A walk amongst the vendors at AFP reveals that eBAM is garnering a lot of interest; MyTreasury making push into US.
A concept, a system and a bank were popular topics on Day 1 of this week’s Association of Financial Professionals (AFP) conference in San Antonio. Here are a few 30,000 foot views:
eBAM
From a vendor viewpoint, a pervasive theme of the AFP conference has been electronic bank account management, otherwise known as eBAM (something we’ve written on a lot lately, too). And the outlook for this newish technology entrant is that it’s not just for bank accounts anymore. A presentation by JP Morgan made the interesting observation that they see a lot of other uses of eBAM other than managing bank accounts going forward. The bank sees treasury using the same technology for other activities, such as trading, etc.
New Faces
One new exhibitor at AFP is UK-based electronic trading platform company MyTreasury. What the company does on the surface seems quite simple but it has a technology infrastructure that should make the company appealing to corporate treasurers. For one, MyTreasury is a direct-account portal, that is, no omnibus-type anonymous relationships with money market funds where clients have an opaque view of things. Instead, clients have a direct relationship with MMFs (which MyTreasury maintains), giving clients peace of mind. For example, when the financial crisis hit and the Reserve Fund “broke the buck,” companies that didn’t have direct relationships with MMFs were at the mercy of the portal where they had purchased the funds. Companies couldn’t call anyone, nor could they find out the status of their cash. MyTreasury changes this. The company is prominent in Europe and has all or most European funds available in its portal. It’s poised to launch in the US in the next couple of months with the top 10 to 15 fund companies available in its portal. The company also is planning on adding FX trading in 2011, as well as CDs, commercial paper and repurchase agreements. The aim is to be the single portal for all treasury trading, rather than making transactions on a variety of vendors.
Another first-time exhibitor is the Bank of Ireland. The company has gone to AFP to try to deepen its reach into the US. It wants to get into more credit relationships in the US, although this will be selective at first. The hope, of course – like all banks these days – is that by offering credit they get ancillary business. The bank said it is prepared to step up credit commitments in order to deepen its relationship with its customers. One offering that makes it stand out from other banks is its ability to competitively trade exotic foreign currencies for clients.