Putting Treasury Objectives into Practice

by Helen Sanders, Editor

We have reported extensively in TMI how liquidity and risk management are now firmly established as treasury priorities, with treasurers now taking a more prominent role in their company’s management team. We also know that their relationship banks have an important role in facilitating the information, transaction flows and financing solutions that treasurers need to fulfil these responsibilities. Less attention has been given, however, to the tools that treasurers are using to realise their treasury objectives, specifically the treasury management system (TMS) that typically forms the core of their infrastructure.

This article features the views of three of the key TMS vendors: SunGard, IT2 and Thomson Reuters on how client demands and opportunities are evolving, and the likely functional and technical future direction in the TMS market to address these.

From complexity to clarity

Putt’s Law states that, “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.” Since the financial crisis in particular, treasurers are trying to prove this law wrong, by managing what they truly do understand. As the need for effective liquidity and risk management has been accentuated, this in turn has led treasurers to seek greater confidence in the data that forms the basis of their decision-making. This has been the fundamental driver behind many technology projects over the past year or so, as Paul Bramwell, SVP, Treasury Solutions, SunGard explains,

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