Sibos: The Challenge of Instant Treasury

Corporate treasury expectations for on-demand financial information are yet to be addressed. The difficulty of gathering data from disparate systems should not be underestimated.

One key topic at last week’s Sibos conference in Toronto was the concept of ‘instant treasury’. Discussions centered on the main challenges to delivering on-demand information to corporate customers as well as the extent to which high inflation has raised the stakes for instant access to balance information. A significant point is the importance corporates place on knowing where their liquidity is at all times.

Before the development of instant payments, end-of-day knowledge was sufficient and the means of delivery understood: an end-of-day statement, possibly supplemented by intra-day, short-term forecasts and funding tools such as overdrafts, treasury bills and short-term loans.

To make instant liquidity decisions, banks require their technology partners to deliver information instantly using APIs.”

— Bob Stark, Kyriba

The rise of instant payments and supporting initiatives such as Swift GPI means knowledge is becoming more real-time thanks to open APIs, but the mechanism for delivering instant financing to corporates so that they can optimize liquidity on demand does not yet exist.