Treasury Management Playbook Dials Up New Cash Flow Strategies

At a time of higher interest rates and heightened market volatility, actionable insights and forecasting take on greater importance for corporate treasury teams. For example, better cash flow prediction can allow treasurers to manage liquidity more tightly, minimizing financing costs. However, the wealth of data now available to large companies does not automatically transform into high-quality forecasting.

Treasury teams require an up-to-date and flexible technology strategy to leverage their data to full effect. This includes cloud-based data management and data visualization tools, all implemented with a security-first approach that aligns with the technology policies of the organization as a whole.

These are just a few of the insights explored in “The Treasury Management Playbook: Technology Strategies and Best Practices,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi collaboration. This report examines the challenges treasurers face in today’s increasingly complex financial and regulatory landscape. It details best practices for their data and technology strategies.

Today’s treasury teams face challenges that evolve more rapidly than at any time in recent history.

For example, regulatory compliance has become a vastly more difficult challenge for large companies. This is especially true for those doing business internationally since each market has its own legal requirements and rules.

Other issues include elevated volatility in cost drivers, accelerating technology shifts and cybersecurity risks that require a security-first approach to new solutions.

Treasury teams can achieve significant improvements with relatively simple initial upgrades.

Impactful upgrades do not always require massive investments or bottom-up changes to the technology stack. Treasury teams that may be behind the curve today can enjoy significant improvements by implementing several relatively low-cost, low-effort upgrades. These include automatic daily reconciliation across all bank accounts and data visualization tools that leverage existing treasury and company-wide datasets.

A best-in-class data and technology strategy includes both technology and policy components.

The gold standard integrates organization-wide data management, analytics and security built on cloud-based systems. Using a centralized data warehouse with standardized formats is a key component. This ensures that historical data can be accessed for liquidity and cash flow analysis and used to train predictive models.

The right data and technology strategy will pay dividends for treasury teams. Download the report to learn more about data management best practices for treasury teams.