January 21, 2011
In The NeuGroup’s Global Cash & Banking Group World-Class project, two of the more challenging topics that emerged were organization and responsibilities. The group debated how world-class cash management is best organized and what activities it should own vs. influence. The debate over the merits and limitations of centralization and decentralization focused a lot around the roles and reporting lines of shared service centers (SSC’s) and treasury centers (TC’s). As the charts below clearly show, there is a strong bias toward centralization of policy-making (Fig. 1) combined with broad sharing of work load between HQ and regional and local operations (Fig. 2).