Treasury and Risk - REAL November 2019 Special Report

Thankfully, modern treasury management systems have made it possible to have access to timely and reliable information. While cash managers used to spend the bulk of their time gathering data and chasing their subsidiaries for balance and cash flow information, they now live in a world where this is available at the click of a button.

This has been made possible by group-wide, one-platform tools where information is centrally available.

Account statements and the financial status from across the group are accessible, as are cash flow information, long- and short-term cash positions, forecasts, planning data and reports.

Transparency and visibility have made
cash management operations much more
straightforward and strategic. It’s all
about what to do with the information,
So why would you need more than that?
Cash management has assuredly come a
long way. On the same coin, there is more
ground to gain and progress to be had.

Enhanced automation

There are a number of processes, such as automatic account statement retrieval or auto-reconciliation of plan/actual data, that can run in the background without any human intervention at all. Automation rules and scheduled processes bring even more efficiency and free up treasurers’ time for other tasks.

Machine learning/AI

Many see great potential in machine learning/AI for cash management. Cash flow forecasting in particular could benefit from supervised learning.

With the potential to store and collect
huge amounts of data in the cloud,
comes the potential to use this data to
“teach” machines. Yet, many follow-up
questions remain unanswered. How
do you deal with the fact that client
data cannot simply be combined at
will, limiting potentially large amounts
of data to comparatively small silos in
terms of machine learning input? Is it
really that valuable to feed unstructured
information into a machine?

Real-time account information through APIs

API technology has been another gamechanger in how information is made accessible. It enables t wo systems to communicate directly, and this information, for example real-time account statements and intraday account balance information as soon as money is credited to or debited from an account, could be processed and responded to in real time. Treasurers could trigger information directly and take a huge step towards an “instant treasury.” They can also benefit from an API interface to SAP for real-time account statement import. Add WebSocket interfaces, and you even rule out redundant data communication.