By Ted Howard
In providing support for treasury management systems—implementation or otherwise—companies need a tech/treasury linguist and a ready team of experts.
When it comes to treasury management systems, companies and their treasurers have avariety of systems and delivery options available to them.They can have a TMS system delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) purchased froma third-party vendor; they can have an installed legacy system from one of the big techsthat they periodically upgrade or replace altogether. Or they can go the home-brewroute, where they choose to build their own TMS in-house. But to make it all go smoothly,support is critical.
Currently, by most treasury lights, support is uneven at best. And the reason why is averitable laundry list of business or organizational hurdles: Treasury might not want totake the overhead of having its own IT department, or in many cases, it isn’t allowed;shared IT groups usually are challenged to serve the needs of treasury effectively; also,often driven by SLA metrics that incentivize IT departments to close tickets, they mightrush a fix, resulting in recurring incidents without ever solving the root cause of theproblem. Whatever the reason, gaps in technology support usually put a strain ontreasury and more importantly, business resources.
But there is consensus about ways to overcome many of the above challenges. One ishaving a person who has the ability to understand both treasury and the technology thatsupports it; the other is putting together a dream team of company and vendor expertsto give the project the needed momentum.
SINGLE POINT OF CONTACT
As noted in a recent NeuGroup TMS webinar, even for treasuries that have the available IT support resources, a primary challenge is having someone know what’s happening onthe tech side while understanding what’s needed on the treasury side.
“It’s very difficult to support treasury effectively if you have a technologist whodoesn’t understand the treasury processes or if you have a treasury specialist whounderstands the processes but doesn’t understand the technologies,” said JeremyKidd, Business Technology Advisor at Cargill, who participated in the webinar. “It’sdifficult to bring those two things together.”
The uniqueness of this challenge has given rise to the treasury-IT liaison (seesidebar, this page), who can “speak both languages” to communicate the treasuryrequirements to the technology provider and IT support team, and in turn,communicate the technology requirements to treasury.
In addition, dedicated IT support can help with its single-point-of-contact structure:It can better deliver a “rapid response capability,” which in turn can optimize treasuryproductivity with the processes supported by the system. The latter requires regulartreasury interaction with its support resources. And this goes beyond implementationand the first few weeks of using the system. Being an IT-liaison means effectivelymanaging the vendor relationship by keeping up with newly released functionality,maintaining service level agreements and identifying functional deficiencies via gapanalysis and operational reviews in anticipation of the budget setting cycle.
THE DREAM TEAM
As suggested in the WC TMS webinar, the desired end-state of a proper functioningTMS also includes a team of subject matter experts—from both inside and outside theorganization—to keep the processes going smoothly.
This is what’s happening at Cargill, where Mr. Kidd is leading an effort to create a neworganizational construct. Mr. Kidd and his colleagues are calling it a Center of Expertiseor COE, which is focused on treasury, without being embedded in Treasury. “And thegoal of this very simply is to bring treasury and IT together and create a shared groupthat sits in the middle. Think of it as a virtual team of experts. We’re not taking peopleout of IT and putting them in treasury.
Mr. Kidd added that it’s a model that will basically have experts at the ready as problemsarise. For instance, if there’s an issue with a bank interface, there will be a personin the COE who has the expertise to fix the problem right away. “So you’re not justputting a ticket in to a random support person,” Mr. Kidd said. The model will includetreasury and IT subject-matter experts and business and systems analysts.
To give it the proper leadership, the COE will be co-managed by a leader fromtreasury and a leader from IT. There will also be an emphasis on a wide range oftechnical expertise, including resources that are (virtually) retained from different partsof the IT department (data, integration, security, etc.) and supplemented with specialistsfrom outside the COE as needed, for instance developers, coders and the like. TheCOE will also be accountable for the overall health and stability of the treasury techenvironment, not just for traditional support, but also for upgrades, enhancementsand new deployments.
Whether managing the growing-in-use SaaS structure or a system that is installedor built in-house, the support of the system matters. And it will matter more as demandson treasury systems increase. Company growth requires scalability to systems,and new regulations also may require expanding current systems to account for newrules. Challenges like these will require more demands on often fewer resources. Thetech-treasury liaison and/or a center of excellence will go a long way toward makingsure the resources are committed to the areas that need it most.
Point of Contact
This treasury-tech liaison role can eithergrow into the desired dedicated treasuryIT support in the future or make anysupport model more effective along thepath. The role often is the same or closelyconnected with the treasury project leadfor TMS implementation. Indeed, onemember of a focus group used in TheNeuGroup’s World Class TreasuryManagement System project asked ifhaving a dedicated treasury liaison or atreasury IT support group helped withimplementation. The answer: Yes, it helpswhen people have skin in the game, i.e., itis their job to ensure implementationhappens on time. The same holds true forsupport.
For this reason, “we don’t want programmerson that team,” as another focusgroup participant noted, “we want peoplewho understand what needs to be doneand then talk to the programmers who canmake it happen. They also need to be ableto call out hurdles, knock heads togetherand make changes, if needed, to move theproject along.”