Your machines could move their own cash
What if your lawn-mower robot had its own bank account, and could automatically text your neighbour to offer its services once your grass is ready? In the future, cash management could be different from today’s.
In the technology stream – on the ground floor of the HC Andersen Castle hosting the Treasury 360 Copenhagen conference on Thursday – SEB:s Robert Pehrson took a lightweight approach to a tech-heavy subject. Host of the stream was BNP Paribas Jan Dirk van Beusekom.
Hand in hand with industrial revolution
With the developments often referred to as ”Industry 4.0”, machines gain increasing logic and can optimize their own activities and collaborate with humans. If payments are to follow the machines into tomorrows fragmented and real-time adapted business processes, we can expect to see a radically changed payment landscape.
One project that Robert Pehrson was involved in, with industrial actors including Ericsson and ABB, explored robot-powered micropayments: “For us that started a lot of discussions on how to be industrially relevant.”
The key to digitalisation: the human
One of the slides in the presentation illustrated the traditional linear way to think about business models. After a human agreement, a resource such as a truck is put in use and the service is payed. In the future – to judge by a contrasting drawing in the slide – machines could seek out optimized business opportunities in a distributed manner, and manage their own payments as an integrated aspect of their operation.
In the technology track of the Treasury 360 Copenhagen event, Robert Pehrson was followed on stage by Swedish steelmaker SSAB’s group cash manager Kati Vellinki. For her, the core of digital transformation is actually in human behaviour and preferences.