TD Bank’s annual survey of treasury and finance professionals at the 2018 AFP’s conference last November showed that:

• risk of payments fraud/cybersecurity topped professionals' list of concerns, with 44% naming it their top operational challenge, a 14% year-over-year increase
• ability to adapt to or process faster/electronic payments = obstacle for 37%, a 14% increase year-over-year
• 60% of respondents expect to see the largest amount of growth this year within faster or real-time processing, an 8% increase from last year.  

Despite industry uncertainties new technologies being used more 

Blockchain/distributed ledger technology: 

• majority of survey respondents (90%) feel that  will have some type of positive effect on the payments industry:
• ability to create stronger audit trails (29%)
• speeding up the payments process (22%)
• improving the efficiency of cross-border payments (21 %)
• reducing payments fraud (18%)

Use of open APIs:

• 50% of respondents claim that their organization currently uses or is in the process of integrating open APIs 
• 49% do not use open APIs and nearly a quarter of that group does not have plans to do so in the future

More technology training: Survey respondents said their organization has training strategies specifically for:

• data and analytics (45%)
• AI and automation (26 %)
• blockchain (14%).

Fraud/cybersecurity

Fraud/cybersecurity threats were top of mind of all respondents AND they want help from their bank/Financial Institution:

• 98% of respondents thought that financial institutions should assist organizations with protecting against fraud and cybercrime
• 55% felt that financial institutions can help them better protect against fraud and cybercrime through education
• 25% of finance professionals surveyed feel that banks should offer greater controls on transactions
• 18% want risk or process reviews.

But 48% of respondents admitted that their company does not have any in-house cyber fraud prevention training.

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CTMfile take: The challenges in managing technology are going to be the single biggest challenge in 2019: moving to instant/real-time payments and liquidity management and managing fraud/cybersecurity.