Benchmarking Treasury for Shareholder Value

4 Treasury and Trade Solutions More integration suggests improved efficiency The survey showed that 72% of respondents have deployed a TMS or an ERP solution. Encouragingly, 84% of participants use these solutions for cash operations and liquidity management. However, the distribution of technology is poor: Only a third of treasury professionals have access to TMS and ERP solutions and 45% of respondents are not deploying these tools for financial risk management or cash forecasting and planning. This may reflect integration challenges at companies; 63% of respondents reported that their TMS is either not integrated or only partially integrated with their ERP (Figure 3) . Similarly, 77% of participants said that their TMS/ERP platform is not fully integrated with their banks, resulting in inefficient manual reconciliation. There is clearly still much work to be done to leverage the full benefits of these powerful technologies. Digital Treasury: Innovation or natural upgrade? Technology is evolving rapidly, with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and other innovations dominating the headlines. These new technologies offer the potential to create a smarter treasury by moving away from basic analytics to predictive and prescriptive analytics. How are companies responding? The survey highlighted some of the near-term opportunities presented by robotic process automation (RPA) and application programming interfaces (APIs); 58% of corporates engaged in treasury transformation projects are focusing on RPA to automate repetitive manual tasks and 54% on APIs to improve integration within their own systems and how they connect with banks and other vendor platforms. Cloud architecture, big data, AI and ML are also a significant focus for corporates to support advanced analytics and for some an aspiration to prescriptive analytics to enable better decision-making. There is increasing curiosity for treasury on how to utilize the emergence of instant payments schemes particularly those that have a direct-to-consumer business model. Distributed ledger technology (which underpins blockchain), cryptocurrency and open banking are currently less of a priority for treasuries. To implement many of these technologies, high-quality data across the organization is paramount. Tools such as RPA, APIs, AI and ML cannot be effectively deployed to solve long-standing challenges, such as reconciliation and effective cash application, without an effective data management strategy in place. Participants surveyed viewed “Continuous improvement in treasury,” as the key driver in bringing about change (Figure 4) . “Technology to support treasury continues to be a core priority. With the digital advances taking place, deciding how best to invest resources is now a core challenge.” — European Treasurer Figure 3: Treasury Interface: Most systems partially integrated Treasury System Interface with ERP/GL 1 Fully Automated Interface Partially Automated Interface No Interface 17% 37% 46% 1 Enterprise Resource Planning and General Ledger (GL)