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 a variety of systems and delivery options available to them.
They can have a TMS system delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) purchased from a third-party vendor; they can have an installed legacy system from one of the big techs that they periodically upgrade or replace altogether. Or they can go the home-brew route, 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 a veritable laundry list of business or organizational hurdles: Treasury might not want to take 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 might rush a fix, resulting in recurring incidents without ever solving the root cause of the problem. Whatever the reason, gaps in technology support usually put a strain on treasury and
more importantly, business resources.
But there is consensus about ways to overcome many of the above challenges. One is having a person who has the ability to understand both treasury and the technology that supports it; the other is putting together a dream team of company and vendor experts to 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 on the tech side while understanding what’s needed on the treasury side.
“It’s very difficult to support treasury effectively if you have a technologist who doesn’t understand the treasury processes or if you have a treasury specialist who understands the processes but doesn’t understand the technologies,” said Jeremy Kidd, Business Technology Advisor at Cargill, who participated in the webinar. “It’s difficult to bring those two things together.”
The uniqueness of this challenge has given rise to the treasury-IT liaison (see box nearby), who can “speak both languages” to communicate the treasury requirements 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 treasury productivity with the processes supported by the system. The latter requires regular treasury interaction with its support resources. And this goes beyond implementation
and the first few weeks of using the system. Being an IT-liaison means effectively managing the vendor relationship by keeping up with newly released functionality, maintaining service level agreements and identifying functional deficiencies via gap analysis and operational reviews in anticipation of the budget setting cycle.
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Go-To Person
This treasury-tech liaison role can either grow into the desired dedicated treasury IT support in the future or make any support model more effective along the path. The role often is the same or closely connected with the treasury project lead for TMS implementation. Indeed, one member of a focus group used in The NeuGroup’s World Class Treasury Management System project asked if having a dedicated treasury liaison or a treasury IT support group helped with implementation. The answer: Yes, it helps when people have skin in the game, i.e., it is their job to ensure implementation happens on time. The same holds true for support. For this reason, “we don’t want programmers on that team,” as another focus group participant noted, “we want people who understand what needs to be done and then talk to the programmers who can make it happen. They also need to be able to call out hurdles, knock heads together and make changes, if needed, to move the project along.”
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THE DREAM TEAM
As suggested in the WC TMS webinar, the desired end-state of a proper functioning TMS also includes a team of subject matter experts—from both inside and outside the organization—to keep the processes going smoothly. This is what’s happening at Cargill, where Mr. Kidd is leading an effort to create a new organizational construct. Mr. Kidd and his colleagues are calling it a Center of Expertise or COE, which is focused on treasury, without being embedded in Treasury. “And the goal of this very simply is to bring treasury and IT together and create a shared group that sits in the middle. Think of it as a virtual team of experts. We’re not taking people out of IT and putting them in treasury.
Mr. Kidd added that it’s a model that will basically have experts at the ready as problems arise. For instance, if there’s an issue with a bank interface, there will be a person in the COE who has the expertise to fix the problem right away. “So you’re not just putting a ticket in to a random support person,” Mr. Kidd said. The model will include treasury 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 from treasury and a leader from IT. There will also be an emphasis on a wide range of technical expertise, including resources that are (virtually) retained from different parts of the IT department (data, integration, security, etc.) and supplemented with specialists from outside the COE as needed, for instance developers, coders and the like. The COE will also be accountable for the overall health and stability of the treasury tech environment, not just for traditional support, but also for upgrades, enhancements and new deployments.
Whether managing the growing-in-use SaaS structure or a system that is installed or built in-house, the support of the system matters. And it will matter more as demands on treasury systems increase. Company growth requires scalability to systems, and new regulations also may require expanding current systems to account for new rules. Challenges like these will require more demands on often fewer resources. The tech-treasury liaison and/or a center of excellence will go a long way toward making sure the resources are committed to the areas that need it most.
Peer-Validated GuidanceDrives Success
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