July 09, 2020
We live in a digital age, where technology is a necessity for driving business success. As the number of transactions and volume and complexity of data involved continues to expand, it is impossible for corporate treasurers to rely on manual processing anymore.
Treasury has already been impacted by digital transformation initiatives. From the adoption of software as a service (SaaS)-based treasury management solutions and the slow-but-steady rise of APIs to standards such as the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) and the related upcoming migration to the ISO 20022 messaging format, digitalization is here to stay.
Here are a few ways digitalization is helping corporate treasurers around the world do their jobs better and more easily:
- Transaction Tracing – The Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2), open banking, and APIs are paving the way for end-to-end transparency in transaction tracing. After gaining traction with gpi, effective by the end of this year, SWIFT is requiring all financial institutions using its network to confirm payments to its Tracker.
- Real-time Cash Visibility – Through technology and centralization made possible by integration between banks, payment providers, treasury aggregators, treasury management systems (TMSses) and enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) corporates can gain a holistic, real or close to real-time view of their cash to aid with positioning, funding flows and liquidity.
- Remote Access – As many organizations discovered with the COVID-19 outbreak, secure remote access to key systems is a critical need. Through SaaS and web-based technology, it is possible to provide the necessary access to the right people regardless of their physical location, enabling companies to hire the best staff regardless of physical location, and ensuring business continuity in the event of a situation such as a pandemic.
- Fraud Detection and Prevention – Authorization and authentication provides a first layer of security for treasury systems access. Paired with automated workflows and functionality such as filtering, flagging, sanctions screening and validation, these tools of the digital age can help treasurers reduce fraud risk.
- Risk Management and Cash Analytics – Technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) can help treasury analysts dive deeper into data than ever before, to produce sophisticated risk scenarios, liquidity modelling, and cash forecasting.
