Question

TMS solutions are meeting the growing demands of the treasury operations department. List the key drivers in Ms. Kuntz’s final selection of a TMS provider for her company. How did the TMS selected meet her company’s needs based on her presentation?

Answer 1

The systems supporting treasury management have evolved significantly over the past 30 years, reflecting the underlying market and regulatory changes that have come to impact the work of the corporate treasurer. This report tracks the primary areas of management concern for today’s corporate treasurer, translating these areas of management into system requirements that a solid TMS system ought to support.

As the scope of treasury management services (TMS) has evolved over the past 30 years, so have the systems that support TMS. Technology has supported the corporate treasurer in the face of market and regulatory change, and in many cases has driven some of the very changes that treasurers have turned to technology to help manage, creating a virtuous circle in the functional development of TMS systems.

The evolution of the financial and capital markets and introduction of greater competition to these markets has been a double-edged sword for today’s treasurers, presenting both greater potential for generating investment returns and greater financial risk that needs to be monitored and managed.

This report provides an overview and history of technology in TMS and examines the role of the corporate treasury group in today’s firms — represented by the seven M’s, or areas of management, in treasury operations. The report then introduces the seven R’s of TMS systems — the seven groups of requirements that drive the TMS systems selection process.

“After years of merger-driven consolidation in the marketplace for TMS systems, things are finally settling down,” says Jim O’Neill, a senior analyst with Celent’s Banking practice and author of the report. “At the same time, corporate treasurers continue to seek TMS solutions that allow them to work efficiently in their daily treasury operations and provide them with flexibility and agility in managing the ever-changing world of the capital markets, all while offering a reasonable point of entry in terms of pricing of the TMS solution.”

Future reports will begin to examine the vendor landscape to determine who the leading TMS system players are — both on the bank side and the vendor side — and to assess how these players perform in meeting the needs of their corporate clients.