SWIFT

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.

Treasury Sciences -SWIFT Connectivity

Sujith Nair — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:18:51 GMT

This post provides an overview of our support for SWIFT. You may know already that we support the MT and ISO 20022 payment formats for payments, transfers, credit notices etc and SWIFT 940/942 for current and prior day reporting. In addition to that, if you utilize the SWIFT network you could use one channel to communicate with all the banks- this is especially true if you need connectivity to multiple (say more than 8 or 10) of banking institutions.

The key benefit here is that you can utilize our cash management, payments system and integration capabilities - the ability to configure your own payment controls, approvals workflow, forecasting from internal systems and positioning and the ability to push data through (STP) to backend GL Systems along with the ability to utilize SWIFT Network for all bank and financial institution connectivity.

Do note that since we have in-built support for SWIFT payment formats, all you will need to utilize SWIFT is for the SWIFT network. If you would like to know more, please send me a note.

Cash Position, Multi bank payments, Payment workflow implementation, Treasury Management , Treasury Management System , Treasury Reporting

Payments, Positioning & Integration for Hedge Funds - Overview

Sujith Nair — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 06:07:41 GMT

The last 2 posts detailed out various aspects of our implementation for a large hedge fund. Todays post or picture provides an overview of the complete implementation - this picture is an early version of the picture that will appear in a case study of our payments and cash management system implementation for hedge funds. Will post a link to it when available. Meanwhile, here is the overview.

Automated Accounting Treatment, Cash Position, GL Integration, Hedge Fund Treasury, Hedge Fund Treasury Worstation, Multi bank payments, Netted Payments, Payment workflow implementation, Reporting, Straight Through Processing, Treasury Management , Treasury Reporting, Treasury Workstation, Treasury Workstation Reporting

Netted Payments from Sungard VPM - Credit Notices, Transfers and Wires - Hedge Fund Implementation

Sujith Nair — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 06:59:49 GMT

In a previous post, I had described some of the challenges and implementation details of a recent payments system implementation for a hedge fund customer. You can read that post here.

This post further details the integration of our payments module (TS EFT) with Sungard's Virtual Portfolio Manager (VPM), subsequent details of netting and eventual transmission of payments, credit notices and transfers to the banks. The picture below provides an overview of the integrated system, details follow.

Sungard VPM Integration: Scheduled exports from Sungard VPM are created and uploaded to folder from which the TS scheduler pulls the data into the TS EFT module. The file imported has a list of transactions and each transaction has a unique transaction identifier and a field that indicates whether the transaction is a new one, an update or a delete request from VPM. Note that transactions from VPM can only be updated or deleted ONLY if the VPM transaction is not part of a netted EFT transaction already. If not, the EFT has to be rejected and only then will the transaction be updated or deleted.

Transaction Manager & Netting Capabilities: The EFT transaction manager lists all imported transactions and allows users to select transactions to net based on rules that can be defined per combination of fields - for example, only certain transactions maybe netted together based on multiple configurable fields (say the clearing broker and currency) from the VPM import file. As the transaction manager is completely XML driven; the product can easily be configured to support other portfolio management systems such as Advent Geneva. It can even be configured to integrate with in-house portfolio solutions.

Template Mapping: TS EFT supports creation and use of templates for all payment transaction types - note that these are templates that are independent of the banks themselves. The transaction manager also allows to map templates to end user selected mapping criteria based on data in the VPM input file. Here again, you could create and map templates - one per clearing broker and currency thereby requiring the user who nets the transactions to create the EFT to enter minimal information on EFT origination.

Payment Types: For this customer deployment, their custodial accounts are at BONY and CSFB has their prime broker accounts. Cash positioning for the custodial accounts held at BONY is done via TS CMO module and hence the need for forecasting for BONY accounts. Based, on the mapped templates or banks and accounts selected on free form transactions, the system presents the appropriate forms. The payment type selection criteria and associated transaction types for payments, notices and forecasts is described in the picture below.

A note about SWIFT for transmission: Our customer choose to utilize SWIFT for transmission to the banks (CSFB only, we communicate directly with BONY). It should be noted that if the payment bank supports secure transmission via FTP and since Treasury Sciences EFT supports standard formats such as ISO 20022 and SWIFT MT files, you do not need to use SWIFT only for transmission- it may not be cost effective.

I will describe some of these features using screenshots from the application in a later post. Thank you for reading.

Hedge Fund Treasury, Multi bank payments, Netted Payments