The Invisible Vault podcast

Untrapping Your Liquidity Through Data and Technology with David Quinn, CFO at BlueVine

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This episode features an interview with David Quinn, CFO at BlueVine. BlueVine provides small and medium-sized business owners with the working capital they need to run and grow their businesses. 

David has more than 25 years of global experience in banking and finance. Prior to BlueVine, David served as Commercial Bank Chief Financial Officer at Silicon Valley Bank. He also served as Executive Vice President and Consumer Bank Chief Financial Officer at Bank of the West. David has held senior leadership positions at Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers in the UK. 

On this episode, David discusses modernizing your technology to work for you, the benefits of using third party software instead of building in-house, and making your business unattractive to fraudsters.

Quotes

*”There's only so much the textbooks can teach you about finance. The rest is on the job learning. And it always makes me smile - you think people have got it all. They come out of their MBA. They have all of the education, but you have none of the tangible. Navigating an economy like this is really tricky.”

*”From a finance perspective, we've really grown up historically by buying bits of technology and then retrofitting our data for that technology. And often, what I've seen is we don't maximize the full benefits. We buy something off the shelf. Best case, we configure our data. Worst case, we customize everything. And that makes it really, really difficult down the line when you are looking to do anything on top of it if you've heavily customized your system. There's a great opportunity to hit reset on that.”

*”We don't build everything. You build where you think you have a competitive advantage. And for us, a lot of the data that we have specifically to our clients, we can use that to enhance and enrich it to go and deliver better services to them. But when it comes to things like treasury management, looking at daily deposits, inflows, outflows, how you bring that together in an asset liability management system. Looking at interest forecasting, for example,  those are very specialist areas. That's not where we are focused. I would absolutely engage with third party software to manage that.”

*”You just have to make yourself the least attractive for fraud from an external perspective. Internal is slightly different. And to do that, you need strong systems right across the board, strong data health checks, a strong understanding of where you have any gaps. And you need to be able to close them quickly. You need good QA testing, you need great product requirements. And I think importantly, you need to collaborate with other industry peers and share best practices. Fraud rings tend to bounce around the institutions. And so what you can learn from other institutions and put in place as protective measures quickly is important.”

*”We have a significantly healthy balance sheet. But at the same time, you want to extend your runway as long as you can. Nobody really knows how long this emerging recession will last, how deep, how it's gonna bounce back. So you need to be prepared. You prepare for the worst, hope for the best. And so as we think about managing our liquidity and employment of technology, we focus on a few areas. One, we focus on how quickly our assets turn. So we're using it to understand what our pay down scenarios are, what our loss rates are, what the demand is on the front end. So getting a really good view of those is critical for us.”

*”I think there is a broader role for CFOs outside of the financial services sector to be way more focused on getting value from the liquidity that they have trapped across all of their companies. But be them global or just international, how do you untrap that liquidity and maximize it? The data and technology combined together can help you do that.”

Time Stamps

[2:43] David’s path to CFO

[11:44] Cash Crossroads: How BlueVine uses technology to track and unlock liquidity

[12:25] How the CFO acts as a strategic partner to the business

[16:57] Using data to make better business decisions

[23:00] Is it better to buy software or build it in-house?

[37:14] The Playbook: Finance Strategy at BlueVine

[27:47] The BlueVine approach to risk management

[38:04] Report from the Future: What the future CFO will need to find success

[41:00] Quick Hits: Rapid fire questions with David Quinn

Sponsor

The Invisible Vault is powered by the team at Kyriba, the global leader in cloud treasury and finance solutions, empowering CFOs and their teams to transform how they activate liquidity as a dynamic, real-time vehicle for growth and value creation. To learn more visit www.kyriba.com

Links

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