Building Automation Boutique: Weekly Reflections — 2025 Week 46
🧭 Building Automation Boutique: Weekly Reflections - 2025 Week 46
Every morning our team shares a Goal of the Day. The one thing that, if done, makes the whole day count.
Some days we hit it, some we don’t. Every week I try to summarise what happened.
This week’s reflection: forecasting experiments, stablecoins and a lesson on freedom and responsibility.
Now, about last week:
1. Cash Flow Forecasting
NineAnts handles the data layer well, so the next step is helping people make better decisions. This week we worked on a prototype of our AI-based Cash Flow Forecasting module and validated ideas with a few corporates.
Principles stay simple. Use good tech, keep people at the centre. It feels like closing a circle after thinking about this problem for years (and designing a system for someone else long ago). If you want to explore this with us, reach out.
2. Stablecoins
Jan-Willem gave another talk on stablecoins. Very well received. One treasurer noted most firms use them for marketing rather than volume. The strongest use case remains extracting cash from difficult countries. Europe stays conservative. We would love to see Adyen support stablecoins. We already have at least one client interested!
3. Automating Market data controls.
If a market rate is missing in your system, everything seems to work fine, except valuations are wrong. To fix this we are building automated market rate controls for FIS Integrity. We use APIs from NineAnts, the ECB and Integrity itself to catch errors before they slip in.
4. Rethinking Excel with AI.
Another enquiry came in for our Advanced Excel and AI training. Many want to use AI to improve formulas. We cover that too, but we focus on how to better design Excel models using AI and little known tools like PowerQuery (free tool hidden inside Excel).
5. Freedom and responsibility.
I wanted to build the company 20-year-old me would have 🩷 to join. Room for initiative and ideas. Sometimes we go too far.
This week we asked something of our junior developer that was outside his current abilities, causing frustration all around. Lesson learned. Opportunity is great, but we must match the right task with the right person. Freedom comes with responsibility for both sides.
6. Payments?
NineAnts already automates Cash Visibility. A prospect asked why we do not support payments. Good question.
We were cautious, since payments increase fraud risk. But after passing our penetration test with no findings, and knowing that with ABN Amro clients still approve transactions in the bank portal, maybe we were too cautious. Worth exploring.
7. Life outside work.
My son could arrive any day now. I am trying to finish as much as I can, while also enjoying being the 3 of us for now. When I book calls I warn people I might need to disappear at short notice.
A good reminder that not everything runs on a schedule, even in automation.
💡 If you have a tip, question or story about automation, treasury or data, drop me a message. I would love to hear from you!
🧭 Building Automation Boutique: Weekly Reflections — 2025 Week 46 was originally published in automationboutique on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.