Monday, 15 May 2020 | By Kostas Kotsiopoulos, Executive Director, Login SA (Member of the Profile Group)
Real-time treasury is fast becoming a reality as greater levels of transparency and forecasting are required. The evolution of instant payment infrastructures worldwide is altering the liquidity landscape and creating the need for treasury processes and controls to turn ‘real-time’ ensuring that cash is being managed effectively.
However, real-time doesn’t only refer to payments, it also includes real-time FX, liquidity management and other treasury processes as noted in Treasury Today. To achieve this, treasurers need to embrace new business models while improving automation, therefore delivering unparalleled efficiencies and insights.
APIs for Treasury
The rise of banking APIs allows for instant connection with treasury teams. APIs will continue to play a major role in this development by empowering banks to communicate with their clients in real-time as noted in Ernst & Young’s paper “Digital transformation in treasury services”. Several banks have made API-driven solutions available in the market, some of which enable treasury clients to integrate their processes, delivering real-time payment capabilities and access to fully automated solutions to process transactions and allow third-party developers to build additional tools that integrate directly with the bank.
Real-time will also be expected in bank balance and transaction reporting, increasing challenges for cash flow and liquidity management. With accurate data, detailed analysis and up-to-date finance and treasury reporting, organisations can reduce liquidity risk, accelerate funding for strategic business initiatives and increase cash visibility across all their banking partners.
According to Global Finance,” Real-time treasury offers the promise of improved business intelligence and cash forecasting, increased yield on surplus cash, and the chance to make more efficient use of working capital”.
Real-time treasury technology
Leveraging the great potential of technology available for real-time treasury will be a key differentiator for Banks in the future so as to optimise working capital, improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of cash management, achieve more accurate and, most importantly, simplified reporting, while being more secure and transparent than the paper-based processes.
Acumen-net is a powerful cloud-native Treasury platform that fully supports real-time treasury transactions with significant implementations to process complex and demanding tasks, delivering automation and efficiency across operations.