Going Above and Beyond: Treasury Technology Pioneers

By Eleanor Hill, Editor

There is a big difference between simply using technology and leveraging it to the fullest extent. FIS, a global leader in financial services technology, with a focus on treasury and risk management, payments and credit and collections, has been helping clients to maximise the value they achieve from technology, and taking their treasury operations to the next level of efficiency and sophistication. This hard work has been rewarded by the TMI 2019 Innovation & Excellence Award for Best Cash & Treasury Management Solution. And three of FIS’ clients scooped accolades for their collaborations with the vendor.

Having turned 30 years old in 2019, the FIS Integrity SaaS solution is one of the longest tenured treasury systems in the marketplace. This does not mean that the offering is standing still, however. The system was recently completely rebuilt, reinvented, and re-released, as the Integrity v10 SaaS solution, with an overhaul of underlying technology, and expanded functionality. 

In 2019, FIS continued aggressively investing and innovating within the Integrity solution. First, the entire system user interface was overhauled to improve customer experience. Next, API capabilities were expanded, empowering treasury to innovate faster and to more readily integrate across all common connectivity points, including banks, trading systems, rate providers, and enterprise resource planning (ERPs) systems, thereby establishing simpler, more streamlined connectivity. In addition, the payments functionality was enhanced, helping corporates to send payments faster, while reducing international processing costs at the same time.

Elsewhere, FIS has been rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics functionality and will continue to do so in 2020. Areas of investment include: cash forecasting, cash reconciliation, system management, and payments – the latter will see machine learning capabilities identify suspicious payments and automatically flag them for review, for example.

Together, all of these developments saw FIS crowned as the winner of TMI’s 2019 Innovation & Excellence Award for Best Cash & Treasury Management Solution. Three of FIS’ corporate clients also picked up accolades for their hard work in conjunction with the vendor.

Crowley Maritime Corporation - Best in Class Collections

Often companies implement technology, then fail to optimise it or upgrade to the latest versions. When Crowley Maritime Corporation was no longer improving upon their credit and collections results with an old version of GETPAID, the credit and collections team took initiative to drive further improvements and be an early adopter of a new version of the solution. In the process, Crowley Maritime has truly transformed and modernised its credit-to-cash processes, reaping benefits such as:

Tronox - Best Treasury Transformation - Highly Commended

Tronox Treasury faced a number of challenges, ranging from problems in departmental structure to limitations in technology. Some of the major issues included decentralisation, inefficient processes and an antiquated treasury management system (TMS), which managed only a handful of treasury functions. Clearly, there was an opportunity to deploy improved treasury technology to better manage treasury functions.

Tronox chose to implement the FIS Integrity SaaS solution to address technological issues, with the initial project beginning back in 2014. The implementation was successful, enabling Tronox to centralise treasury and banking functions, and automate several of its previously manual processes. Improved operational efficiencies immediately helped Tronox treasury to shift from operational to strategic, while at the same time improving systematic controls and reducing risk.

The latest technological improvement initiative at Tronox treasury has been the migration from the FIS Integrity private cloud deployment to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment. This has streamlined the upgrade process and greatly simplified the overall system maintenance efforts by Tronox treasury. To ensure FIS continues to provide maximum benefits and enable future treasury transformation, Tronox is the leader of the Integrity client user group based in North America and EMEA.

GE - SWIFT gpi for Corporates Pioneer

In 2019, GE’s treasury team implemented FIS’ TRAX payment factory solution to help GE centralise all payments and bank reporting for the company, while providing improved application functionality, more robust controllership and to aid in simplifying the overall treasury application landscape.

Alongside the implementation, GE became one of 10 corporates involved in testing SWIFT gpi for Corporates. GE’s Treasury helped design the go-forward payment strategy for the industry, which now provides track-and-trace payment capabilities, providing end-to-end visibility into the transaction lifecycle of cross-border payments and more transparency into FX and bank fees. GE will be partnering closely with SWIFT and FIS to pilot the Inbound Tracking Proof of Concept in 2020, contributing to further innovation in the industry. FIS will also be making enhancements to the design of user dashboards for SWIFT gpi purposes.

Celebrating success

Commenting on the Award wins, Andrew Bateman, EVP of Capital Markets Buyside, FIS, said: “We are pleased that several of our customers were recognised for their use of our technology to help them modernise their treasury and risk, payments, credit and collections operations. We are also honoured to be recognised by TMI for having the Best Cash & Treasury Management solution. Our experience, continued investment in innovative solutions and the cloud, as well as our commitment to service delivery, have us well positioned to offer greater value to FIS clients in 2020 and beyond.”