We live in what may be the most complex corporate treasury management environment in recent memory. Interest rates are rising globally at unprecedented rates. In the US alone, the federal funds rate has whipsawed, in just a few months, from all-time lows to levels last seen before the 2008 global financial crisis.
The resulting rise in the value of the US dollar—for the first time in twenty years, the dollar is worth more than the Euro—has upended traditional wisdom in foreign exchange. At the same time, steep rises in inflation are eating away at the value of deposits, forcing treasurers to chase yield in a market in which capital constraints persist, and traditional asset allocation strategies appear to be competing to reach new performance lows.
In this turbulent context, effective cash and liquidity management—consistently one of the top three treasury concerns, according to the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP)—is now far and away the number one priority for corporate treasurers.
It is also an essential service treasurers require from their banks. Unfortunately, as the complexity of treasury demands increase, financial institutions are falling further behind in their quest to provide their customers with the tools they need to optimize their cash and liquidity operations.
Volante, TreasuryPay and IBM have been hard at work to address this gap. We’re delighted to announce that we are bringing to market a new ecosystem of connected, intelligent solutions that allow financial institutions to provide real-time insight and automation to their corporate customers, a significant improvement over legacy cash and liquidity management solutions in today’s data-driven economy.
The first-of-its-kind partnership brings together three best-of-breed solutions from acknowledged category leaders. TreasuryPay’s cash and liquidity solutions provide corporate treasurers with a scalable AI-powered intelligence-as-a-service model, incorporating advanced real-time analytics. Volante provides low-code, ISO 20022-native, real-time financial message transformation and integration solutions, on or off the cloud, to simplify and accelerate corporate-to-bank integration and onboarding. And IBM and the IBM Payment Center bring world-class strategy and consulting services to ensure that both corporate customers and their banking providers can make the most of the new capabilities on offer.
These new capabilities are both broad and deep. Treasurers within financial institutions will benefit from payment detail mapping and advanced analytics that provide real-time insights, alerts, and automation. They will enjoy a next-level user experience, personalized by role and function, that will increase efficiency and reduce costly errors throughout the payments process. The always-on digitally connected solution also improves operational control, reduces labor, increases resiliency, and delivers a new era of intelligent financial automation.
Ultimately, this will enable financial institutions to break down the myriad complex silos of banking and payment information typical of legacy solutions, providing their customers with deep insight and control over their cash and liquidity management processes—and an essential leg up in a complex and unpredictable world.
