Treasury Management System Blog - Sujith Nair

Payment Approval Workflows & Controls

Sujith Nair — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:17:14 GMT

Treasury Sciences EFT is a web-based multi-bank payment origination system. It allows for custom payment workflows and controls, ability to set per-transactions and cumulative limits at multiple levels, allows free-form and bank independent template based and netted payment originations and supports ISO 20022, SWIFT MT and even custom bank formats for payment transmission to banks. The key differentiator between TS EFT and other systems (bank provided and otherwise) is that most if not all payment approvals processes and controls that are needed to meet an organization's specific needs is accomplished in TS EFT via configuration.

This post looks at couple of typical payment origination processes and controls that can be configured within TS EFT. The first scenario shown below is a typical configuration of TS EFT for an organization that utilizes one payment bank and needs free-form, template based and netted originations with dual approval. Note that TS EFT provides payment controls such as the differentiation of payments users from administrative users - ensuring that a user has permissions to originate or approve the creation of a bank account does not have the ability to originate or approve payments and vice versa.

The second scenario described below discusses a more complex configuration of EFT (note that this is still configuration and not custom development or customization of the product) wherein an organization needs 2 different approval processes - a one step approval process for payments originated from pre-approved templates for the treasury organization (typically for net-funding or concentration wires) and a dual-approval process for all payments from subsidiaries. Also note the connectivity to multiple payment banks as well.

Configuring Centralized & Decentralized Cash Management in TS CMO - Part 4

Sujith Nair — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 21:08:05 GMT

This is the last in the series of posts that describes the ability of TS CMO to support multiple centralized and decentralized cash management and positioning needs of enterprise organizations. Today we will look at how TS CMO can be configured for a case of completely decentralized cash management. (Please read the first post the describes a centralized scenario as well as the second post on a decentralized cash management scenario and a third post on another decentralized treasury scenario)

Decentralized Cash Management - Consider an European corporation with operations in Europe, North America and in ASIA with each subsidiary managing their cash and investments respectively)

The scenario described above can be configured in TS CMO by creating the specific treasury operational entities needed viz. Europe, Asia, US and Canada and by assigning the respective users, user groups and accounts or account groups to it. Another treasury operational entity called "Enterprise" is created for management that needs visibility across all entities. A depiction of the the configuration is shown below.

To summarize this series of posts

Treasury Sciences CMO provides the ability for end users to configure the system based on their specific treasury operational needs- be it centralized, decentralized or a mix of centralized in certain areas and decentralized in others. It also provides the ability to adapt to changes in your organization, be it the acquisition of a subsidiary that you choose to run autonomously or consolidation of cash and investment management across subsidiaries.

Configuring Centralized & Decentralized Cash Management in TS CMO - Part 3

Sujith Nair — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:45:23 GMT

This post continues the series of posts that describes the ability of TS CMO to support multiple centralized and decentralized cash management and positioning needs of enterprise organizations. Today we will look at how TS CMO can be configured for a case of decentralized cash management that is even more complex. (Please read the first post the describes a centralized scenario as well as the second post on a decentralized cash management scenario)

Decentralized Cash Management - Consider an European corporation with operations in Europe, North America and in ASIA, the European organization managing the treasury (cash and investments) for Europe and Asia while the US subsidiary manages cash and investments for North America (US and Canada)

Note that the above scenario is an example of a de-centralized scenario for the enterprise with centralized cash management across subsidiaries in specific regions. This scenario is described in a a bit more detail below that highlights the need, the various file types and connectivity involved as well as the need to support multiple backend GL systems. You can read more about the GL integration capabilities of TS CMO here and here.

To accommodate this need 2 Treasury Operations Entities are configured in TS CMO- "North America" and "Europe & Asia" and respective users or roles and accounts or account groups are assigned. US users are assigned the "North America" Treasury Operation Entity or Tag and European users are assigned the "Europe & Asia"tag. Now users in the respective organizations can perform their day to day forecasting, reconciliation, positioning, reporting and other functions w.r.t the specific set of accounts. As noted previously, not all accounts need to be used position and they can be classified as such.

A third Treasury Operational Entity called Enterprise is created with access to all accounts and is assigned to a specific set of senior management users who need access to data across the enterprise- Note that users using this entity will use it for view only access as the cash management functions are performed within the "North America" or "Europe & Asia" entities created earlier. This configuration is described below.

Configuring Centralized & Decentralized Cash Management in TS CMO - Part 2

Sujith Nair — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 21:40:44 GMT

Todays post continues that series of posts that describes the ability of TS CMO to support multiple centralized and decentralized cash management and positioning needs of enterprise organizations. Today we will look at a case of decentralized cash management. (Please read the first post the describes a centralized scenario as well)

Decentralized Cash Management - Consider an organization head quartered in the US with operations in US and Canada, the US organization managing the treasury (cash and investments) for the US and the Canadian subsidiary managing their cash.

A decentralized cash management scenario is described below - the organization receives BAI files from banks and proprietary investment updates in the US and Bank proprietary files for cash and investments in canada. Cash management and Investments are decentralized and taken care of by treasury users in respective locations. Also note that two backend GL systems that TS CMO synchronizes with are part of this setup as well. You can read more about the GL integration capabilities of TS CMO here and here.

To accommodate this need 2 Treasury Operations Entities are configured - Canada and US and respective users or roles and accounts or account groups are assigned. Now users in the respective organizations can perform their day to day forecasting, reconciliation, positioning, reporting and other functions w.r.t the specific set of accounts. As noted previously, not all accounts need to be used position and they can be classified as such.

A third Treasury Operational Entity called North America is created with access to all accounts and is assigned to a specific set of senior management users who would need access to data across the enterprise- Note that users using this entity will use it for view only access as the cash management functions are performed within the US or Canada entities created earlier. This configuration is described below.

It is important to note here that we went from centralized positioning (described in the previous post) to decentralized positioning purely via end user configuration. It is also important to note that in the event that a new user or set of users need to perform a cash management function, all an administrator has to do is to assign that user or the role of the user to the appropriate tag using a web browser.
We will look at the same feature set in even more complex scenarios in the next couple posts. Thank you for reading.

Configuring Centralized & Decentralized Cash Management in TS CMO - Part I

Sujith Nair — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:47:56 GMT

Over the next 4 posts, I will describe the ability of TS CMO to support multiple centralized and decentralized cash management and positioning needs of enterprise organizations. To start, we will look at less complex scenarios and move towards the more complex models.

Centralized Cash Management - Consider an organization head quartered in the US with operations in US and Canada, the US organization managing the treasury (cash and investments) for the entire enterprise.

The centralized cash management scenario is described below - the organization receives BAI files from banks in US and Bank proprietary files for cash and investments in canada and investments in the US, it has one backend GL system that TS CMO synchronizes with. You can read more about the GL integration capabilities of TS CMO here and here.

TS CMO allows for the configuration of this model via the creation of cash operations entities or tags. In this case, since all cash management is done by the central US organization one cash operations entity (tag) called North America is created by the end user. All bank and investment accounts across the enterprise (US and Canada) that are used for cash management purposes (note that accounts can be marked as not used for cash management as well, useful when concentration accounts are used for positioning) assigned this tag. Appropriate users or roles (groups of users) from US treasury organization are assigned this tag as well ensuring that they can position for US and Canada.

Once a US treasury user logs, he or she will be able to position both in USD and CAD for the enterprise without any custom development effort. Exports to the backend GL system can be automated . In the above example the only transformations needed are to transform the proprietary bank and investment formats into TS XML format and transformation of the TS XML GL export to Oracle GL Specific format. Note that these transformations are fairly quick and either the TS managed services team or your internal IT team could do that.

In the next post, we will look at a decentralized cash management scenario.