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Emerging trends in treasury management

New-age treasury involves a more interactive eco-system around corporate treasury and banks, payment hub factories and consolidation by technology players, cloud offerings and outsourcing. The role of the treasury has evolved from being a centralized liquidity management function to that of a comprehensive payment, supply chain, liquidity and forex management function while becoming innovative in order to develop an independent identity for itself.

When we say treasury, we are not only talking about corporate treasury, but also about the treasury and capital market functions of financial institutions.

While the treasury function of a bank has its primary focus on managing the surplus and shortfall of its liquidity needs, managing short- and long-term borrowing strategy, driving appropriate investments to maximize returns and managing the foreign exchange exposure of the institution, the role of corporate treasury is more tuned to managing the working capital, repatriation of cash, managing foreign exchange volatility and keeping the cost of capital under control.

The advent of some of the new-age practices and their adoption has made a big difference to trends in treasury management both for corporate treasury and for treasury functions at banks and financial institutions.

Let’s explore them in a little more detail : –

1. Integral workflows
The integration in the treasury workflow of the bank with that of corporate procure-to-pay and the order-to-cash cycle is driving significant synergies in the transaction banking arena. Be it with liquidity forecasting, payments, settlements or with pure reconciliation, the savings driven through integration are significant. This ability to have online connectivity of banks with corporate treasuries has also created the need for a more agile and effective use of working capital, with a better outlook of the risk.

The connectivity, in essence, is three-fold : –

1. Firstly, with banks and their communication modes, including SWIFT, multi-bank reporting and payment confirmations

2. Secondly, with market data, including Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg

3. Lastly, the critical part of the connectivity is with function-specific applications for trade confirmations, investment portals and reporting systems.

The key implication is that unless banks continue to drive the integration with the corporate treasury and have a strong transaction banking offering, their ability to be a comprehensive solution provider to its clientele is likely to be seriously impaired. The downside risk of such an integral workflow is that of cyber risk and exposure of financial data, which needs to be proactively managed.

2. Payment-hub factories
The services of payment-hub, enabling better cash forecasting, standardized approach and transaction processing is emerging as a key factor in the corporate treasury landscape, particularly in the last decade. Essentially, the payment-hub bank enables a centralized and standardized payment process across the corporate, for all bulk commercial and treasury payments, local, cross-border and inter-company transfers, while also providing value-added services of reconciliation and netting.

This has also resulted in a key shift in the focus of the adjacent technology category – the payment system suppliers, with a large number of new players emerging in this area. Some of the recent industry consolidations (eg Misys with D+H) are significant in this context, given the industry leader of Fundtech, a D&H unit in the area of cash management and payment services.

An aligned phenomenon that is increasingly adopted by large corporates is that of in-house banks, where an internal unit helps administer inter-company liabilities and provides bank-style services to the affiliated entities. The model approaches just an external bank account to business, providing inter-company settlements, cash pooling, hedging settlements, etc. The key consideration of this approach is to reduce the number of bank accounts, and the external transaction costs.

3. Greater proliferation of cloud
While the larger tier-1 banks are comfortable with the specialized niche players, and the tier-2 banks would still be fine with treasury modules of universal banking solution providers, a large number of tier-3 and 4 banks continue to evaluate options that are specific, easy to adapt and cost-effective. Cloud-based offerings and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models, therefore, are seen to have their share of charm with smaller banks and are expected to continue to do so.

Essentially, there are three parts to treasury technology that banks are looking to be delivered:

• Liquidity management: Funding, risk, balance sheet management and hedging
• Investment management: Portfolio, collateral, investment instruments and optimization
• Capital markets: Trading, risk, transaction processing and accounting

While there are front-, mid-and back-office features that are related to the dealing, risk management and settlement operations for every deal cycle, multiple aspects of the above value chain are being addressed using the SaaS model, allowing the transaction fee to be structured on a pay-as-you-use model. The situation is identical even from a corporate treasury standpoint, where small and medium-sized enterprises would rather have a plug-and-play model that co-exists with their ERP applications.

4. Technology marketplace consolidation
Over the years, there have been multiple acquisitions on the Treasury and Capital Markets space, reflecting the nature of this industry. Multiple well-known treasury technology suppliers such as Sophis, FRS Global, Sungard have, over the last few years, been merged or acquired with other larger industry players, and the implication is not very hard to decipher: Banks are more comfortable with stability and larger, specialized players, which is either reflected by industry players who are uni-focused and deep in this space (eg Murex, Calypso, Wallstreet), or players who have a strong treasury offering as an integral part of a larger suite of offerings (eg Misys, Temenos).

A more unmistakable trend in this context is the significance of risk, compliance and governance and their implications to technology and analytics. The universal banking players stand to gain more in this context, and space for best-of-breed treasury players is likely to be increasingly squeezed out.

From a corporate treasury standpoint, while the core treasury functionalities of cash and liquidity management, interest and FX risk management, forecasting and reporting functions are provided by the treasury suppliers (eg Kyriba, Reval), the integration with other specialized applications and portals for transactions, dealing systems, hedge accounting, GL applications and BI systems form a critical part of the functional architecture.

There are also other investment portals, market information systems, risk management applications and reconciliation systems that are used in the corporate treasury context. Consolidation of players resulting in a more comprehensive end-to-end offering is therefore inevitable.

The integration of banking treasury with that of corporate ERP offerings also provides an edge to the large ERP players who also have a core banking offering, with an interesting market advantage (eg SAP, Oracle). The use of ERP for treasury management in a corporate context also comes with its own advantages: better data integration and leverage of existing data, ability to integrate across locations and reduction of operational risk.

5. Treasury operations
Although smaller in size, the front- and middle-office functions that manage the dealing room and the risk management continue to play the central role of a treasury function, both in banks and large corporates. It is natural that the back-office functions of treasury have seen a higher share of outsourcing, considering the fungible nature of the responsibilities, the time-zone leverage that offshore locations offer, cost reduction driven through the shared services model and a higher consistency of global standards, especially in treasury accounting and compliance norms. With the advent of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and cloud technologies, operations digitization as a theme is inevitable.

However, what may be interesting to note is that MNC corporate treasury functions may be more comfortable in building internal centers of excellence, especially where the operations spill across multiple countries and consistency becomes key.

The benefits of these are quite obvious:

Scalable and cost-effective operating model, centralized liquidity management function, single point of relationship with banks, leverage of subject matter expertise, standardized operating model – resulting in higher throughput, lower pilferage and improved effectiveness.

Regulatory standards, compliance norms and emerging governance principles have all always necessitated both banks and corporate treasurers to review their treasury systems and reporting framework to stay compliant. Be it the IFRS9 norms or BASEL III or the Dodd-Frank regulations, these have made the higher degree of reporting rigour a significant impact area for the treasurer – either with the bank or in the corporate.

While the historical approach had always been a ‘wait-and-watch model until there is clarity on the regulations and their implications, a more recent trend has been stakeholders adopting early compliance, based on expectations. This is also partly because the number of supervisors to whom reporting is to be made has increased significantly, and the cost of non-compliance is increasingly prohibitive.

The outlook of the treasury function, be it within the corporate or at a bank, has seen a fair degree of shift over the last few years, and is also likely to go through a much higher degree of innovation and consolidation, both from the technology and operational perspectives. Keeping with the times and being aligned may just be the mantra for survival if you are an active participant in the world of the emerging treasury!

Payment hubs – transcending many borders

The concept of a payment hub is a key shift in the industry, enabling a centralized, standardized and coordinated payment model for person-to-person, business-to business, micro, commercial and treasury payments

Perhaps the single biggest shift in the past decade is in moving payments services from being a utility-oriented cost center to that of a state-of-the-art center for innovation, and a profit center for banks and financial institutions. Considering that any bank has a myriad of payments to make, across individual and institutional transactions – the emergence of payment hubs, or payment “factories” as they are now increasingly called, is but inevitable and a natural progression that’s come of its age. And the reasons for those are not hard to decipher:

A global marketplace results in a more accurate demand for consistent services across geographies and customers with an international orientation seek homogenous payment services independent of geographies
There is an exponential growth in payment technology and its applications – mobile, contactless, NFC, e-wallets, blockchain and also a higher degree of regulatory requirements such as SEPA, necessitating standardization of services across banks.
Competition brings out the best in the best. Innovative products and intuitive service offerings in the payments domain have an instant customer appeal, and being the early bird, does help.

The historical framework of payment applications required having one’s respective mechanisms of settlements, reconciliations, exception handling and supporting services of risk and compliance validation, anti-fraud screening and wherever required, dispute resolution.

The costs of all of these on an individual basis would not only be prohibitively high but also render the scope of services to be fairly limited as it was not easy to have all of these services embedded across all service areas. When the investments are concentrated into a single payment hub, the limited resources at a bank’s disposal get better deployed and drives a higher return on the infrastructure investment.

What is important to note here, is that a payment hub is not necessarily always centralized, or is a single piece of infrastructure. The concept has evolved over the years, and without necessarily calling it a payment ‘hub’, many parts of the model have been adopted and put in use by banks across the globe in different variations.

The blocks of payments integration, as we see them today, have grown through the value chain of front, mid and back-office functions, the sequence representing customer interactions, risk management and payments processing activities respectively : –

1. Front office/customer interaction & data services: Having a broader and deeper perspective of all the customer payments requires the integration of multiple data feeds coming in from the client, fed appropriately into respective systems using a straight-through-processing (STP) framework. This is the first, and most critical part of the payment infrastructure, as it not only helps reduce the cost structure through the elimination of manual intervention but also facilitates the avoidance of duplication and the related costs. It also significantly reduces error rates.

2. Mid office/compliance and risk governance: As STP became commonplace in the banking industry, increasing volumes of real-time payments also evolved, making it very critical to have a centralized governance framework to validate data, run necessary ÜAE Ïslamic banks renewing their focus analytics – specifically related to compliance and AML / Fraud, and provide a confirmation of adherence to regulatory norms. This was also necessitated by respective geographies of the origination and destination of the payments being processed.

3. Back office / central processing hubs: Payment hubs have also been coined as Payment factories, primarily for the active back-office functions that it provides now. The ability to service through a centralized and automated payment over an integrated, interfaced infrastructure across both internal and external applications, physical and electronic channels, and also through the financial clearing networks, has allowed banks to set-up a series of flexible offerings to their customers. They drive product innovation. Quite naturally, this helps in building a differentiated fee model, driving revenues and enhancing profitability.

“Innovative products and intuitive service offerings in the payments domain have an instant customer appeal.”

The key to all of this, of course, is a robust system infrastructure, that enables connectivity across both legacy systems and new-age applications, based on configured business rules and flexible component-based architecture. The core proposition is to allow a faster service to the customer, even while ensuring it is cost-effective, independent of whether they constitute low-volume / high-value corporate payments, or low-value / high-volume consumer payments.

Emerging trends: 4-I principle

The advent of payment factories across geographies and the appeal that it has with international customers – both commercial and retail alike have driven both mid-size and large banks to pursue this as an area of emerging focus. However, the key differentiator between the successful ones and others is in their ability to address the 4-I’s, which summarises the essence of the emerging trends in payments:

Integration | across channels Payments cut across channels – both physical and electronic. Having an integrated platform to offer and build services around P2P transfers, B2B transfers, Micropayments, fund transfers over the mobile and the internet, new age payment needs-driven through the social media and also being able to maneuver through the myriad of both internal and external systems is a pre-requisite for a successful service model. The customer is looking to develop a holistic perspective across all payments data – including domestic and international, both from a current and historical standpoint with insightful analytics. Providing such an integrated view calls for a superior integrated technology framework. The ability of the bank to seamlessly transact across instruments, formats, clearinghouses and payment types across any channel is the hallmark of a customer friendly payment hub!

Immediacy | Real-time services Provision of real – time views and instant payments is dependent on having accurate information, and the ability to integrate data from multiple sources on a real-time basis. This is necessitated not only from a marketing perspective but also because customers have commitments made to their principals on the back of this service level. The sweep in and sweep out facilities to have funds pushed or pulled on a real-time basis not only reduces the cost of funds for a corporate treasurer, but the elimination of the settlement lag can also mitigate liquidity and credit exposure levels for the corporate. B2B transactions are priced by providing for the elimination of such credit and liquidity exposures, and the reduced processing time also implies higher floats and lower cost of funds for the bank. “Provision of real-time views and instant payments is dependent on having accurate information.”

Innovation | services & pricing A payment service that is faster, with reduced risk, higher control on frauds and minimal errors by itself deserves a better pricing. Add in an element of the flexibility of 24×7 timelines for payments to be processed at a date and time of their choice, a cross-border supply chain financing framework, combined with a 360-degree view to transactions on a real-time and an anytime-anywhere access to funds, and the value proposition from a customer’s standpoint can be quite significant. Service differentiation is key, and a prominent feature that scores is in providing the customer with the flexibility of a payments framework that is entirely rules and parameter-based, for a self-service model without having to redefine everything from scratch.

Interface | front, mid and back The Payment hub, in itself, is somewhat loosely defined, as it can be the central junction that connects across the front office – digital and physical channels and the treasury desk with the back-office transaction platforms of ACH, Cheque processing platforms, RTGS and also with the middle office – risk and analytics platforms. The role of the hub also extends beyond connecting transaction platforms, to being an aggregator and distributor of all payment instructions across all platforms – core banking systems, cash management platforms, payment networks and risk management applications.

Payments hub technology

Establishing the right payment hub platform and configuring it with the right technology is a pre-requisite for a successful services model. While the choices are always split between specialized applications that offer depth versus suppliers with the ‘breadth’ of an application portfolio, there are a few elements that are critical when a payment hub is setup.

The scope of the platform – across the three building blocks of front, mid and back office features is a primary factor. Alignment to the industry norms, and emerging requirements – such as European SEPA or the US image based clearing model – is critical. The ability to define and innovate on product offerings and its life-cycle, building a parameterised self-service model for the customer, driving a flexible pricing engine and having a plugand-play model that fits the size of operations of the bank, are all important factors.

The other key success factor is the agility of the platform to seamlessly replace or update its connectivity to legacy applications, as and when they are replaced or upgraded. A good payment hub platform is one that is less expensive to operate and ready to adapt to new payment types, preferably using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

An easy to maintain transaction logic and an open architecture that lends itself to adaptability with changing needs is not only critical for the ease of maintenance but also to assure the longevity of the payment hub platform itself. Sequencing the modules of implementation, without having to have a big-bang replacement of all applications is a smart strategy, especially when it comes to payment hub technology.

Looking forward

Payments industry revenues are expected to reach $1.4tn in the next four years, with more than 69% of that driven by emerging markets. Interestingly, wholesale payments contribute to 25% of the payment industry revenues. More than half of the revenues being driven through transaction services in mature markets, which is also the fastest-growing revenue contributor for emerging markets. It would be quite hard for any bank to ignore this portfolio.

“A good payment hub platform is less expensive to operate and ready to adapt to new payment types.”

Delays are not acceptable

For a customer, who has been dealing with multiple payment file formats, multiple bank utilities to upload and download files and statements, limited visibility to all payments and liquidity status, delays in processing of payments and resultant costs – a consolidated payment hub offering from a bank which offers STP and enterprise level control, can be more than just a fresh breath of air!

Banking can easily be dumbed-down into just a commodities game and price-wars if it was not for the excitement of innovation and service differentiation. Concepts such as payment hubs are classic examples where the best have differentiated themselves from the rest. A final word before we conclude: payment hub is more of a concept, a framework and an operating model, and not just a technology platform. Retaining that perspective is important. The perennial mantras for any concept to thrive are simply two: Fit-to-requirement, and time-to-market!