As part of what I do at Treasury Sciences, I interact with multiple treasury professionals on a regular basis- at conferences, at our speaking engagements of course potential customers. Most of the time, the conversation revolves around the current issues they are facing with TMS. What I also realized over the last year or so is that there is quite a bit of misinformation regarding Treasury Management Systems- mostly in the area of how technology addresses a certain business need. I will try to address some of these in this blog post.
1. Hosted Treasury Management Systems are not Configurable
This statement is true for a large number of hosted software products or SaaS products out there. Hence the implication that since this is true for many software products, it must also be true for a hosted or SaaS Treasury Management System. However, there are some other points to consider when discussing Treasury Management Systems. It is widely understood, that even though the core treasury management needs are the same, organizations differ in how each of their treasury management processes are implemented. Best practices in Treasury Management could also vary from organization to organization based on the organizations industry and many other factors. Hence, configurability is an absolute need for Treasury Workstations or larger Treasury Management Systems.
Most Treasury Management System Vendors understand this, I know that we do because we have spent countless hours making our suite of Treasury Management Products configurable, in most scenarios- end user configurable. Now, if our products are configurable does that mean that there is a catch? Well, the answer to that is that it does not matter whether a vendor (us included) calls it SaaS or hosted or internet based or whatever. Ignoring these larger classifications for a bit, let us look at what a TMS should provide such that it provides most value to customers.
Treasury Management Systems are best hosted at an external data center as this considerably reduces overall costs and hassles and considerably reduces or eliminates internal IT costs, the TMS needs to be configurable as business needs differ and access to TMS is best delivered via a web browser over the internet, as this reduces unwanted access constraints and improves maintainability - downloaded software is a pain to manage and maintain from a users perspective and to support from a vendors perspective.
If the product you are considering does all of the above well, trust me you can ignore the buzz words and marketing speak which all vendors provide (including us).
2. Try before you buy can lead to Sunk Costs & Unintentional Decision Making.
This is something we started hearing lately- that a Free Trial of a Treasury Management System leads to sunk costs and unintentional decision making - i.e a potential customer utilizing a Free trial to evaluate TMS will loose investment and unknowingly choose a product. As much funny and completely irrational as that sounds, this is a concern out there regarding Free Trials.
The premise of a Free Trial is that a customer uses a product before making a choice, that the product will be configurable fairly quickly (without years of technology consultants burning through your budget) and extremely user friendly ensuring that it takes as less as 1-2 days to get started. Of course, it is Free- so customers do not have to pay the vendor for a Free Trial.
Please note that there are not many vendors out there that provide free trials, this is because you need a well designed configurable product to give out a Free Trial. However almost every software vendor that is a leader in their respective segment provides a Free Trial. The model of a Free Trial has been tried and tested multiple times over in multiple industry segments, some of which are far more complicated when compared to Treasury Workstation functionality. Now, what is ironical here is that the very people who complain about "Sunk Costs" of a Free Trial are the same ones that spend months on an RFI followed by months on an RFP trying to figure out what is out there- without ever using a product.
Hopefully that addresses the "sunk costs" part of misinformation. Now, for the "Unintentional Decision Making" part- honestly, I don't know what to say but for this that I do not expect any of my customers to choose anything unintentionally, more so a Treasury Management System. We are not talking about 5th graders here, we are talking about a group of Treasury Professionals selecting a Treasury Management System. This is not Free Candy! A Free Trial of a TMS is meant for serious people making informed decisions.
3. Internet Based Treasury Management Systems are not secure.
We need to move on from here- yes, I have heard this from multiple CIOs in the late 90's through early 2000's. But now? There are secure mechanisms of delivery over the internet and multiple mission critical systems that use the internet to deliver secure data.
Would love to hear your thoughts, any experiences that you may have had in this regard.