Stuart Wray, head of implementation future finance at RBS, wasn’t always as embedded in future tech as he is now.
As a dual-qualified chartered accountant and treasurer, he established his finance credentials across a range of industries. But an early fascination for technology and a willingness to address broad-based finance implementations have brought him industry awards and interesting roles.
Having begun his career as a chartered accountant in practice in Dundee, Scotland, he got his first taste of treasury at Scottish Resources Group, a mining company.
There, his FD encouraged him to study for the AMCT as a route to fully understanding the core disciplines of cash management (a highly challenging facet of treasury within mining), as well as FX management around the company’s import activities.
From Scottish Resources, Wray moved into the financial services sector, joining Alliance Trust. As a closed-ended investment fund with an underlying asset manager and bank, Alliance Trust gave Wray plentiful opportunity to embed himself still further in the finance and treasury worlds.
One of his first endeavours was to lead the programme, upgrading the general ledger, introducing planning and visualisation software, and overseeing an Oracle ERP upgrade that introduced a greater degree of automation. “The whole idea was: could we use technology to improve the finance processes and improve our internal customers’ perspective of finance?”
You’re empowered by data; you’re empowered by information
The initiative represented Wray’s first proper technology transformation with major changes to the finance function. And it attracted attention, netting Wray and his colleagues the Scottish Finance Team of the Year Award from business and finance website Business Insider, for the considerable degree of technology transformation brought in against a very tight timescale.
That programme posed interesting technological challenges, and it was at this point that his interest in technology and financial systems was well and truly sparked.
Wray credits his boss at the time, the CFO of Alliance Trust, as an important advocate and backer: “He had a lot of faith in my ability and I think it was quite critical to my success at that stage of my career.”
As his career progressed with Alliance Trust against a backdrop of considerably upscaled regulatory reporting, Wray was responsible for implementing the consolidated regulatory reporting.
This was for Alliance Trust’s bank alongside changes in capital and liquidity reporting to ensure compliance with the Capital Requirements Directive IV.
Alliance Trust provided Wray with a wide-ranging experience from running the day-to-day operation of the bank’s cash positions, leading the outsourcing of the finance back office, leading the year end and working as finance lead on a variety of strategic initiatives, including an acquisition in the group.
Having developed his technological and treasury skills against a highly testing regulatory backdrop, Wray was looking for new opportunities, when an opening at RBS came up.
“My first job at RBS was head of business intelligence for products in personal banking. It is the biggest franchise of the bank and I ran a team of up to 17,” he says.
“Our job was to look after the revenue forecasting, budgeting and stress testing for personal banking. Based on what I’d learnt previously, I could see there was an opportunity with technology here.”
Wray and his team implemented an Oracle cloud budgeting and planning tool, which they introduced across the bank’s personal banking products, bringing in faster and more effective modelling. It was an experience that yielded great results by improving the control and speed at which forecasts could be prepared.
“One of the great things about learning revenue,” he says, “is that you need to understand how a bank works and you need to understand all the components within the bank – and you get exposed to treasury aspects of that.”
Having completed the project for the personal banking division, Wray wrote a proposal for rolling this approach out across the whole bank. He then moved to be head of finance for planning and budgeting cloud, and took charge of a 30-member team responsible for implementing the planning system.
This large-scale project delivered 30 new models across currencies, enhancing control and removing more than 1,000 spreadsheets. More than 400 new users were onboarded globally, including the group finance team, with colleagues from tax and treasury disciplines working with the system also.
Wray won his second significant award, an Oracle Change Agents of Finance Award, and spoke on the change programme at an Oracle Executive Leaders Circle in San Francisco in 2018.
This success proved to be a springboard into his current role at RBS, as head of implementation of future finance, focused on implementing new emerging technologies across the bank’s 1,900 finance staff, with a particular focus on robotics, natural language generation and visualisation.
He notes: “As a finance function, we need to innovate. One of the things about my job is to really look at the technology that is further out and see if it can transform how we do things today. Could I take this technology and work with a small team to put it into production?”
Wray oversees the work of three incubators, which effectively operate as start-ups within RBS Finance. Each has its own team working respectively on robotics, visualisation and natural language generation.
To put it simply, robots record stable, repeatable sequences and then replicate them, performing them faster and with greater control than humans. It is an area with a great deal of applicability to finance and particularly banking and treasury.
“My job is ultimately to bring robotics across all areas of finance,” says Wray. “We’re at the point where we’re almost ready to scale robotics processing and proliferate them across all of finance, including treasury.
“It’s an aspect of technology that is going to be very helpful in areas such as running various types of finance/treasury processes. Most banks are doing this today. We want to evolve and we want to try out the technology in a safe and controlled manner, and then scale it up.”
Visualisation is likewise a rich area for treasurers, with the potential to short-circuit long data analysis and report preparation.
“Traditionally, treasurers and finance professionals will prepare reports using PowerPoint or Excel,” he continues. “But visualisation tools can take that data, bring it together and display it in such a way that it can be queried and will yield more insight that would otherwise be hidden in the data.
“We’ve had these tools to an extent, but the new-generation visualisation techniques available mean that we will be able to display information in such a fashion that you can get a lot more out of it. You reveal the insight that’s hidden in the data and you access that insight much more quickly.”
Wray’s third area of focus, natural language generation, is an artificial intelligence (AI) type of technology that effectively takes numbers and turns them into text.
Instead of having an analyst write a commentary around a set of numbers, a generated script will create that written analysis, meaning reports that may have taken 90 minutes to write in the past will only take seconds or minutes.
“So, say I was writing a regular report for an internal stakeholder,” Wray explains. “Instead of having to manually type it, natural language technology will read the numbers and write a summary of what’s going on drawing on cues that we programme into the script.”
The real potential, he suggests, lies in bringing these technologies together: robotics to gather the data, assembling a report using advanced and speedy visualisation, and adding commentary via natural language generation.
“If you scale that across a large finance function,” Wray says, “you can see that the opportunities to get to some great insights for your commercial teams and for your directors is enhanced because they can see the information much faster, with a much deeper and richer underlying analysis.”
At RBS, finance professionals can join the incubators to gain insights into the technology development and help build out the new technology that will one day feature in their daily working lives.
The incubator teams themselves are kept purposely small: “If you keep them small, that’s a really big benefit, because you get people very familiar with the technology.”
Wray’s team is also exploring AI, in particular the subfield of machine learning, and how this can be applied to forecasts. “It’s a bit earlier in concept, but it is something that could revolutionise what we do from a forecasting point of view,” he says.
One of Wray’s key preoccupations is ensuring that the current generation of finance professionals are steeped in technology. RBS is prototyping a PhD sponsorship to create a pipeline of qualified individuals in mathematics and in data science. “This allows us to explore the future development of skills for tomorrow’s finance function.”
And he believes in individuals furthering their own learning on this front on the job: “I think treasurers and finance professionals need to be much more tech-savvy going forward. I really feel that you need to get exposure to technology and build your familiarity with it. I think AI’s influence will be positive.”
He notes: “One of the great things about having all this is that it frees finance up to be much more value creation orientated, automating basic tasks. That’s going to mean we can be partners with our internal stakeholder much more. We will have a lot more time to spend helping the business understand the output of the technology, rather than spending our time writing reports.
“It provides an opportunity for finance to take its commercial acumen and be the co-pilot to all of finance and to the internal stakeholders because you’re empowered by data. You’re empowered by information.”
Exposure to the incubators or to finance teams interrogating new technology or exploring treasury technology implementations in an enhanced way is absolutely essential he believes. “I would say to young professionals: you need to get involved. Be curious and get involved in technology projects, because it’s a great opportunity that will give you a really diverse skill set. It was curiosity that got me into technology.
“My prediction is that in five years, things will have significantly changed in treasury and finance. Firms that are early adopters will see this sooner. As a function, we want to make sure that we’re benefitting from this technology and not missing out on whatever opportunities it brings.”
What I most value about the ACT is… the universal transferability of treasury skills that it has taught me, opening up a world of opportunities for career development in partnership with my finance skills.
What I like best about treasury is… the importance of cash management. My skills in treasury were developed in this area and I feel it was a critical foundation understanding that has underpinned my career – now and in the future.
The work challenge I would most like to fix is… to bring AI into finance and treasury, upskilling my colleagues and ensuring that this technology is used in a safe and controlled way.
2018–present Head of implementation future finance, RBS
2017–2018 Head of finance – planning and budgeting cloud, RBS
2015–2017 Head of business intelligence – revenue, RBS
2013–2015 Senior manager – commercial business partner, Alliance Trust
2010–2013 Management accountant, Alliance Trust
2008–2010 Management accountant, Scottish Resources Group
2007–2008 Management accountant, Kwik Fit
2004–2007 Senior accountant, EQ Chartered Accountants
Liz Loxton is editor of The Treasurer
This article was taken from the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, log in to view the full issue or sign up for eAffiliate membership