They are all doing it - partnering like crazy, but who is going to win?:

• Kyriba announced yesterday that they have entered into strategic alliance with Globaltrade Corporation, a leading multi-bank trade finance platform, to bring together trade finance and treasury management solutions to empower global finance leaders to better manage high volume cash and trade operations. “Kyriba’s market leading treasury and financial management solutions combined with GTC’s ease of use and flexibility in managing trade flows in a multibank environment will help global financial executives manage the complexities of international trade,” said Jacob Katsman, CEO at GlobalTrade Corporation. 
• Reval Cloud Platform is used by Hasbro to connect its global operations for treasury and risk management, leveraging straight-through processing to Reval's partner offerings. "We use Fides, FXall, Thomson Reuters’ market data and SAP, all without leaving the system. Reval is unique in its connection to Fides for bank connectivity, so we did not have to seek out another source ourselves,” Martin Trueb, Hasbro’s corporate treasurer. Hasbro have used Reval’s Cloud Plaform to provide: “leadership with real-time information, spending time on strategic planning and forecasting and learning new ways to manage our treasury responsibilities globally.”  
• BELLIN, the web-based treasury software and services for multinational corporations, have announced that they will be releasing a Virtual Network Bank service. BELLIN say that “Their mission in this new services is to create “global transparency in banking communication” by revolutionizing the bank onboarding process for corporate clients.”
• TMS + Fides combination: Another approach is to combine the TMS with a third party service provider. Fides, the Swiss connectivity provider, has partnerships with TMS providers such as Reval, SAP and TreasuryXpress.
• Etc.

Who wins?

This partnering is critical to the TMS providers as it improves the depth and range of their product or service, and makes it easier for the corporate treasury department to just focus on their own internal processes and procedures. All the TMS providers are racing to add more service partners to their solution trying to ensure that their overall solution is good enough not to lose users and to attract new ones. There will be no overall winner in this model.

In the age of the Application Programming Interfaces will this adding of new partners prove unnecessary, as corporate treasury departments will be able (so called ‘experts’ say) to just add services to their corporate treasury department system(s) when they need it? It is an exciting prospect but will it/can it really happen?