Strategic Treasurer unveils 2020 analyst reports

Strategic Treasurer’s 2020 Analyst Report guides to Treasury Management Systems (TMS) and Treasury Aggregator (TA) solutions are now available. These reports offer an overview of the current solution types, from the challenges driving their adoption to emerging technologies and leading practices for implementation. The solution type overviews are followed by in-depth coverage of prominent vendors in the space.

The TMS Analyst Report offers a thorough evaluation of the TMS space by covering the emerging uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), robotic process automation (RPA) and application programming interface (API) technologies in treasury; the place of a TMS/TRMS in business continuity planning and preparing for disruption and volatility; the best practices and proper mindsets for avoiding pitfalls in selecting, making a business case for, and implementing treasury technology; as well as the varied ways in which these solutions address the day-to-day pain points and inefficiencies of treasury departments.

The Treasury Aggregator Analyst Report covers the pain points driving this technology, such as fraud, disparate and evolving payment formats, economic globalisation, complexity, compliance, and staffing, along with the various ways in which a treasury aggregator can address those pain points and support efficient and controlled operations. Additional topics will include the role of a treasury aggregator within the larger treasury technology landscape, factors affecting the future of aggregation, and best practices for selection, implementation, employee training, system integration, and bank onboarding.

 

Walmart selects Coupa to enhance business spend management

Coupa Software has announced that it has been chosen by Walmart to upgrade the retail corporation's source-to-pay processes. The firm's business spend management (BSM) platform is expected to enhance Walmart’s visibility into its global spend, create better efficiencies across its business, and drive incremental savings in the company’s end-to-end procurement process. Walmart selected Coupa for the software firm's modern and comprehensive platform, source-to-pay and contracting solutions, and focus on delivering value.

“Today, we have multiple, complex procurement systems across our business," commented DK Singh, chief procurement officer at Walmart. "Coupa’s unique technology solution will help us optimise and harmonise our source-to-pay processes, providing cost savings, a simplified system and greater ease of use.”

Walmart currently uses Coupa to optimise the sourcing of significant third-party spend in North America. The company will now embark on a phased rollout to expand adoption of the Coupa BSM platform with procurement and advanced contract lifecycle management solutions. This should help Walmart to not only optimise spend for highly complex sourcing events and categories, but also drive incremental savings through spend efficiencies.

 

BBVA collaborates with AWS and Bloomberg to develop technology for its equity business

BBVA, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Bloomberg, has developed a new cloud-based technology for the equity markets area of its Corporate & Investment Banking unit. The bank has created ‘BBVA C-fit’, a platform built around AWS and Bloomberg technologies, to provide its equity trading team with what it calls one of the most cutting edge platforms available in the financial markets sector.

In today’s environment, where seamless access to market information and the ability to handle increasingly vast volumes of data is essential, investing in innovation and infrastructures is becoming more and more critical in order to deliver the highest quality service to customers while minimising and monitoring market risks.

The goal of the new platform is to boost the bank's equity team’s risk management capabilities, as well as to significantly expand the range of services that it can deliver to clients through the digitisation of solutions. ‘BBVA C-Fit’ can host all the processes of the equity desks related to the marking and management of market data used to set prices or manage book risk. The platform’s design allows for a growth potential, not only in terms of scalability and elasticity, but also in the deployment of other functionalities in the activity, such as mass pricing of products for their distribution through electronic channels.

BBVA says that what sets the platform apart from others in the market is its design, which combines technologies such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka with Bloomberg’s B-PIPE, to render real-time direct access to market data over the cloud. From a technical standpoint, the platform incorporates some of the latest technologies for designing and developing microservice-based web apps, as well providing access to market data from Bloomberg.