Recently I saw two job postings on Linkedin, I saw both on the same day which is probably why I noticed the subject matter of this post. There is something very surprising in these postings, if not bothersome. Here are some of the typical needs that you may expect and see
Prior Experience, Forecasting, Daily Positioning, Bank relationship management capabilities, Certification etc..
Now, here is the other set of requirements for a Treasury Analyst that I will discuss today which are also very common to most postings out there.
Proficient in advanced Excel or MS Access and SQL
or in some others
Must have experience with Sungard products or Oracle suite of Treasury Management Products or another vendors products. Some even go to the extent of saying that the Treasury Analyst should have worked on one of these systems for more than 2 years.
If you get a chance, please go through some of the job postings out there in the Treasury Management space. There is a good chance that you will be surprised as well.
From what I understand of business software applications (treasury management systems or treasury workstations included), the primary goal is to help the business function; whatever that function may be. Help via automation, faster processing, elimination of errors, repeatability among other but primarily - Efficiency. On a side note, I still remember (I can almost hear him even now!) an old teacher of mine yelling "Efficiency, Efficiency" on the top of his lungs explaining applied sciences and engineering.
There surely has to be something wrong with the job postings mentioned above. After all, you can't expect to add another totally different and unrelated skill set set to a cash analyst's resume and then hope that it will help with efficiency of the core skill set.
If you look carefully, you would realize that there is one of the two possibilities for the job postings mentioned above. What is even more interesting is that these two possibilities are interconnected.
Let us take the need for specific software product experience for a cash analyst first. The very reason that a specific product has to be mentioned in a job posting for a user of the system indicates that there is a learning curve involved. Users of the system have to spend considerable amount of time understanding and learning the product before they can be functional users of the product. Hence the need for specific experience; after all we all want to hit the ground running.
Now the first point. If someone is interested in expertise in MS Excel, Access and SQL it is unlikely that the organization has a treasury management system. They are making do with something less, something which was never meant to be a treasury management system. Why? Here again, chances are that these organizations realize that making do with something lesser but something much more common like MS Excel is better than hunting for users with expertise in a specific vendor's product.
Going back to my applied science and engineering reference earlier, the very point of using software is to make a business function easier, better, faster. It is to improve efficiency. Unfortunately, a lot of the products out there have missed the point.
Our group of engineers here at the Treasury Sciences are trying not to make these mistakes by providing better usability, better and faster training via product videos and making the adoption process smoother. In fact, our most important selling point or differentiator is that we can get your organization and users up and running on a enterprise class Treasury Management System faster than anyone else.
Our hope is that there will never be a job posting that says "Need cash analyst with 2 years of experience with Treasury Sciences products".
Thank you, feel free to email any comments to sujith@treasurysciences.com.