When entering the international market, it is paramount to have a treasury management system (TMS) and growth agenda designed to support the complexity of your global business while leveraging automation.
A TMS can evolve to accommodate and expedite your company’s global expansion. By enhancing global treasury operations, you can simplify bank connectivity, improve payment security, reduce non-value work, lower implementation fees and achieve optimal long-term structure.
Why Should I Implement a TMS?
A treasury management system can help in many areas of your business by increasing cash visibility, managing banking requirements and currencies, mitigating risk and more.
With a TMS, companies can decrease their over-reliance on spreadsheets and manage data accurately and in real-time. Some additional benefits include:
- Enhanced controls
- Connectivity to all banks for statements & payments
- Access to accurate and consistent data
- Adoption of world-class processes
- Automation and streamlining of processes
- Significant time savings, enabling treasury to concentrate on strategic issues
- Scalability for future growth
- Regulatory compliance support
- Improved data analysis
- International remote capabilities
Gaining Support for a TMS Implementation
Gaining internal and external support when implementing a TMS eliminates unnecessary stress and energizes all phases of implementation. Communication and collaboration can help navigate and smooth out any bumps along the road.
So how do you gain that support? In order to gain internal support, it is necessary to first build a strong business case. Doing so will make it easier to gain approval for necessary budget allocations. When building a business case, it is important to identify and involve all essential groups and people to ensure you are addressing any and all “hot button” issues, as well as to gain the support of teams outside of treasury by explaining how a TMS can provide benefits to their departments. By addressing any issues, you can more easily prioritize business needs and use them as guidelines when building out your TMS.
For external support, it is vital to gather all of the information needed to support internal initiatives and then add to that by doing your due diligence. When looking for external support, ensure you have researched and vetted vendors, collaborated with solutions providers and consultants that can provide valuable insight into best practices and configuration options, and leverage relationships, networking and conferences to learn about industry trends so that you can deliver a full and thorough business case.
Establishing an Implementation Plan
Realistic expectations in treasury and finance are dealt with all of the time, and we at Actualize Consulting are experts on this topic. Yield and FX curves, stock prices, liquidity management, earnings expectations and tight controls are part of our daily jobs and we intimately know what happens when expectations aren’t met in these areas. Implementations are no different. Set the right expectations upfront with stakeholders, project participants, the vendor and YOU.
That’s why, to ensure everything goes smoothly, we suggest following the ABC’s of implementation:
- Adoption – not just implementation
- Business priorities
- Collaboration and commitment
- Documentation
- Expectation
- Flexibility
A comprehensive strategy is needed on many levels, covering everything from learning local regulations and requirements, and identifying how operations differ. Often regional offices have more focus on general finance matters than overall company liquidity and risk analysis. The goal is for technology to be used as an integral part of your liquidity and risk management, not just functionally implemented. As your company evolves, so too should your treasury management system.
Watch Kyriba and Actualize Consulting’s recent webinar with Trek Bicycles to learn how the company approached their own TMS implementation, including the planning phase, project realization and the steps they took to get from design to go-live.
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Actualize Consulting is a professional services firm specializing in business process engineering and technology implementations for financial institutions. With offices in the U.S. (New York and Northern Virginia), Canada and the UK (London), we are able to keep our finger on the ever-changing pulse of the capital markets, treasury, mortgage and fixed income areas. We serve mortgage firms, banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions, federal and state government, as well as specific activities of Fortune 1000 firms.
Priscila Nagalli, CFA, CTP is the Director at Actualize Consulting for the capital markets and treasury practice group specializing in the areas of international cash, investments, debt, compliance, risk management and structured funding for both emerging and developed markets. She has held progressive roles in banking, pension fund, corporate treasury and consulting. Priscila has analyzed and implemented numerous treasury management system solutions and helped companies to reengineer and improve their treasury activities.
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