Re-examining Your Strategic Treasury Management System

If you had the opportunity to reimagine your treasury strategy and overall treasury operation, what would you do? This opportunity was given to our treasury team at Health Care Service Corp (HCSC), a large health insurer operating across the U.S. under the brand names of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, Texas and more.

As part of a corporate-wide transformation nearly a decade ago, treasury was challenged to think differently about everything from cash and liquidity management, undertaking new “non-treasury” responsibilities, data science, cross-team collaboration and the use of technology to drive innovation.

The result was a completely new treasury mandate, which set in motion a series of continuous projects focused on managing liquidity more efficiently against the backdrop of constantly seeking ways to create new best practices.

We have presented on this ongoing digital transformation at prior conferences, discussing everything from perfecting cash visibility, re-engineering cash receipts, implementing new controls to protect investments and payments, establishing KPIs to benchmark and measure success, and implementing a data visualization strategy to drive business intelligence and create systems of insight.

This year at AFP 2021, we will talk about the opportunity for a redo of our treasury strategies through what we called a platform utilization study (or PLUS, which sounds more fun). The goal was to determine what we could do better with our technology and our technology partners — and nothing was spared! We focused on the technology itself, its level of modernization, if we met our digital transformation objectives, and if we were set for success for the next five years.

Specific questions related to treasury management strategies included:

• What should we be using a treasury system (TMS) for?
• Were we using our treasury systems and the processes built around them in the best ways since their implementation five years earlier?
• What capabilities in our TMS were we not using — and why were we not using them?
• Did we have the right technology interconnecting our internal systems and external partners (e.g. banks, ERP)?
• Do we have access to enough digital information — and is our tech stack helping us make sense of data to provide sufficient insight?
• Were we adapting to our treasury technology — or was it configured around our needs, as a data-driven treasury operation?
• Did we have the ideal partners in our journey?

All these questions will be answered to make (what we think) is a fascinating use case about making sure you get the most out of your treasury technology and not being afraid to rip things up and improve them in the quest for a more strategic treasury operation.

We hope you will join us in this discussion and ask great questions. It will be nice to see you all!

Don’t miss Bob Stark and David Deranek’s session, Reexamining Your Treasury Management System Through a Platform Utilization Study (PLUS), and check out all the sessions on the AFP 2021 SESSION EXPLORER. Register for the conference HERE.

Click here to go to AFP 2021 Blog.