Treasury management systems are no longer just for deal and payment admin and management, they are about managing the overall liquidity and risks of the company as a whole, not just about the financial instruments. This requires a detailed understanding of what is really happening across the whole organisation, which requires data, loads of it, not just bank balance reports from your bank. 

Connecting treasury management systems to more and better data

In November Joseph Neu in one, his excellent Distilled Insight columns argued that the “real fail point for treasury management systems is access to underlying data”. He continued, “I have always thought the chief fail point for the traditional TMS is its failure to deliver out-of-the-box reports that most treasuries need. The bigger problem being exposed now by the proliferation of data analysis and visualization applications (many self-built) is a lack of access, or limited access, to required and increasingly nice-to-have data.”

This is particularly true with cash forecasts and risk analysis, “Access to all the data is critical because you don’t always know the importance of missing data; for example, the actual currency of payment vs. the translated amount recorded in the general ledger system. Plus, the connection of everything via the internet of things is now creating data that no one imagined existing before.”

Neu has found that “The sources of data relevant to treasury and finance functions can be substantial.” This underlines why it is so important for treasury management systems, e.g. Cashforce which can access AND make use of big data in their cash flow forecasting and liquidity management systems, etc.

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CTMfile take: The age of comprehensive big data in treasury management systems is beginning which is why, next month, we will be featuring a WEBchat on “The opportunities from a data-centric corporate treasury business model.”