Managing a Treasury Management System (TMS) selection and implementation is CV-worthy and a career defining event for the ambitious treasury executive. The Request for Proposal (RFP) is a well trodden, easily structured and well understood path to securing workable initial proposals, typically based around apparently well defined, detailed functional requirements. But, explains Patrick Coleman, Regional General Manager, IT2 Treasury Solutions, the format has limitations and pitfalls. It also presents very significant, and often unrealised opportunities for the treasury team. How should treasury maximise its return on an RFP?
Treasury Management has always involved a significant amount of measurement and analysis. This article introduces the concept of treasury KPIs, which provide a structured and objective environment for assessing the effectiveness, accuracy and rate of improvement of critical treasury processes. Treasury KPIs are valuable at all levels of an organisation, potentially enhancing the quality, level of policy compliance and efficiency of treasury.
Cash Management is such a wide topic that a whitepaper of this nature must focus on a relatively small selection of key issues which are today of priority interest to corporate treasurers. The substance here is the product of recent research performed by the Zanders organisation into corporate cash management, reflecting the cash management behaviour – and especially its best practice elements – that we have observed and in which we have participated over the last couple of years.
Multinational corporations the world over have much to gain from eBAM — a solution that promises to standardize and automate the inefficient, paper-based account management processes. But the path to eBAM is far from straightforward and there is much work still to be done. Rather than sitting back and waiting for the solution to become available, a few pioneering corporates have taken the initiative and are actively taking part in pilot programs. Collaborating closely with banks, treasury technology companies, SWIFT service bureaus and standards organizations, these corporate trailblazers will help to define how eBAM develops in the coming years.
This paper examines the three pillars of best-practice cash and liquidity management, which together facilitate the end-to-end visibility and management of corporate cash flows. It also describes the role each plays in facilitating the end-to-end visibility of corporate cash flows and explains the areas on which corporate treasurers are presently focusing their efforts.
In the wake of the global financial crisis, the spotlight has never been so firmly focused on the corporate treasury department and, in particular, on financial risk management. The recent extremes in market conditions have exposed significant weaknesses in traditional corporate risk-management practices. This paper sheds light on those inherent weaknesses, and explores some alternative and supplementary techniques that are becoming more commonplace in the new era of advanced corporate risk management. The paper goes on to explain how each of the new techniques brings its own set of challenges which treasury departments must first understand — and then overcome. The key new challenges involve determining the relevance of concepts such as basis adjustment, credit valuation adjustment, curve construction, scenario generation, VaR, dynamic counterparty risk indicators and company risk — and of understanding the interrelationships of these sometimes complex concepts.
In the general field of cash forecasting, there are a number of factors that in practice combine to make each company’s cash forecasting requirement unique. These include matters such as company organisation, business cycle patterns and treasury cash management policy and the detailed corporate information management infrastructure that delivers the forecast information.
Corporate treasurers today are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate that their operations are not only efficient but also well-controlled, clearly and currently documented, and compliant with all applicable company policy, laws and regulations. Technology now offers cost-effective solutions which combine treasury process productivity, accuracy and control improvements with the provision of dynamic, up to date process documentation. Additionally these elements may be integrated with treasury policy documentation, to offer a much more complete solution for the diverse and demanding requirements of a treasury department. The end result is an intuitive, easy to use and easy to audit solution, which provides senior management with significantly enhanced levels of assurance that treasury operations comply with industry best practice – and, significantly, are clearly seen to do so.
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