AFP Conversations

AFP 2024 is headed to Nashville this October 20-23. To give us a preview of the city, we invited Heather Middleton, Chief Marketing Officer for the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp., onto the AFP Conversations podcast.

During the podcast, Heather shared what makes Nashville such a popular destination, her must-visit spots within the city, and where to get the best Nashville eats.

Learn more about AFP 2024.

Adam Kruis, Senior Vice President, Manager, Working Capital Consulting, at U.S. Bank, and Anu Somani, Head of Global Payables and Embedded Payments, at U.S. Bank, discuss why real-time payments are becoming important, common use cases for real-time payments, and how to stay current on developments in the real-time payments space. This episode is sponsored by U.S. Bank.

Erica Orange, speaker for the AFP 2023 MindShift Keynote, sponsored by Capital One, is the Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of The Future Hunters, one of the world’s leading futurist consulting firms. She analyzes emerging sociocultural, technological, economic, geopolitical and environmental trends and identifies the strategic implications (the “So what?”) of those trends for several of the most influential Fortune 500 companies, trade associations and public sector clients.

In this episode of AFP Conversations, Erica explains what a futurist is and how she became one, shares her perspective on what the future holds, and gives advice to help organizations future-proof.

Fotini Iconomopoulos, the speaker for the AFP 2023 Monday Executive Institute Keynote, sponsored by PNC, is an expert communicator with a passion for helping organizations and individuals get what they want. For over a decade, she has been helping Fortune 500 clients and their teams achieve their business goals, increase profitability, and create a competitive advantage. She is also the author of the best-selling book Say Less, Get More: Unconventional Negotiation Techniques to Get What You Want.

In this episode of AFP Conversations, Fotini shares what to do — and not to do — when negotiating and how people with a risk minimization and certainty mindset need to adapt to succeed in negotiations.

Olivia Fox Cabane, the speaker for the AFP 2023 Tuesday Executive Institute Keynote, sponsored by PNC, is an expert in charisma and leadership. In addition to co-founding KindEarth.Tech, Olivia Fox Cabane has taught at Harvard, Yale, MIT and the United Nations and has spoken to countless leaders in Fortune 500 companies. Her best-selling books, The Charisma Myth and The Net and the Butterfly, have been translated into 32 languages.

In this episode of AFP Conversations, Olivia talks about what led her to study charisma and leadership, what it means to be charismatic and the biggest inhibitor to charisma.

AFP 2023 Tuesday Keynote speaker Ian Bremmer is a political scientist who helps business leaders, policymakers and the general public make sense of the world around them. He is president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political risk research and consulting firm, and GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of international affairs.

In this episode of AFP Conversations, Ian talks about geopolitical trends to watch for and how treasury and finance professionals should account for geopolitical risks in their work.

The speed of business and disruption means that we need to do more than simply run our planning routines faster, we need to change how we deliver planning services. Pietro Castelli, Head of Product Marketing at Board, talks through his research paper on “Creating Value Through Planning” and offers five ways to improve finance processes and add agility to the business. This episode is sponsored by Board.

Business school education is changing to keep up with the rapidly evolving finance profession. Jim Washam, Dean of the Neil Griffin College of Business at Arkansas State University, and DJ Masson, Clinical Professor of Finance at Indiana University's Kelly School of Business, discuss the state of business school education and how business schools are evolving to meet the needs of students, as well as those of employers who can't seem to find enough talent.

It’s not just about reporting on the data. CFOs who leverage data-driven insights are serving as strategic advisors by shaping business strategy and driving the organization forward. Bryan Hipsher, CFO of Dun & Bradstreet, explains data strategy, getting data right, and how his department transforms data into analytical insights, yielding smarter decisions that benefit every function at the company.

Welcome to a special three-part series of AFP Conversations, The Road to Treasury Optimization, where we take a deep dive into how the treasury landscape is transforming in the Asia-Pacific region. What should you consider when you’re looking to enhance liquidity management? How has the pandemic accelerated finance and treasury transformation? And what does the future of digital treasury look like? We answer these questions and more. This series is a companion to the Executive Guide: A Treasurer’s Guide to Centralization, as underwritten by Standard Chartered. If you want to learn more about the topics covered in this series, visit AFPonline.org/TreasuryCentralization.

In this podcast we discuss how the pandemic has accelerated finance and treasury transformation. We explore challenges encountered during transformation projects and processes that had to be re-engineered.