The JP Morgan Treasury Insights section is worth a look, i recently read an interesting article on Treasury technology – Demystifying New Technologies in Treasury. Check out the article for full details, following are my quick notes.
Adopting New Treasury Technology – The Challenges
Of course, most organisations want to get rid of manual processes, dreaded spreadsheets and that process which has been running for years but no one really knows about it. But taking the leap is a challenge, particularly for large organisations that have been around for decades or longer. Following are a couple of reasons why:
- Legacy systems prevent easy adoption
- Organisational culture to wait and see
- Fear of disruption to the old way of doing things
- Managing change due to the above hindrances
- Securing limited resources from across the organisation to Treasury projects is often difficult
- Cost and time to implement new systems/manage upgrades alongside other organisational priorities
- Being bamboozled by new technologies and the benefits they may bring to Treasury
3 Key Shifts in Treasury Technology
- Batch Processing –> Real Time Processing
- Payment processing, payment status feeds, balances, foreign exchange rates traditionally were managed using batch processing – that is a scheduled task that runs at defined intervals during the day, or even at the start/end of day
- API technology and payment infrastructures are now enabling such processes to be run in real time
- Manual Task Driven Processing –> Robotics and Intelligence Automated Processing
- Repetitive tasks such as data collection/processing/reporting are often time consuming, manual and subject to human error
- RPA or Robotic Process Automation enables such tasks to be automated. Build in some Machine Learning and you have an intelligent robotics engine that can assist with wider Treasury processes
- Physical Systems –> Virtual Platforms
- The move to cloud is complicated right now due to major concerns with cybersecurity, theft of intellectual property and data loss – especially following the introduction of GDPR in Europe
- Currently there is a move towards virtual platforms – a simulation of your system, which enables better scalability and business continuity
5 Emerging Treasury Technologies
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- Tools to automate repeatable tasks currently performed by humans, that also have the ability to learn
- According to the 2016 EY report Get Ready for Robots – RPA can reduce the costs of manual operations by 25%-40% without having to change existing systems
- Cloud
- A way of storing data and accessing data/systems over the internet
- Machine Learning
- Data analysis conducted by intelligent computer programs that can learn and make predictions based on data patterns
- Application Program Interface (API)
- Functions and procedures that allow systems to talk to one another – the API makes a request and receives a response
- Blockchain
- I explained blockchain using the acronym DANDYGIT… 🙂
Potential Use Cases for New Technology in Treasury
Source: JP Morgan Insights – Demystifying New Technologies in Treasury