Picking Up

by Helen Sanders, Editor

We have talked about the need for greater automation and efficiency in treasury for many years and indeed, a great deal of progress has been made. However, as with many major steps forward, it may take a crisis to act as a catalyst for real change. Very often at treasury conferences, liquidity is described as the lifeblood of an organization. While this analogy is a good one in many respects, effective liquidity management is not just about the substance which is pumped around the body of the company, but also the arteries through which it flows. For this reason, a focus on payments and how they are channelled in and out should be amongst the priorities for a treasurer in the new financial climate in which we find ourselves.

...a focus on payments and how they are channelled into and out of the organization should be amongst the priorities for a treasurer in the new financial climate.

In this article, we survey some of the trends and developments in payments, particularly in the United States, where the move toward payment automation has taken place a little later than in Europe and parts of Asia Pacific. What is significant, however, is not only the increasing synergy across regions in the challenges which companies are facing, but also the ways in which they are addressing them.

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