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Corporations are finding better ways to work with their bank and trading partners by improving transparency to the financial supply chain and streamlining messaging and communications, says SunGard.

“Corporations are discovering new ways to harness technology to increase their visibility to cash and to better manage the risks that have become more prevalent, such as FX, credit, interest rate and commodity risk," says Paul Bramwell, senior vice president, treasury solutions of SunGard’s corporate liquidity business.

Bramwell adds that corporations are also increasing deployment of treasury technology in private cloud environments, helping them realise greater efficiencies and reduce IT costs.

SunGard has identified ten trends that are influencing how corporate CFO’s, treasurers and other finance executives operate their treasury departments and manage liquidity. These trends are:
 
1. Corporations are striving to attain a holistic view of risk and are increasingly modeling multiple risk types such as FX, credit, market, interest rate and commodity.
2. There is a greater adoption of payment networks and exchanges.
3. Treasurers are looking to improve working capital through improved credit risk analysis and collections automation strategies, resulting in reduced borrowing margins.
4. Corporations are looking to streamline and consolidate their payment flows.
5. There will be a continued movement towards outsourcing transactional treasury functions.
6. More corporations are turning to consolidated technology hubs for multi-bank connectivity, including embedded services such as eBAM and managed connectivity to the SWIFT network.
7. An increasing number of corporations, particularly those in Asia, the Middle East and South Africa, are centralizing their treasury operations for increased transparency and efficiency.
8. Corporations are becoming more educated about cloud services and security and are increasingly choosing to deploy their treasury technology in private cloud hosted environments.
9. Treasurers are increasingly seeking up-to date, enterprise-wide views of FX and interest rate risk positions with real time debt & investment reporting.
10. Corporations continue to review financial messaging standards, such as ISO 20022, CGI and SWIFT’s 3SKey, as well as prepare for SEPA compliance.

Nancy Atkinson, senior analyst, Aite Group, notes there are transformations taking place in treasury technology across the globe.  This spans a wide spectrum from dropping spreadsheets in favor of adopting centralized treasury technology; to streamlining corporate-to-bank connectivity, which may include managed SWIFT connectivity and eBAM; to working across technology platforms to attain a holistic view of risk. 

"In addition, we are seeing more treasury technology deployments in hosted private cloud environments, which helps remove the weight of IT maintenance from the treasurer’s shoulders and allows for more focus on liquidity management,” says Atkinson.

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