised by investors. Ultimately, we believe IMGA’s future will depend on maintaining a very clear direction: continuing to improve the quality of our investment management, deepening our areas of specialisation, developing our international presence, strengthening our relationships with investors and continuing to invest in our teams. All of this must be underpinned by hard work, consistency and an ongoing commitment to improve.
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TRADING
Growth Is Not the Problem, Cash Flow Is: Why APAC CFOs Are Rethinking Credit Risk in 202 For many APAC businesses, growth is no longer the biggest challenge. Getting paid is. Changing trade policies, currency volatility, supply chain pressures and less predictable payment behaviour are influencing both everyday commercial decisions and long-term growth plans. For finance leaders, the challenge is not simply whether to pursue new opportunities. It is how to pursue them without placing unnecessary pressure on liquidity. According to Allianz Trade’s latest report, The Art of Making Bold Moves: A CFO’s Roadmap to Credit Resilience and Liquidity in APAC, resilience does not require companies to eliminate risk entirely. Instead, businesses need better information, stronger credit management and the flexibility to adapt when conditions change. Delayed payments are tying up working capital One of the clearest pressures facing businesses is the growing amount of capital held in unpaid invoices. The report reveals that Days Sales Outstanding, or DSO, in Asia stands at 59 days, above the global average. Asia also stands out with the longest cash conversion cycle, taking businesses 70 days to convert cash spent on operations into cash collected from sales. For companies trading across borders, payment periods can extend from 90 to 180 days. Yet throughout this period, businesses must continue paying employees, suppliers, logistics providers and other operating expenses—often well before revenue is collected. The impact becomes more significant when companies are expanding. Rising sales do not automatically produce stronger cash flow if capital remains locked in receivables. A business may appear commercially successful while having less available cash to fund inventory, invest in technology or enter new markets. This makes DSO more than an accounting measure. It is an important indicator of how much financial flexibility a business actually has.
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Why SMEs face greater pressure Small and medium-sized enterprises remain a key driver of economic growth across APAC, but they often have fewer resources available to absorb delayed or missed payments. SMEs frequently find themselves caught between large multinational customers with the need to remain competitive. To secure new contracts, they may accept longer payment terms or higher customer credit limits. These decisions can support sales, but they also increase their vulnerability to non-payment. The report notes that 65% of APAC mid-sized businesses export to more than three countries, while 40% are actively pursuing growth in emerging markets. This expansion can create valuable opportunities, but it also introduces different payment practices, regulatory requirements, legal systems and standards of financial disclosure. Assessing a customer’s financial strength can be particularly difficult when reliable information is limited. Credit decisions may then depend on incomplete records, previous relationships or assumptions about an unfamiliar market. The result is a difficult balance. Being too cautious may mean losing valuable business, but extending credit without sufficient insight can weaken cash flow and place growth plans at risk. Turning receivables into a strategic asset Trade credit insurance, or TCI, is often viewed primarily as protection against customer non-payment. Nowadays, businesses are increasingly using it as a broader credit-management and growth tool. Before extending credit, businesses need to understand the financial strength and payment behaviour of prospective customers. Through TCI, finance and sales teams are able to gain access to credit intelligence, buyer assessments, and continuously monitored credit limits. When an insured customer fails to pay, a TCI policy may indemnify up to 90% of the covered debt, depending on the policy’s terms and conditions. This can help stabilise cash flow and prevent a single unpaid invoice from disrupting wider business plans.
TRADING
26 Insured receivables may also strengthen conversations with lenders. Subject to a bank’s own assessment and lending requirements, a recognised TCI policy can potentially support negotiations over credit facilities, revolving finance or borrowing costs. The value therefore extends beyond recovering losses. TCI can help businesses make more informed decisions before accepting an order, maintain consistent credit controls and pursue opportunities that might otherwise appear too uncertain. Connecting credit intelligence with commercial decisions For TCI to create meaningful value, it should be integrated into a company’s wider credit management process rather than treated as a standalone process. The Allianz Trade report outlines a practical 90-day approach. The first step is to review receivables and stress-test the largest debtor exposures to identify customer concentration risks and potential cash flow vulnerabilities. Next, businesses can begin integrating credit risk data into internal systems and approval workflows, enabling sales teams to respond faster while ensuring decisions remain aligned with the company's risk appetite. Finally, finance teams can reassess bad debt provisions and engage banking partners on how insured receivables may support financing arrangements and unlock capital for growth initiatives. The objective is simple: create visibility before risk becomes a problem. Combining global information with local market knowledge Credit and payment behaviour can differ considerably across APAC markets. Legal procedures, regulatory expectations and collections practices that work in one jurisdiction may not apply in another. Allianz Trade combines global risk intelligence with local market expertise across 13 APAC markets, incorporating factors such as payment culture, court efficiency, disclosure standards and regulatory conditions into its assessment of buyers and collections support.
This combination can be particularly valuable for SMEs entering unfamiliar markets without dedicated local credit teams. Product availability, coverage and policy-issuing arrangements nevertheless vary by jurisdiction and should be confirmed before a business makes a decision. Moving from caution to informed growth In an uncertain trading environment, strong growth depends on more than generating sales. Businesses must also understand when those sales are likely to turn into cash and what could happen if a customer does not pay. By combining customer intelligence, continuous monitoring, receivables protection and disciplined internal controls, TCI can help companies make commercial decisions with greater confidence. For APAC SMEs, that confidence can mean offering competitive payment terms, entering new markets and supporting important customer relationships without losing sight of liquidity. The objective is not to eliminate every risk. It is to make risk visible, manageable and consistent with the company’s financial capacity. With the right information and protection in place, businesses can preserve cash flow while remaining ready to act when opportunities emerge. In today's uncertain business environment, organisations must strike the right balance between pursuing growth opportunities and maintaining financial resilience. Allianz Trade's The Art of Making Bold Moves: A CFO's Roadmap to Credit Resilience and Liquidity in APAC details how finance leaders across the region are approaching credit risk, liquidity management and sustainable growth.
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BANKING
Ahli Bank Q.P.S.C., Best Bank for Treasury Activities Qatar 2026 What key strategies have enabled Ahli Bank Q.P.S.C. to excel in treasury activities and achieve the “Best Bank for Treasury Activities” award in 2026? Qatar’s domestic banking sector is highly competitive. Our relative size allows us to adapt quickly and act entrepreneurially, helping us respond to changing market conditions and client needs. How has the bank leveraged technology and digital solutions to enhance efficiency, risk management, and client service in its treasury operations? Digital and AI solutions are helping to improve business efficiency and transparency as the Bank continues its technology journey. They are also supporting the development of our products and services for clients. Treasury operations often involve complex risks. What innovative approaches has Ahli Bank implemented to manage market, liquidity, and operational risks effectively? Adaptability has been critical in navigating the uncertain risk environment we have experienced this year. It has helped the Bank respond to challenging conditions while continuing to support our clients’ treasury requirements. How does Ahli Bank tailor its treasury products and services to meet the diverse needs of corporate and institutional clients in Qatar and the region? Through regular engagement with our clients, we develop a clear understanding of what matters to them. This helps us tailor products and services to meet their current requirements and anticipate their future growth and business needs. This approach extends beyond Treasury to the wider customer experience.
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In a competitive banking landscape, what sets Ahli Bank apart from peers in treasury management and financial innovation? A one-size-fits-all approach will inevitably leave some clients’ needs unmet. Our understanding of client priorities enables us to provide tailored solutions and a range of products and services that help Ahli Bank stand out. How does Ahli Bank integrate sustainability and ESG principles into its treasury operations and investment strategies? ESG principles are an important part of Ahli Bank’s approach. We listen to our clients and the community and use what we learn to develop products and services that respond to their needs. What emerging trends in treasury and financial markets does Ahli Bank anticipate, and how is it preparing to stay ahead in the coming years? What works today may not be fit for purpose tomorrow. As technology and AI continue to develop, we keep looking ahead so that the Bank can adapt to change, respond to emerging opportunities and prepare for new challenges. What does receiving the “Best Bank for Treasury Activities Qatar 2026” award mean for the bank, its clients, and the broader financial sector in Qatar? Being recognised as “Best Bank for Treasury Activities Qatar 2026” acknowledges the collective effort of our team and our continued commitment to improving the value we offer. It also reinforces the importance we place on understanding and serving our clients.
BANKING
Derek Kwok, Chief Executive - Treasury & International Banking
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BUSINESS
Why Repair and Reuse Are Becoming Operating Decisions A returned product is not necessarily a lost sale. It may be a lightly used item that can be resold, a repairable product with a long remaining life, a source of spare parts or a costly object to dispose of. The commercial outcome depends on how quickly the business identifies the condition of the item and chooses a route. Repair and reuse therefore belong in operating design, not merely in an environmental statement. The scale of the challenge is substantial. The National Retail Federation's 2025 returns study, produced with Happy Returns, projected US retail returns of $849.9 billion for the year and estimated that 19.3% of online sales would be returned. Those are estimates for a particular market and methodology, not a universal return rate. They nevertheless show why the physical journey after a sale can be material to margins. A second decision after the first sale The original sale starts a forward supply chain: source, manufacture, distribute and deliver. A return starts a less predictable one. It may arrive without original packaging, with missing accessories or after a seasonal price has fallen. Each additional day can reduce recovery value. A company needs triage rules that tell staff when an item should go back into stock, to repair, to a specialist reseller, to a parts channel or to responsible disposal. This decision is economic. A product with a high resale price might justify testing and refurbishment. A low-cost item may cost more to transport and handle than it can recover. A damaged device may hold valuable components but require data removal and safety checks before any parts are reused. A blanket instruction to repair everything can waste money and, in some cases, resources. The OECD's work on reverse supply chains examines the organisation needed to collect products and materials for reuse, remanufacture and recycling. Its core insight for managers is that reverse flows need their own infrastructure and information. They do not automatically work by running the forward logistics network backwards.
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Unit economics begin with the product For a repair programme, the useful measure is contribution after all direct costs. Start with expected resale or retained customer value, then deduct collection, inspection, parts, labour, cleaning, repackaging, warranty provision, payments and the cost of an item that cannot be recovered. Include returns from the second sale and the time inventory sits idle. The resulting picture varies sharply by product, condition and location. Product design can change that arithmetic before a return occurs. Replaceable components, accessible fasteners and available manuals reduce labour time. Standardised parts can lower inventory complexity. But modularity may add manufacturing cost, weight or quality challenges. The question is whether the lifetime benefit exceeds those trade-offs for the actual customers and products involved. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation describes models that extend product life through repair, resale and refurbishment. That is a useful framework, but a company still needs to test willingness to pay, repair failure rates and whether a second-hand sale displaces a higher-margin new purchase. Circularity does not guarantee profitability. The customer experience can make or break recovery Returns policy shapes both conversion and cost. A policy that makes every return difficult may reduce claims but also discourage future buyers. A generous policy may support sales while increasing shipping, fraud exposure and handling. The NRF study found that many customers consider free returns important and reported return fraud as a concern. Companies need to distinguish legitimate service recovery from preventable misuse rather than making all customers bear the same friction. For repair, the critical customer questions are ordinary ones: How long will it take? What will it cost? Will the product be safe? What happens if it fails again? An attractive sustainability message cannot compensate for a repair process that is slow, opaque or more expensive than replacement. Accurate diagnostics and clear pricing can matter more than a broad promise to be circular.
BUSINESS
Businesses should also distinguish repair from refurbishment and resale. A repair restores a specific item for its owner. Refurbishment may prepare a returned product for another buyer. Resale requires grading, disclosure of condition and an appropriate warranty. Combining all three under one vague claim can create misunderstandings about what a customer is purchasing. Regulation changes the design incentives In Europe, right-to-repair measures encourage repair for products covered by the rules and set out obligations relating to access to repair and spare parts. The EU Council says the directive entered into force in July 2024, with member-state transposition due by the end of July 2026. Product scope and national implementation matter: a business should check its actual obligations rather than assume that every good is covered in the same way. The European Commission's work on the Digital Product Passport also points to a greater role for structured product information. Reliable records about components, materials and repair history may help a business decide whether an item can be restored and may help downstream users handle it responsibly. The specifics depend on the relevant product rules as they develop, so companies should build flexible data practices instead of assuming a single universal passport design. Environmental outcomes need evidence too Keeping a product in use can preserve embedded materials and manufacturing effort. Yet reverse transport, replacement parts and energy-intensive repair can offset part of the gain. The US
Environmental Protection Agency's electronics resources discuss reuse and sound end-of-life management as part of responsible electronics handling. A company making an environmental claim should compare realistic alternatives, including the age and efficiency of the product being repaired. For an old appliance, repairing it might extend its useful life; for some product categories, a more efficient replacement may alter the life-cycle comparison. The result is not fixed by a slogan. It depends on energy consumption, repair materials, remaining service life and local recycling options. Businesses should be cautious about claiming a quantified emissions saving without a method and data that support it. Building the operating system for returns A useful return record begins when the customer initiates a request. It identifies the product and purchase, reason for return, condition, accessories and available repair history. At receiving, staff can use a consistent grading rubric. An automated recommendation can help route routine items, while uncertain safety or fraud cases should receive a human review. The goal is to make decisions quickly and consistently without hiding exceptions. Management should review recovery rate, resale speed, repair success, repeat failure, customer satisfaction and the net value recovered per product category. It should also watch for unintended effects: a repair queue that grows faster than technicians can clear it, a refurbished channel that creates excessive warranty claims or a policy that drives legitimate customers away. A single headline recycling rate would miss these operating tensions.
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BUSINESS
Partners matter. Specialist repairers, reverse-logistics providers and certified recyclers can provide capabilities that are uneconomic to build in-house. Contracts should specify condition grading, chain of custody, data security where devices store personal information, ownership of recoverable parts and responsibility for customer warranties. Without those details, a retailer can lose visibility just when it needs evidence of what happened to a returned item. Inventory and cash must be part of the calculation Recovered products tie up cash between the return and the next sale. A high theoretical resale price can look attractive until the company counts weeks in testing, cleaning, listing and storage. Seasonal goods are especially sensitive to delay. Managers should compare the value after recovery with a realistic alternative, such as immediate sale to a specialist buyer, rather than with the original full retail price. The allocation of costs matters too. If inspection labour is booked to customer service, warehouse space to logistics and resale revenue to another division, no team sees the complete economics. A common product-level view makes it possible to distinguish items that earn a contribution from items that merely move expenses between departments. It also helps buyers negotiate more realistic terms with suppliers whose packaging or component choices determine how easily a product can be restored. This does not mean every activity must pay for itself as a separate profit centre. A company may choose to repair an item because it meets a warranty obligation or preserves a valuable customer relationship. Such decisions can be justified, but their cost should be visible. Without that transparency, an unsuccessful recovery programme can continue under the cover of a broad sustainability target. The supplier and channel question A manufacturer that designs a product for repair creates a continuing need for parts, technical documentation and qualified service. If those elements remain available only from the original producer, customers may face high prices or long waits. If they are distributed through partners, the producer must manage quality and warranty responsibilities. Either route has operational implications long after the first sale. Resale also needs channel discipline. A refurbished item may appeal to buyers who would not purchase the new model at full price, expanding the addressable market. It may also substitute
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for a new sale. Companies can test the difference by product tier, customer type and geography rather than assume that every secondary transaction is incremental. The useful measure is total customer and product value, including service costs, across both channels. In some categories, independent repair businesses can extend reach without the manufacturer building a branch network. Contracts should make parts availability, service standards and claims handling clear. If incentives encourage a partner to minimise repair cost while the brand bears repeat failures, the resulting quality problem can outweigh the savings from outsourcing. Design small experiments before making large claims An initial test could focus on one product family with a stable volume of returns. The business can record how many units qualify for direct restock, repair, refurbishment and recycling; what each route costs; how long each takes; and what customers report after the item is returned to use. That data is more useful than a generic target for the share of products described as circular. A second test might change one factor: spare-parts availability, a customer repair booking flow or the location where items are inspected. Compare the outcome with a similar product group or earlier period, while allowing for seasonal effects. The purpose is to learn where the bottleneck sits. Better triage may create more value than an expensive new workshop; a revised product design may create more value than cheaper shipping. Public communication should follow the evidence. A company can say it offers repair for specified categories or that a share of eligible returns was restored during a defined period. It should avoid implying that every repaired product produced a net environmental saving without an appropriate comparison. Credible figures are narrower, but they are also more useful to customers and managers. Start with categories where value is visible Repair and reuse programmes work best when a company can identify products with meaningful remaining value, repeatable defects and a route back to customers. A limited trial can compare recovered value with the full cost of handling and track whether the process improves customer retention. Once the underlying numbers are known, the business can redesign procurement, packaging and product specifications to improve future recovery. The strategic shift is modest but important: treat a return as another operating decision about a physical asset. Some items should be repaired, some resold, some recycled. Making that choice well is where a more durable business model begins.
FINANCE
How Payment Terms Shape Supplier Resilience A supplier can report a profitable sale while waiting weeks for the cash that pays its employees and its own vendors. The buyer, meanwhile, may report stronger cash flow because it has delayed an outgoing payment. Both statements can be true. Payment terms allocate financing pressure across a supply chain, and their effects can reach far beyond the accounts payable department. A small manufacturer that ships components every week may need to buy materials and run payroll before a customer settles an invoice. If the agreed payment date moves from 30 to 60 days, the supplier must finance an additional month of work. If payment slips beyond the agreed date, the supplier faces both a timing problem and uncertainty. These are different issues and deserve different remedies. The cost of waiting is rarely free The simplest cost is the cash tied up in receivables. A company may bridge it with a credit line, owners' capital or cash that could have been invested elsewhere. But there are operational costs as well: collections staff chase invoices, managers delay purchases, and suppliers may turn away new orders if they cannot fund the materials needed to fulfil them. The UK Office of the Small Business Commissioner's research estimates that late payment affects more than 1.5 million UK businesses a year and that businesses are owed around £26 billion in overdue payments at a given time. Those figures are estimates for the UK, with defined research assumptions; they should not be treated as worldwide totals. They nevertheless show why payment performance is a business issue rather than merely a matter of invoice administration. The buyer may pay an indirect price too. A stressed supplier might require a higher price, ask for an advance, reduce capacity or struggle to maintain service during a demand spike. The cheapest apparent procurement terms can therefore carry hidden continuity costs. No single invoice proves this effect, but repeated payment volatility can influence which customers suppliers choose to prioritise.
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Separate long terms from late payment A 60-day term paid reliably is not identical to a 30-day term paid 20 days late. In the first case, a supplier can plan around a known schedule, subject to its financing capacity. In the second, the timing is uncertain and the business may incur extra collection and borrowing costs. Both can put pressure on smaller firms, but a policy aimed only at overdue invoices will miss the impact of long contracted terms. The UK government's consultation on poor payment practices explicitly distinguishes late payments, long payment terms, disputed invoices and construction retentions. Its government response indicates an intention to legislate when parliamentary time allows; proposed changes should not be described as already in force. For companies operating across borders, applicable law and the contract itself remain decisive. Disputes complicate the picture. A buyer may have a legitimate quality complaint, an inaccurate purchase order or a mismatch in tax information. A poorly designed process can nevertheless leave the whole invoice unpaid while only a small portion is contested. Separating undisputed amounts and resolving exceptions quickly can preserve fairness without asking the buyer to abandon controls. Financing is part of the supplier relationship Trade credit is a form of financing: the supplier effectively funds the buyer for the agreed period. Large buyers may have cheaper access to capital than their smaller vendors. Extending terms can shift financing to the party least able to bear it. That does not make every extended term improper, but it should make procurement and treasury teams evaluate the full supplychain effect rather than treating days payable outstanding as a goal in isolation. Access to alternatives varies. The OECD's SME financing scoreboard tracks differences in financing conditions across economies. The European Central Bank's survey of euro-area enterprises provides a separate view of firms' financing needs and constraints. Those sources are useful context, but neither tells a buyer what a particular supplier pays to finance a particular invoice. Direct discussion and contract-level evidence are still needed.
FINANCE
Early-payment discounts and supply-chain finance can help under appropriate terms. Yet a supplier should compare the discount or fee with its own borrowing cost and assess whether participation is genuinely optional. A buyer should disclose the process clearly, prevent a financing programme from masking a unilateral extension of payment terms and consider what happens if the financing provider changes its appetite. Treat payment as a measurable process A company may report average payment days and still have a subgroup of suppliers paid much later. Aggregates can hide small suppliers, disputes and recurring approval bottlenecks. The useful management view combines the proportion paid on time, the distribution of actual days to pay, invoice rejection rates, average time to resolve disputes and the share of invoices without a valid purchase order. The European Commission's EU Payment Observatory examines payment behaviour and its effects across the region. For an individual buyer, that wider evidence is a prompt to inspect its own transaction records. Data should be segmented by supplier size, geography and type of spend, with attention to whether agreed terms have changed. Payment reliability is a process that can be measured and managed, not a vague statement about corporate values. Information quality is often the immediate operational challenge. If invoices arrive without order references, if goods receipts are
recorded late or if approval authorities are unclear, accounts payable cannot consistently meet a stated target. Improving the upstream process may do more for actual payment timing than repeatedly asking the finance team to work faster at month end. Working capital has two sides An increase in payables can improve a buyer's cash position in the short term, but finance leaders should be careful about calling it a durable efficiency gain if it depends on a weaker supplier absorbing more cost. Better working-capital management can come from accurate forecasting, sensible stock levels and faster exception handling rather than from simply increasing the time before suppliers are paid. Financial reporting also needs to reflect material financing structures. IFRS 7 addresses disclosures about financial instruments, while related supplierfinance disclosures sit in IFRS accounting requirements. The accounting treatment depends on the arrangement and applicable reporting framework. The broader management point is simpler: treasury and procurement should know whether an apparent change in cash conversion reflects operating improvement, changed payment terms or a financing programme. A supplier can use the same discipline on the receivables side. Before accepting a large order, it should model the cash needed from production through collection, including tax, shipping and potential disputes. It should understand concentration risk: a single late-paying customer may have more effect than many smaller ones. Negotiating staged milestones or deposits can be more effective than quoting a higher price and hoping the extra margin covers uncertain cash timing.
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FINANCE
What boards should ask Directors do not need to review every invoice, but they can require a clear account of payment practice. Are small suppliers paid at the same speed as larger ones? How much of reported cash improvement comes from longer supplier terms? Are disputes resolved promptly, and are undisputed amounts released? Have procurement savings been assessed alongside supplier failure risk? Do finance metrics reward teams for decisions that make the supply base less reliable? The answers will differ by industry, geography and bargaining structure. Some suppliers prefer a higher price and longer term; others need quick settlement to fund growth. A good policy allows justified exceptions without allowing opaque delays to become normal. Payment terms should be negotiated transparently, monitored consistently and revisited when conditions change. Contract design can reduce preventable friction Payment starts long before an invoice is issued. If a buyer's contract leaves delivery acceptance, documentation or dispute procedures ambiguous, the supplier may discover only after completing the work that the invoice cannot enter the payment workflow. A clear contract specifies the event that triggers invoicing, the information required, the approval owner and a route for resolving disagreements within a defined period. Milestone payments can be appropriate where work takes months or requires material expenditure before delivery. A deposit may help a small supplier commit capacity, but buyers should assess delivery and counterparty risk as well. Other contracts may be better served by payment on completed units or regular progress certificates. There is no universal term; a sound term allocates risk in a way both sides can understand and fund. The same care applies to changes during a relationship. Extending a term at renewal can have a larger effect than an apparent discount, particularly for a supplier with substantial payroll or inventory. The buyer should know whether the concession is a genuine negotiated trade-off and whether it will still have enough capable suppliers when demand rises. Why averages can mislead management Suppose a buyer pays nine large vendors on day 30 and one small specialist on day 90. A value-weighted average may appear strong because the specialist's invoices are small. Yet the late payment may threaten a component on which an entire production process depends. A reliable dashboard therefore needs to show supplier counts and the distribution of days to pay as well as monetary averages.
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A useful review identifies the stages at which invoices become stuck: missing orders, receiving delays, coding errors, disputed quantities, approvals and final payment runs. Some delays are genuine controls that protect against error or fraud. Others come from avoidable re-entry of information or unclear ownership. The objective is to simplify preventable delay without weakening the checks that keep both parties' records accurate. Boards can ask for trends in invoices past due and in the tail of very late payments, not only the mean. They can also ask what percentage of disputed invoices were settled in the agreed period and whether suppliers were told what was missing. An improvement claim should be assessed against these more granular measures and against any change in the mix of suppliers. Liquidity should not disappear from either side Faster payment is not a command to exhaust the buyer's cash reserve. A buyer with seasonal revenue needs a forecast that reflects payroll, taxes, debt service and essential inventory. Payment policy belongs in that forecast so finance can identify when a promised term might become difficult to meet. Discovering a gap before the invoice falls due creates more options than asking suppliers to wait after a silent missed date. Suppliers need their own early warning measures. A rising proportion of receivables from one customer, repeated disputes or increasing time between acceptance and payment can signal concentration risk. That information should influence order commitments and credit limits. Bank finance, invoice finance and early-payment options may bridge timing gaps, but their fees and recourse terms must be examined case by case. The financial outcome is strongest when both sides exchange accurate information. A buyer that announces an unavoidable delay early gives a supplier time to adjust. A supplier that invoices promptly with complete supporting documents reduces the chance of rejection. Neither action excuses chronic late payment; both make a functioning relationship easier to maintain. A more complete view of resilience Supplier resilience is often discussed in terms of geography, inventory and alternative sourcing. Cash belongs in that discussion. A business cannot build reliable delivery on contracts that it repeatedly pays late or on terms its essential vendors cannot sustain. Conversely, paying early without sound controls or a clear commercial purpose can waste the buyer's own liquidity. The practical objective is a predictable, fair payment system that fits the economics of both sides. When buyers measure the true timing of payments and the causes of delay, they can improve working capital while reducing avoidable fragility across the chain.
TECHNOLOGY
Where Industrial Edge Computing Creates Measurable Value
A factory machine can produce a stream of readings every second, but most of those readings do not require a journey to a remote data centre. A vibration anomaly may matter within the next few production cycles. A monthly performance comparison can wait. That difference in timing is the practical business case for industrial edge computing: put enough processing near the equipment to make time-sensitive information useful, while retaining central systems for wider analysis, governance and longterm records. Edge computing is often marketed as a sweeping architecture change. For many companies, it is better understood as a placement decision. Which data must be interpreted locally? Which decisions can tolerate delay? What should be stored, shared or discarded? The answer depends on the operating process rather than on the volume of sensors purchased. Start with a decision rather than a device
justify devices, software support and operational change. Some processes already perform well with existing control systems. Adding an edge layer without a defined decision can increase complexity without adding value. NIST's smart manufacturing research highlights the importance of reliability, time-critical performance and security when new computing and communications technology enters a manufacturing environment. Its point is useful for investment decisions: a tool that performs well in a demonstration still has to function under the plant's actual operating conditions. Separate control from insight An industrial edge project can serve several roles. It may filter noisy sensor data, detect changes in a machine's condition, assist a technician or transmit a concise event to a central platform. Those activities carry different levels of risk. A dashboard suggestion that an engineer reviews is not equivalent to software that alters a control setting automatically.
Consider a packaging line where an optical sensor can identify a misaligned label. If an operator can stop or divert a unit before it enters a sealed carton, fast analysis has a direct quality benefit. If the same alert arrives hours later in a central report, the company may still learn about a trend, but it has lost the chance to correct the individual item. The value is generated by the action available within the decision window, not by the computing hardware itself.
Companies should be clear about this distinction before procurement. The more directly a system influences the physical process, the stronger the requirements for validation, fallback, human authority and change control. NIST's guide to operational technology security explicitly addresses the performance, reliability and safety demands that make these environments different from conventional office IT. It is a reason to involve production engineers and safety staff early, rather than treating deployment as a conventional cloud project.
The analysis should begin with the cost of a missed or late intervention. That might be scrap, unplanned downtime, excess energy use or a delayed safety response. Teams can then ask whether local processing improves those outcomes enough to
Local processing can also reduce unnecessary data transfer. It may make sense to send a timestamped alert and an exception trace to a central platform while retaining routine high-frequency signals for a shorter period
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TECHNOLOGY
near the machine. But the opposite may be necessary for audit, root-cause analysis or model improvement. A retention schedule should follow the use case and legal requirements, not a blanket promise that processing locally will always reduce storage costs. Reliability has more than one dimension Edge advocates often emphasise latency. In many plants, continuity during a network interruption is equally important. If a local application can keep monitoring a line when a wide-area connection fails, operations may preserve visibility. Yet continuity is not automatic: the application itself can fail, its model can become outdated, and a local device can lose power. Plants need a documented answer for each failure mode. That answer may include a simple manual procedure, a knowngood configuration, spare devices and rules on when a control reverts to its original operating state. An edge service should also know how to reconcile records with the central platform after connectivity returns. Duplicate events, missing timestamps and conflicting versions can undermine the very quality data that the project was meant to improve. The pilot should therefore be tested during planned disconnections and maintenance windows, not only under ideal network conditions. Mean time to recover, data completeness and production impact are more meaningful than a laboratory latency figure alone. It is entirely possible for a slower but stable design to outperform a faster system that is difficult to maintain.
Cybersecurity belongs in the cost model More local computing endpoints create more systems to inventory, patch and monitor. Where a device sits between sensors and enterprise networks, its credentials and remote access paths become significant control points. A strong project budget must account for secure deployment, software updates, logs, access rights and incident response over the useful life of the equipment. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's secureby-design guidance argues for making security a product and supplier responsibility. Buyers can translate that principle into procurement questions: Is support available for the expected life of the machine? Can default credentials be changed? How are vulnerabilities disclosed? Can the device be restored without prolonged disruption? These questions affect both resilience and total ownership cost. Controls should suit the plant. Patching a laptop overnight is different from patching a device on a continuous production line. Maintenance windows, compatibility testing and a rollback path can matter more than the speed of any single update. This is why operations, IT security and vendors need a shared plan rather than separate assumptions about who will maintain the edge estate. Data access is becoming a commercial issue The ability to use machine data is not solely a technical question. Contracts may define who can obtain it, which third parties may analyse it and how portable the resulting records will be. A manufacturer that builds analytics around one proprietary format can later discover that changing equipment suppliers is expensive even if the new hardware is competitively priced.
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TECHNOLOGY
In the EU, the Data Act, applicable since September 2025, addresses access to certain data generated by connected products and includes provisions affecting cloud and edge service switching. Its application depends on the product, the roles of the parties and the data in question. It does not turn every derived insight into an unrestricted public asset. For businesses, the immediate lesson is to document data rights and portability before deployment, including the format, interfaces and exit arrangements. For smaller suppliers, interoperability is also an investment issue. The OECD's work on SME digital transformation describes capability and resource gaps that can slow adoption. A deployment that requires a specialist team at every site may succeed in a flagship plant but struggle across a dispersed supplier network. Simpler configuration and open interfaces can matter more than a long feature list. Measure the entire operating result A credible business case compares a baseline with a controlled pilot. It sets out current downtime, defects or energy consumption; records the frequency of events that staff can actually act upon; and captures the labour required to investigate false alarms. Then it counts the full costs: sensors, integration, training, licensing, maintenance, power and periodic model review. Energy claims deserve similar care. Local processing may reduce the amount of data transmitted, but it also adds hardware that consumes electricity. The IEA's analysis of energy and AI is a
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reminder that computing has a physical footprint. A company should measure energy at the facility and system level before claiming that a shift in architecture produces an environmental saving. The strongest early projects tend to have an observable event, a clear action and a traceable financial outcome. A quality-control alert with a measurable scrap rate is easier to assess than a broad promise to make every factory intelligent. The wider transformation can follow once a company has demonstrated that its local decisions, data stewardship and support model work together. People and maintenance determine whether pilots scale Many edge pilots depend on a particularly capable local engineer who knows the machinery, the sensor and the software supplier. That may be acceptable while evaluating a single line. It becomes a governance problem when a company expects the same system to work across dozens of sites. The expansion plan should identify who owns configuration, who reviews alerts, who trains replacement staff and who has authority to disable an unreliable model. Documentation needs to travel with the system. It should describe the data collected, the version of each processing rule, the location of stored records and the escalation route when the application behaves unexpectedly. If a technician cannot distinguish a sensor fault from a genuine process anomaly, false alarms can erode trust quickly. Reviewing operator feedback is therefore part of measurement, not an optional change-management exercise.
TECHNOLOGY
Skills constraints can change the economics. A plant with limited IT support may prefer fewer advanced features in exchange for a device it can recover and maintain locally. A larger group may be able to support central monitoring of many small edge nodes, provided central oversight does not override site-specific safety decisions. These choices should be explicit before pilots are copied. Build a financial test with uncertainty A business case should give a range rather than a single return figure. It can estimate a low case in which alerts catch fewer defects, a central case reflecting observed pilot performance and a high case that assumes repeatability across similar lines. Costs should also be ranged: maintenance visits, equipment replacement, network upgrades and data integration often become clearer only after installation. Management can require a clear counterfactual. Would better maintenance schedules, operator training or an inexpensive software change achieve most of the same result? Edge computing deserves credit for the benefit it causes, not for every improvement made at the same time. A pilot should record what changed and when, then compare like-for-like shifts or production runs where feasible. Scaling should follow process similarity. A model trained on one machine, material mix or operating temperature may perform poorly elsewhere. Each new site should have a validation period and acceptance criteria. That disciplines spending while reducing
the risk that headline savings from one location are multiplied mechanically across an entire group. Governance of models and decisions Where local analytics include machine learning, performance can change as equipment ages or product specifications change. An anomaly threshold that was useful at launch may generate too many false alarms six months later. Define who is allowed to retrain or alter it, how changes are tested and how decisions can be traced to the model version in use at the time. A decision log does not need to capture every raw sensor reading indefinitely. It should preserve enough context to explain why a consequential alert appeared, what action was taken and whether the outcome justified it. This evidence helps engineering teams improve performance and gives managers a basis for continuing or retiring the project. Operational trust grows when staff can challenge an alert and see that the challenge affects the system. The decision companies should make Edge computing is valuable where the location of processing changes an operational outcome. It has less value when the same decision can be made centrally at lower cost and with simpler controls. That conclusion should not be treated as a setback for digital strategy. It is evidence that the company is matching architecture to its work. Manufacturers that start with the timing of the decision, test reliability under real conditions and price the full lifecycle can build selective edge systems that are easier to trust. The opportunity is to make information useful at the moment it matters, then carry the right evidence into the broader business.
Issue 89 | 31
BUSINESS
Why Business Continuity Depends on Knowing Your Hidden Dependencies A disruption rarely respects an organisation chart. A supplier misses a delivery, a cloud service becomes unavailable, or a specialist employee cannot be reached. The visible failure may appear in one department, while the consequences spread through customer service, production and cash collection. The first task in business continuity is therefore deceptively simple: understand what a critical service actually depends on. Many companies maintain supplier lists, application inventories and continuity plans. Those records can each be correct while the combined picture remains incomplete. A product may need a small component from a supplier several tiers away. A billing process may depend on a single file transfer maintained by one contractor. A replacement supplier may exist on paper but require months of testing before it can supply at the necessary standard. Continuity becomes more practical when these links are made visible and tested against a realistic time limit. Start with the service customers would miss The most useful starting point is a service or product, not a department. Ask which activities must continue, what level of interruption customers can tolerate, and which obligations have fixed deadlines. Then work backwards through the people, locations, technology, data, equipment and outside organisations needed to deliver it. That approach reveals dependencies that a traditional asset list can miss. ISO 22301 frames business continuity as a management system for preparing for, responding to and recovering from disruption. A framework helps create discipline, but a certificate or a documented plan cannot demonstrate that a specific service will continue under
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every scenario. The value comes from translating the framework into decisions: who can authorise an alternative process, where capacity can be obtained and which customers need to hear from the company first. It is helpful to distinguish a dependency from a single point of failure. A company may depend on electricity, but it may have tested backup power. It may have two suppliers, yet both could rely on the same upstream plant or transport corridor. The question is not simply whether there are two names in a procurement system; it is whether one event could remove both options. Mapping ownership and common exposures makes the answer more credible. Supplier visibility has an economic limit The OECD Supply Chain Resilience Review examines how connected supply chains transmit shocks and how resilience can be improved. Its broad lesson for an individual company is that diversification and visibility involve trade-offs. Keeping extra inventory, qualifying another supplier and moving production closer to demand may reduce some risks while raising costs or creating different constraints. A continuity strategy needs to state which interruptions it is paying to reduce. Companies can begin with suppliers whose failure would stop a critical service, then ask about locations, subcontractors, financial health, security controls and recovery arrangements. The UK government’s supply chain guidance encourages firms to understand exposure and take proportionate steps. This is more useful than sending an identical long questionnaire to every vendor. A small supplier delivering an irreplaceable item may warrant deeper engagement than a large supplier of a readily available service.
BUSINESS
Visibility also depends on the quality of answers. A supplier may be unable to disclose every sub-tier relationship or may not know how a disruption would affect its own partners. Contracts can establish notification duties, but they do not create physical capacity. Joint exercises, samples of recovery evidence and conversations about lead times often reveal more than a completed form. A business should record uncertainty where it cannot see further into the chain and plan around that uncertainty.
The map should include internal dependencies too. Some processes rely on a single person’s judgment or an undocumented sequence of approvals. Cross-training is useful, but it will not replace authority if nobody else is permitted to act. A continuity exercise should test whether the second person has both the knowledge and permission to make decisions when the usual owner is absent.
Digital dependencies are part of the same map
A plan is most valuable when it changes what people do during the first hours of an interruption. A tabletop exercise can reveal confusion over escalation and communications. A technical recovery test can show whether backups are usable. A limited operational exercise can establish the real capacity of a manual workaround. Each tests something different. Passing one does not prove the others.
Software services, identity systems and data connections now sit inside routine operations. A warehouse can be physically open while it cannot receive orders. A finance team can hold cash while it cannot access the data needed to pay suppliers. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 guide to supply chain risk stresses governance and understanding relationships with suppliers. Cyber risk is one form of interruption, but its lesson about accountability applies to operational dependencies more broadly. The more detailed NIST supply chain risk publication also discusses practices across the life cycle of systems and organisations. For a business leader, the practical question is whether a critical vendor’s failure mode has a workable response. Can orders be processed manually for a day? Is the data needed for a switch available in a usable format? Has a backup provider actually handled a live transaction? The answers may differ sharply from what a contract promises.
Test the time to recover
The resulting measures should be service based: time to detect a failure, time to make a decision, time to restore a minimum level of service and time to clear the backlog. A company should also record what it sacrificed to keep operating. Continuing to accept orders while fulfilment falls behind might defer rather than solve the disruption. Clear thresholds tell managers when to slow intake, inform customers or use a more costly substitute.
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BUSINESS
Separate substitutability from redundancy Two sources of supply are useful only if they can meet the same need within the required time. A second manufacturer might use a different specification, lack available capacity or need approval from a customer before its component can be used. A backup logistics provider might have trucks but no access to the data needed to route them. The continuity map should identify these switching conditions and the work required to remove them. A nominal alternative is not the same as a ready alternative. This creates an investment choice. For a low-cost item that can halt a high-value service, carrying more stock may be proportionate. For a specialised service with long qualification times, keeping an alternate provider warm through occasional work might be more effective. For a dependency that cannot economically be duplicated, the best response may be a clear customer communication plan and a realistic recovery window. Resilience is not always maximum duplication; it is an informed match between the cost of preparation and the harm of interruption. Decide who owns the gaps between functions Procurement may understand contracts, operations may know the process, technology may know the system architecture, and finance may understand the cash impact. None necessarily owns the entire service dependency. A cross-functional review can connect these views, but it needs a named decision-maker. Without one, every team can complete its own checklist while a critical gap remains in the handoff between them.
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The review should distinguish three questions. What is known about a dependency? What can be done if it fails? Who has authority to spend money or change service levels when that happens? Answers need not be elaborate. A short record showing the service owner, the recovery option, the time it takes to activate and the unresolved assumptions can be more useful than a lengthy document nobody can act on. Updating that record after supplier changes and system releases keeps it connected to current operations. Finance has a role in turning this from a risk discussion into an operating decision. The cost of a second supplier can be compared with the margin and customer obligations exposed by a disruption. A backup system may look expensive until the business estimates the work that would be interrupted. These calculations will be uncertain, but explicit assumptions invite challenge and revision. The aim is to prioritise investment, not manufacture a precise price for every hypothetical crisis. Learn from small interruptions Organisations often wait for a major incident to review continuity. Smaller events can be more useful because they occur often enough to show patterns. A delayed file, a late delivery or an absent approver may reveal that work has accumulated around one person or connection. Recording the time to detect and resolve these events can show which links are already strained before a larger shock occurs.
BUSINESS
After an exercise or incident, improvements should be assigned to an owner with a date and a way to test completion. A finding that a manual process is needed is not resolved by writing it into a plan; staff must have access to the forms, data and authority it requires. A finding that a supplier needs more capacity is not resolved until the supplier has agreed how that capacity will be available. Closing that gap between observation and tested change is what makes continuity work accumulate value. Business continuity therefore has a cadence. Critical services can be reviewed when products, suppliers or systems change, and the highest-risk alternatives can be exercised periodically. The map will never be complete, but it can become accurate enough to support better decisions. A company gains resilience when it knows where uncertainty is concentrated and can act before an interruption becomes a surprise to everyone involved. Continuity is ultimately a question of choice under pressure. Companies cannot eliminate every dependency, and they need not build an expensive replacement for each one. They can identify the links that matter most, test how quickly alternatives work, and make the trade-offs explicit before a crisis forces them to decide. That gives business continuity a place in everyday operating decisions rather than leaving it as a document consulted only after something breaks.
Issue 89 | 35
FINANCE
Why Payment Timing Is Becoming a Bigger Finance Decision A payment can leave an account in seconds, but the decision behind it may have taken days. Someone must confirm the amount, the recipient, the invoice, the funding source and the authority to release the money. As payment systems accelerate, the gap between a fast rail and a slow internal process becomes more visible. Finance teams have to decide where speed creates value and where a brief pause protects cash. This is an operational finance question, not just a technology upgrade. Faster settlement can reduce uncertainty for a supplier and make cash available sooner. It can also shorten the window for correcting a mistake or stopping a fraudulent instruction. The strongest payment design treats timing, information and approval as one process rather than assuming the fastest available route is always the right one. The value of knowing when money will move Cash planning often begins with a forecast of receipts and payments. In practice, the date printed on an invoice is not necessarily the date cash arrives. A dispute, a missing purchase order, a batch schedule or a bank cut-off can shift the timing. On the outgoing side, a payment approved today may settle today, tomorrow or later depending on the rail, currency and intermediary banks. Treasury needs a forecast of actual flows as well as contractual due dates. The International Accounting Standards Board’s IAS 7 sets out how cash flows are reported in financial statements. That reporting view is essential, but operational decisions need more granular information: which payment is ready, which is waiting for evidence,
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and which may be recalled or disputed. A finance team can have accurate historical statements and still face a surprise liquidity need at the end of the week. Faster systems make that distinction sharper. When a supplier offers a discount for prompt payment, the buyer can compare the saving with the cost of using cash early. When an invoice is disputed, paying quickly may be the wrong choice even if the rail is available. Timing should reflect commercial terms, the reliability of the underlying data and the company’s cash position. The decision belongs in a policy that people can apply consistently, not in an informal habit of paying everything at the last moment. Instant settlement changes the control point Europe’s Instant Payments Regulation is expanding access to euro instant credit transfers and includes requirements for checking whether the payee name matches the account identifier. Its implementation has staged dates and scope rules. For businesses, the lesson is broader than one regulation: verification must happen before a payment is sent, because a very fast settlement leaves less time for intervention afterward. A name check can flag a mismatch, but it cannot establish that an invoice is genuine or that a legitimate supplier has authorised a changed bank account. A convincing impersonator may supply a real account in a matching name. Finance teams therefore still need controls around changes to supplier master data, independent confirmation of unusual requests and clear escalation when a result is ambiguous. The European Central Bank’s explanation shows why verification is becoming part of the payment journey, not an optional afterthought.
FINANCE
Controls must also suit the value and urgency of the transaction. A low-value recurring payment to a known beneficiary does not require the same review as a first transfer to a new overseas account. Risk-based limits, segregation of duties and reliable audit trails can allow routine payments to move quickly while giving exceptions more attention. If every payment is treated as exceptional, staff may create workarounds and the control loses its purpose. Data quality determines whether speed helps Payment messages carry information that helps banks and businesses route, screen, reconcile and investigate transfers. The Committee on Payment and Market Infrastructures’ updated ISO 20022 data requirements aim to improve consistency in crossborder messages. Common fields do not automatically make a company’s source data accurate. If an ERP system holds an incomplete beneficiary name or an unstructured invoice reference, a richer message format can carry the same weakness further downstream. The Bank of England’s CHAPS enhanced data policy provides a concrete example of the move toward more structured information in high-value payments. Finance functions should examine where the data originates, who can edit it and how exceptions are resolved. Improvements to payment files can reduce manual investigation only if the invoice, vendor and account records are maintained with similar care.
Reconciliation is where the benefit becomes measurable. A receipt that arrives promptly but cannot be matched to an invoice may remain unusable for credit control. A payment marked sent but lacking a clear status can prompt duplicate enquiries or even duplicate payments. Swift’s gpi service illustrates how tracking information can improve visibility into cross-border transfers, though a payment’s final timing still depends on the route and institutions involved. The relevant metric for a business is often the time from initiation to a confidently reconciled record, not merely the network’s advertised speed. Cross-border payment is a chain, not a single rail Moving money between countries can involve different operating hours, data requirements, compliance checks and domestic systems. The BIS Committee on Payment and Market Infrastructures’ 2026 work on fast payment system interlinking examines ways those systems might connect. Interlinking may improve reach and efficiency, but it does not by itself remove foreign exchange risk, local compliance obligations or the need for clear beneficiary data. For an international company, a practical approach is to map each important payment corridor. Record when a transfer can be initiated, what information it requires, when the recipient can use the funds, how fees and exchange rates are communicated, and how an error is resolved. A corridor that works well for routine supplier payments may be unsuitable for a time-critical acquisition or payroll run. Choosing among rails is a matter of service need and control, not a general verdict on which system is modern.
Issue 89 | 37
FINANCE
Design the decision before choosing the rail Finance leaders can start with a small set of questions. Is the beneficiary independently verified? Is the underlying obligation approved and undisputed? What is the economic value of earlier settlement? Will the transaction leave enough liquidity for other commitments? Can the status and reference be reconciled without manual reconstruction? Those questions turn a payment from a mechanical instruction into a deliberate cash decision. Decide how much liquidity speed is worth Faster receipt of funds can reduce the need for a cash buffer, but only if receipts are predictable and usable when expected. A payment that settles quickly yet arrives without a usable reference may still take a day to allocate. Conversely, faster outgoing payments can compress a buyer’s available cash. The finance team should model settlement timing and reconciliation timing separately, then compare their effect on credit lines, investment of surplus cash and the ability to meet obligations. This can change supplier negotiations. A buyer with predictable cash may offer earlier payment in exchange for a discount, while a supplier facing volatile receipts may value certainty more than a
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marginally higher price. Neither party should assume the economic value of a one-day shift is fixed. It depends on borrowing costs, uncertainty and bargaining power. An arrangement that works for a large supplier may place a smaller one under pressure if the price concession outweighs the cash benefit. Build a clear exception process Payment errors are not limited to fraud. A duplicate invoice, a wrong currency, an expired account number or a mismatch between the approved purchase and the delivered goods can all create an exception. The process should make it clear who can hold a payment, what evidence will release it and how the supplier will be informed. Silent delays damage relationships and make forecast dates less reliable. A visible queue of unresolved exceptions helps treasury distinguish timing risk from actual liquidity shortage. Supplier bank detail changes deserve particular attention because they combine a legitimate business event with a common fraud opportunity. Independent confirmation using an established contact route, approval by a second person and a record of the change can reduce risk. These steps need to be workable under time pressure. If the approved route is too slow for routine changes, staff may make informal exceptions that are hard to see until after money has moved.
FINANCE
Finance and technology teams should also establish what happens when a payment rail is unavailable. Can an urgent obligation move through another bank or channel? Does that route preserve the necessary reference data and approval records? Is there a clear threshold for paying a fee to use it? A backup that has never been tested may fail at the point of need because limits, credentials or beneficiary details are missing. Use status data to improve the forecast The payment process produces useful signals before cash moves. An approved invoice, a completed beneficiary check, a released payment instruction and a confirmed settlement each indicate a different degree of certainty. Treasury can use these milestones to improve short-term cash forecasts, provided the source systems agree on definitions. A payment marked complete by an internal workflow is not necessarily settled at the recipient bank. The same discipline applies to incoming cash. Sales teams may forecast collections from customer promises, while credit control sees disputes and payment history. A shared view of expected
receipts should show the evidence behind each date and the owner of any uncertainty. Over time, differences between forecast and actual settlement can reveal whether delays cluster around customers, payment corridors, missing data or internal approval steps. That diagnosis supports targeted fixes instead of a blanket increase in cash buffers. The best metrics are therefore layered: time from invoice to approval, time from approval to payment initiation, time to settlement and time to reconciliation. A single average can hide a small group of long delays that matters most to suppliers or cash planning. Segmenting by payment type, value and geography makes the data useful for decisions. As speed increases on the rail, these internal intervals may be where the largest remaining improvement can be found. The promise of faster payments is real, but speed changes where care is required. Good data, proportionate approvals, beneficiary checks and usable status information let a company benefit from quicker movement without surrendering oversight. As more payment options become available, the finance advantage may come from knowing when to use each one—and from being able to explain the decision afterward.
Issue 89 | 39
TECHNOLOGY
Why Digital Identity Is Becoming Business Infrastructure A customer who cannot sign in cannot complete a purchase. An employee locked out of a system cannot serve that customer. A contractor with access that lasts too long can create a different problem. These events often sit in separate budgets, yet they share a common question: how does a company establish who someone is, decide what that person can do, and maintain confidence as the relationship changes?
The distinction matters commercially. Repeated document requests can drive abandonment, while inadequate checks can expose a business to fraud or disputes. A sensible design asks what evidence is needed for each action, how long it should remain valid, and what happens when circumstances change. A lost phone, a new device, a change of role or a suspected account takeover can each require a different response. Building those recovery paths into the service is as important as making the first sign-in smooth.
Digital identity has traditionally appeared to be a narrow security function. It is now part of the infrastructure behind sales, service, hiring, payments and partnerships. The shift is visible in NIST’s digital identity guidelines, which treat identity proofing, authentication and federation as related but distinct tasks. A business can improve its login screen and still leave the rest of that chain weak. The practical challenge is to make trust dependable without asking every user to repeat the same burdensome checks.
Identity is also a continuing access decision. Employees join, move between teams and leave. Contractors need defined scopes and expiry dates. Customer permissions may change as products and regulations change. Treating all these events as one permanent approval invites privilege to accumulate. A clearer system records who approved access, which services it covers, and when it should be reviewed. Those records help a company resolve incidents and explain decisions to customers, auditors and partners.
Identity begins before the login
The move toward phishing-resistant sign-in
When a company opens an account, it may need to establish that the applicant is a real person, that the information supplied belongs to them, and that the level of assurance suits the activity. A newsletter account and a loan application do not carry the same risk. Nor do a payroll administrator and a temporary supplier need identical access. NIST separates proofing from authentication for this reason: confirming an identity at enrolment does not settle how that person should sign in tomorrow, or whether a particular transaction needs a fresh check.
Passwords remain familiar, but they can be reused, stolen or entered into convincing fake pages. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s guidance explains why phishing-resistant multifactor methods offer stronger protection against that form of attack. Passkeys are one route. They use cryptographic credentials tied to a service and can let a user authenticate with a device rather than type a password into a website.
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The appeal is wider than security. In its 2025 Passkey Index, the FIDO Alliance reported experience from nine member organisations that had deployed passkeys. It found high eligibility and stronger sign-in completion
TECHNOLOGY
among the participating services. These are findings from a small, self-selected group of implementers, not a guarantee that every business will see the same results. They do show why authentication is increasingly discussed as a conversion and support issue as well as a defensive control. Migration takes care. Many users still move between devices or share access to household services. A company must decide how accounts are recovered when a device is unavailable, how old authentication methods are retired, and whether a fallback creates a weaker route into the same account. Staff training and customer communication matter because a secure method can fail operationally if users cannot understand when and why it appears. The economics should include support contacts, failed transactions and fraud exposure, not just the licence cost of an authentication tool. Credentials that can travel between organisations Companies repeatedly ask people to prove qualifications, status or eligibility. The W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model 2.0 sets out a way to express claims that an issuer can sign and another party can verify. In principle, a credential could let an organisation check an attribute without rebuilding the entire evidence trail from scratch. The standard describes a technical model; it does not, by itself, resolve who is trusted to issue a credential or whether a relying business must accept it. That governance question is central. A valid signature says that a credential has not been altered and identifies its issuer. It does not prove that the issuer made a sound underlying decision, that the
claim is still current, or that it answers the receiving organisation’s legal and operational requirements. Businesses need policies for revocation, expiry, disputes and changes in status. They also need a way to avoid collecting more personal information than the decision requires. The European Commission’s work on the EU Digital Identity Wallet illustrates the potential scale of this approach: credentials and digital identification could be used across public and private services. Companies should avoid assuming that one wallet or credential type will serve every market. Interoperability depends on technical rules, legal acceptance, issuer coverage and user adoption. Pilot projects are useful when they test these conditions with real customer tasks instead of merely showing that two systems can exchange a token. A business decision with several owners Identity design touches security, product, legal, customer support and operations. Security teams may want a strong challenge at every risky step; product teams may want fewer interruptions. Privacy specialists will ask why each attribute is collected and retained. Operations teams need recovery routes that work at scale. These priorities can be reconciled through a shared risk model: identify important journeys, define assurance appropriate to each step, and measure where users encounter friction or fraud. A useful scorecard would look at successful sign-ins, failed recovery attempts, support demand, suspicious activity and the time taken to remove unnecessary access. None of those measures alone captures success. A rising sign-in rate could hide an unsafe fallback; a fall in fraud reports could reflect weaker detection. Reviewing them together makes it easier to see whether a change improved the whole system.
Issue 89 | 41
TECHNOLOGY
Put the exception paths under scrutiny
Make trust portable without losing accountability
Identity programmes often focus on the normal journey: a user arrives, presents a credential and gains access. The costly cases happen when that journey fails. A customer might have a new surname, lose a device or be unable to use a particular biometric method. An employee might need urgent access while the identity platform is unavailable. The exception path should specify what evidence is acceptable, who can approve it, how the decision is recorded and when temporary access expires. Otherwise a strong front door can be bypassed through a weak help desk process.
Federation allows one organisation to rely on an identity assertion from another. That can spare users another password and reduce duplicated administration, but it creates questions about the reliability and scope of the assertion. A business should know when it was issued, how the person authenticated, which attributes were checked and what it may legitimately infer. A partner’s assertion that someone is an employee, for example, does not necessarily authorise access to confidential financial records.
Accessibility is part of that design. An authentication method that assumes everyone owns the latest phone, can receive a text message, or can complete a screen-based challenge may exclude legitimate users. Offering alternatives creates a security design problem rather than a reason to disregard accessibility. Companies can define several routes with comparable assurance and test them with the people who must use them. Measuring abandonment by customer group and device type can reveal a problem that an overall success rate conceals. The same principle applies to automated checks. A document verification tool may reject a genuine document because of lighting, damage or an uncommon format. If the appeal process is slow or opaque, the business can lose a customer while maintaining a technically correct fraud control. Human review is valuable when reviewers have clear criteria and can see why the system made its decision. It becomes a new risk when staff are pressured to override checks without evidence.
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Contracts can allocate responsibilities for incidents and changes, but the technical implementation must enforce those boundaries. If a partner loses its ability to verify people or changes its standards, relying organisations need a way to respond. Testing the termination of a trust relationship is especially important: can access be withdrawn promptly, and are active sessions handled as intended? This is where identity management begins to resemble supply chain management, with each participant dependent on another’s controls. Measure improvement across the full journey An identity programme should start with a small number of important journeys, such as opening an account, changing payment details or granting an administrator role. For each journey, record the risks, required evidence, time to complete, drop-off points and support demand. Then make one change at a time and review what happened to both legitimate users and suspicious attempts. This prevents a gain in conversion from hiding a loss in assurance, or a security gain from masking an unusable recovery process.
TECHNOLOGY
The investment case will vary by business. A retailer may care about checkout completion and account takeover. A professional services firm may focus on contractor onboarding and rapid removal of access. A regulated lender may need more evidence at enrolment and stronger records of decisions. The common foundation is a documented chain from proofing to authentication, authorisation, recovery and revocation. Once that chain is visible, technology choices can be judged by how they improve it. Digital identity is becoming business infrastructure because it sits between a company and nearly every digital relationship it maintains. Better technology helps, but durable value comes from defining who may make a claim, how it is checked, what access follows and how mistakes are corrected. Firms that treat those questions as part of service design can build both stronger controls and a more usable experience.
Issue 89 | 43
BANKING
Why Deposit Stability Is Becoming a Closer Test of Bank Strength A bank can report healthy capital and still face an uncomfortable question: how quickly could its customers move their money? Deposits have long been a central source of bank funding, but their apparent stability is not uniform. A savings balance held for years by one household behaves differently from a large operating account whose owner monitors rates and risk every day. Fast digital transfers make the difference more consequential when confidence weakens. The failures of several US banks in 2023 gave that question urgency. The Federal Reserve’s review of Silicon Valley Bank identified a concentrated business model, high reliance on uninsured deposits and weaknesses in managing interest rate and liquidity risks. The lesson for the wider industry is not that all deposits will run. It is that treating balances as interchangeable can hide important differences in who owns them, why they are held and how they might move. A deposit balance is not a funding promise When a customer deposits money, the bank owes the customer that amount under the account terms. It can use funding to support assets while retaining liquidity to meet withdrawals. A bank therefore needs to estimate not just how much money it holds today but how much could leave under different conditions. Deposits tied to payroll, payments or long-standing household relationships may prove steadier than balances attracted by a short-lived rate promotion, though none are guaranteed to remain.
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Insurance coverage matters because it changes incentives. A fully protected retail depositor has less reason to make an immediate judgement about a bank’s ability to repay. An uninsured corporate treasurer has a duty to manage exposure and may spread balances across institutions. Yet insured status is only one variable. A payment outage, a rapid change in rates or uncertainty over access can also affect customer behaviour. The FDIC’s staff study of deposit flows at three failed banks offers direct evidence about how withdrawal patterns developed during the 2023 stress. That experience should inform scenario design without being copied mechanically into every bank’s forecast. A diversified retail lender and a bank serving one tightly connected sector do not have the same depositor network. Speed is changing the shape of stress Customers can check balances and move funds without visiting a branch. A treasurer can arrange large transfers within an ordinary working day. Digital convenience is generally valuable; it also reduces the friction that once slowed decisions during a confidence shock. The pace of communications can amplify the pace of transactions, especially when many clients respond to the same information at once. An IMF analysis of technology-driven bank runs argues that technology can accelerate outflows and complicate conventional assumptions about how long a bank has to respond. That does not mean social media alone causes bank failures. Losses, business concentration, risk management and supervisory issues remain material. The more precise point is that a bank with fragile funding may have less time to address concerns once they become widely shared.
BANKING
Banks are therefore paying closer attention to intraday information. End-of-day reports can obscure a morning of large withdrawals or a rapid shift from one group of customers. Liquidity teams need reliable data about account ownership, deposit insurance, payment rails and which customers may act together. More frequent reporting has value only when executives know what action the information should trigger. Concentration can matter more than a headline ratio Suppose two banks have the same amount of total deposits. One serves millions of households across regions; the other depends heavily on a small number of corporate groups within one industry. Even if both show a similar balance sheet today, the second is exposed to a more correlated decision. A market event affecting that industry could cause many clients to withdraw or reduce balances at the same time. Effective segmentation goes beyond counting accounts. Banks can examine the size of each balance, links among depositors, how the money is used, historical behaviour during changes in interest rates and whether balances depend on one intermediary or platform. Where a large proportion of funds arrive through brokers or digital marketplaces, the bank should understand how quickly those channels can redirect them. The Basel Committee’s liquidity coverage framework requires qualifying banks to hold high-quality liquid assets against a defined 30-day stress scenario. It establishes an important baseline. Yet a standardised ratio cannot capture every concentration, reputational problem or timing mismatch. Internal stress tests should probe the specific sources of each bank’s funding, including unusually fast outflows. The other side of the balance sheet still matters Deposit stability cannot be assessed in isolation. Banks hold loans and securities with different cash flow and market characteristics. If withdrawals require a bank to sell assets quickly, unrealised
losses may become realised losses. Rising rates can increase the cost of retaining deposits while reducing the market value of some fixed-rate assets. A funding plan that looks comfortable in normal conditions can become strained when those pressures occur together. Management can hold liquid assets, secure diversified contingent funding and reduce mismatches between asset maturities and liabilities. Each choice has a cost. Cash and low-risk securities usually earn less than some loans; term funding can be more expensive than deposits. The objective is not to eliminate every risk at any price, but to ensure that the bank’s growth strategy is consistent with its ability to meet obligations in stress. The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s risk perspective is a reminder that liquidity risk sits alongside credit, interest rate and operational risks. For a bank with large commercial deposits, a review of funding should also ask how quickly assets could be pledged or sold and whether the related processes have actually been tested. Relationship banking gains a measurable role Banks often describe customer relationships as a source of loyalty. The relevant operational question is more specific: does a customer use the bank for recurring payments, payroll, collections and credit, or only to place a balance at a competitive rate? A deep relationship may make deposit flows easier to forecast, but it is not a guarantee against withdrawal when a client perceives elevated risk. Rate competition adds another complication. When market rates rise, customers may move funds in search of better returns even if they remain confident in their bank. That is ordinary competition rather than a run. A liquidity model should distinguish price-sensitive migration from distressdriven flight because the bank’s responses differ. Higher deposit rates can retain funds but compress margins; a confidence problem calls for credible information and a robust funding plan. Research on bank runs and public communication from the BIS examines how beliefs can influence collective behaviour. Clear communication can help, but it must be supported by facts and operational readiness. Vague reassurance will not replace access to liquid assets or sound supervision.
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BANKING
Better monitoring needs clear decisions
Why payment data can improve the forecast
A useful funding dashboard can show the largest depositors, expected recurring flows, uninsured balances, rate sensitivity and current liquid resources. It should also show concentrations hidden behind related entities or a single customer acquisition channel. Banks can test what happens if several large clients withdraw together, if an online rumour raises concern or if an operational incident disrupts payments.
Customer balances are a snapshot; transactions reveal how the money behaves. Payroll and supplier payments, tax cycles, seasonal sales and investment maturities can all create large but predictable movements. Banks that understand these rhythms can distinguish an ordinary workingcapital withdrawal from an unusual run of transfers. Doing so requires combining account data with relationship knowledge and protecting sensitive customer information.
The difficult part is linking thresholds to action. Who can raise funding, draw on a facility, slow new asset growth or contact supervisors? Are securities eligible to be pledged, and have the bank’s teams completed the documentation? Has management considered what different actions might signal to customers? A stress test that assumes an emergency response is available without checking execution is incomplete.
Data can be misleading if it is stripped of context. A large outflow from a company during an acquisition may be expected, while a smaller but widespread series of transfers from otherwise steady clients could signal broader concern. Trends should be assessed against the relevant peer group and time period. Alert systems should help a treasury team ask the right question, rather than label every unexpected movement a crisis.
Deposits remain a valuable and often resilient foundation for banking. The adjustment is to treat stability as a characteristic that must be evidenced rather than assumed. Banks that understand why customers keep money with them, and how those reasons could change, can make better lending and liquidity decisions. That is a stronger measure of funding quality than the size of deposits on a single reporting date.
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Models also need to account for customer choice when interest rates move. A balance held in a non-interest-bearing account may become less stable when attractive alternatives are readily available. Historical experience from a low-rate period can understate this sensitivity. Scenario analysis should make the assumption explicit and compare it with observed behaviour as conditions change.
BANKING
Stress plans must work outside an exercise A bank can identify sources of emergency funding on paper without being ready to use them quickly. Securities need to be eligible and correctly recorded as collateral. Legal agreements and access to central bank facilities, where available, must be current. Teams need authority to act and a way to coordinate across treasury, operations, communications and customer service. Testing these steps can expose gaps that a high-level liquidity ratio cannot. An orderly response also depends on communication. Customers may ask whether payments will continue, how deposits are protected and whether account access is affected. Clear, accurate information can reduce confusion, but the bank should not improvise claims it cannot substantiate. Internal escalation and regulatory contact should be assigned in advance, with a clear record of decisions and changing assumptions. Not every situation calls for the same response. Paying up to retain deposits may be reasonable in a competitive market; using a temporary funding source may bridge an ordinary liquidity need; slowing balance-sheet growth can reduce pressure when funding becomes less reliable. The aim of contingency planning is to make these choices earlier and on better information.
What boards should ask Directors need to understand more than a single regulatory ratio. They can ask how much of the deposit base comes from the largest related clients, what share is uninsured, how balances changed during recent rate moves and whether the bank has actually tested the liquidity options assumed in a severe scenario. They should understand how quickly management would know that assumptions had stopped holding. A useful board report should explain what would have to happen for the bank to change lending, pricing or funding plans. It should show the costs of maintaining resilience as well as the losses a failure to prepare could cause. That makes the discussion a strategic one: the bank’s appetite for particular customers and assets must be consistent with the funding it can keep through difficult periods.
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How Banks Can Measure Resilience Across Shared Technology Providers A bank can operate several customer-facing apps, payment services and risk systems while relying on the same underlying technology provider for all three. From the customer’s perspective, those are separate services. During a disruption, they may fail together. Operational resilience therefore depends on understanding the links between important banking services and the people, processes and suppliers that support them. The Basel Committee’s principles for operational resilience ask banks to identify critical operations, map their dependencies and test their ability to remain within tolerance levels during severe but plausible disruption. This is a change in emphasis from asking whether individual systems have backup capacity to asking whether customers can still complete an important activity. A bank may recover a server while a payment journey remains unavailable because identity verification, network access or a third-party interface is still down. Map the service from end to end Mapping begins with an outcome a customer or market participant needs: receive salary, make a payment, access deposits or settle a transaction. The bank then traces the technology and human steps required to deliver it. This includes upstream cloud services, telecommunications, outsourced processing, authentication tools and internal data stores. A dependency map is useful only if it identifies where apparently separate paths converge. That convergence is easy to miss. Two applications may use different software but the same identity provider. Backup infrastructure may occupy a separate building yet depend on the same network operator. An outsourced contact centre may have spare staff but no way to view the customer’s account when a core system is unavailable. A credible map records these common points and the service-level consequence of losing each one.
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The Financial Stability Board’s third-party risk toolkit describes approaches to identifying, managing and overseeing service-provider risk. Its central implication for banks is practical: contractual assurances and supplier due diligence should be tied to the actual services a provider supports. The contract may permit an audit, but the bank still needs to know which failure scenario to test and what evidence would demonstrate recovery. Test the customer outcome A recovery exercise should start with a plausible event and measure the service. Suppose a cloud region fails while payment volume is high. Can customers log in? Can the bank accept, screen and complete payments? What happens to transactions already in flight? Can staff see which payments are pending, and can the bank explain that status clearly? Counting restored machines is less useful than measuring the time and accuracy of the customer journey. Tests also need decision points. Who can declare an incident? When does the bank switch processing? Who approves a manual workaround, and how are errors reconciled afterward? The people responsible for customer communication, compliance and liquidity may need to act before technology teams finish diagnosis. Exercising these handoffs can reveal weaknesses that a narrow disaster-recovery test misses. In Europe, the Digital Operational Resilience Act framework described by the EBA requires financial entities to maintain registers of information concerning ICT third-party contractual arrangements. The register supports oversight and risk assessment. It does not substitute for current service maps, realistic tests or management judgment about which dependencies could interrupt critical operations. Concentration changes the scenario Risk can build inside one bank and across many banks. A provider used by numerous institutions may create common exposure even if each contract
BANKING
appears individually acceptable. The European supervisory authorities’ DORA oversight guide describes the framework for oversight of designated critical ICT providers. Oversight of a provider adds information and discipline, but each bank remains responsible for its own service continuity and exit planning. An exit plan is credible when it describes data portability, technical dependencies, likely migration time and temporary service arrangements. It is less credible if it simply names an alternative supplier that has never been integrated or tested. Switching providers during an acute disruption may be unrealistic for a complex core service. For some functions, graceful degradation and clear customer communication may be more achievable than immediate replacement. Management needs usable measures Boards cannot supervise resilience through a single uptime percentage. They need evidence of which services are critical, the tolerance set for disruption, the results of severe but plausible
tests, unresolved dependencies and the time needed to restore customer outcomes. Measures should show whether repeated incidents are improving the system or merely generating the same remediation plans. The ECB’s update to its TIBER-EU testing framework illustrates the role of advanced testing aligned with digital operational resilience requirements. Threat-led exercises are valuable when findings reach the teams that own controls, contracts and recovery decisions. Their value is limited if tests are treated as a certificate rather than a way to expose failure paths. Define a tolerable disruption A tolerance for disruption should be stated in terms that matter to customers and markets. For a payment service, that may include the maximum duration of unavailability, the number or value of delayed transactions and the integrity of records after recovery. Different services warrant different thresholds. A bank should explain why a chosen limit is defensible and whether its existing systems can meet it during a severe but plausible event.
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A tolerance is not the same as a service-level promise from a technology vendor. The supplier may restore its platform before the bank has reconciled failed transactions or reopened the customer channel. Conversely, the bank may maintain a limited but useful service through a workaround while the provider remains impaired. Metrics should capture these differences and give incident leaders a clear trigger for escalation. Follow subcontractors and data A bank’s direct provider may rely on other companies for hosting, security software or telecommunications. Subcontracting can create a chain whose weakest link is not visible in a standard procurement review. The bank needs enough information to understand material sub-dependencies, the provider’s notification duties and what happens if a subcontractor changes. This does not mean auditing every minor vendor. It means focusing attention where a change could affect a critical operation. Data location and accessibility matter in recovery. If a service is unavailable, can the bank obtain current customer and transaction data in a usable format? If copies exist, how recently were they updated, and who can access them? A backup that cannot be restored within the service tolerance has limited value. A transition plan should also address data deletion and control after a contract ends, while preserving evidence needed for reconciliation or regulatory duties. Incidents expose governance gaps During an outage, teams must make trade-offs. A manual payment process may maintain access for urgent cases but introduce operational error or fraud risk. A decision to close a channel may protect record integrity while preventing customers from accessing funds. These judgments should have accountable owners, a record
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of why the decision was taken and a means to reverse it when conditions improve. The framework must be practised before a real incident. Communication should reflect what is known, what remains uncertain and when the next update will arrive. Customers need to know whether a payment was received, queued or rejected. Staff need consistent instructions so that the same question does not receive conflicting answers across branches and call centres. Recovery is incomplete until outstanding transactions have been reconciled and complaints caused by the disruption have a clear path to resolution. Evidence for supervisors and boards A board pack can bring together critical service maps, concentration exposures, test results and time-bound remediation actions. It should indicate which problems recur, what has actually been fixed and what residual risk is being accepted. An issue rated as low probability but capable of disabling several critical services deserves explanation. The board also needs visibility when a planned growth or technology change increases dependence on an already important provider. This approach is more demanding than an annual policy review. It requires the first line of business to own the customer service, technology teams to understand the failure path and risk teams to challenge assumptions. Independent assurance can test the evidence, but it cannot replace operational ownership. The result should be a continuously updated view of whether the bank can continue delivering its most important services. Resilience is ultimately a question of what a bank can continue to do for customers under stress. Shared technology can bring efficiency, scale and security expertise, but it can also make distinct services fail together. Banks that trace those links, test the customer outcome and fund specific repairs are better placed to judge their resilience than banks that rely on an impressive inventory of controls.
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