A quick look at what’s on International Treasurer’s radar screen this week. 

With The NeuGroup meeting season in full swing, our editorial meeting was filled with issues we will be tracking. The first is the continuing proliferation of capital controls, including to Eurozone countries like Cyprus (what happens when a restricted currency is worth more offshore than onshore?).

Before Cyprus and Argentina: Venezuela
We also will be tracking the situation in Argentina with care and hope it does not follow much further the path of Venezuela. The announcement last week of a new tier to Venezuela’s currency regime, SICAD to replace SITME (which was closed with the bolivar devaluation February 8), gives MNCs hoping to get cash out of the country very little to hang their hat on (see related post, here).  An insecure leader can often mean a harder line (see North Korea).

XML Fluency
A session led by RBS at the Global Cash and Banking Group (GCBG) meeting they sponsored last week underscored the importance of treasury understanding the implications of XML for re-systematizing payments processing, not only in the immediate gear-up for SEPA, but global payments and more down the road.

Understanding how to get data out of disparate enterprise systems to identify and validate exposures was also a theme at last week’s NeuGroup FX Summit, sponsored by Deutsche Bank and FiREapps. FiREapps has made a business out of helping MNCs get at their actual exposures to FX. From there, treasury can analyze them, develop hedging strategies and transact with leading FX dealers like Deutsche Bank with greater confidence in their underlying position. While not XML per se, the related understanding of data extraction, mapping and new methods of electronic data exchange will be key to the data-driven, decision-support analytics that will be part of every MNC finance function’s future.

Platform Evolution
The third major issue on our radar screen this week is how current trends are playing into treasury platform evolution. A session at the GCBG on best practices in Shared Services Centers (SSCs) also highlighted how the above-described technology-centric, big data driver is already blurring governance lines for SSCs between finance and IT functions. This is part of an emerging trend toward shared solution centers emphasizing higher-value, technology-enabled solutions, leveraging the shared big data. New platform labels might also help in other ways. The growing popularity of in-house banks as a centralizing platform for corporate treasury activities has triggered concern that regulations aimed at mitigating the systemic risk of the banking system will be allowed to spill over to anything modeled after a bank.