Even after a few decades in existence, Treasury Workstations and the more comprehensive Treasury Management Systems (TMS) have still not been widely adopted by corporations and government organizations. On the other hand, many adopted solutions have required organizations to commit significant costs and lengthy deployment cycles on solutions that may not meet some of their significant treasury operational needs. Although vendors have recently introduced new versions of products that attempt to overcome some of barriers to adoption; there continues to be a relatively low adoption of TMS, Note the excerpt below from the Annual AFP Benchmarking Survey conducted last year.
50% of organizations do not use a system! It is important to remember that this is in-spite of many studies and recommendations and proven examples of benefits of utilizing a robust Treasury Management System. What is further more interesting is that even after these many years, there is no Treasury Management System vendor that has achieved a near decent market share.
The above chart reflects that even the most well known vendor (Sungard) has only a market share of 6%. Manual processes and spreadsheets retain almost 50% of the market share among products that are used to manage cash and the only other double digit market share solution is the multitude of treasury functionality offered by banks via their business banking portals.
Spreadsheets provide no historical data storage, very limited to no audit capability and are most prone to user error. Honestly, it is downright embarrassing that established vendors in the Treasury Management System space have not yet been able to provide a viable alternative to potential customers. In the next few posts, we will look at possible reasons as to why it is difficult for customers to cost effectively adopt a TMS and present potential alternatives that may help increase the likelihood of their adopting a product that meets their needs.