Best treasury and cash management providers 2024: North America

Collaborate with banks for expertise and resources to maintain competitive advantage.

Payments innovation creates both opportunities and challenges for US treasurers; and understanding how to optimize liquidity and achieve greater operational efficiency with the ever-evolving transformations in real-time payments, open banking and embedded finance is at the heart of the future of treasury. By partnering with banks, treasurers can gain access to the best tools, expertise and resources needed to stay competitive.

bank of America (BofA) takes home the award as Best Bank for Transaction Banking, serving one in five mid-market companies with revenues of $5 million to $2 billion operating in the US. BofA invests heavily in technology, offering online banking platforms, mobile applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) for seamless cash management and integration with corporate treasury systems. In mid-2023, BofA brought together Global Transaction Services and Enterprise Payments under the umbrella of Global Payments Solutions, to strengthen and focus resources and efforts to improve the payments experience for all customer segments.

Citi is a double winner, as Best Bank for Cash Management and for Best Corporate Cross-Border Payments Solution. Debopama Sen, head of payments at Citi, said at the Citi Services Investor Day in June that the bank has a wide range of products and solutions in four core areas: domestic payments and payment acceptance, cross-border network, clearing and commercial cards. “With this product suite, we are addressing our customers’ most important needs right across the entire payment continuum of accept, hold, pay and finance – from facilitating payroll payments to gig economy payouts, such as pay app developers, to manage receivables from their customers.” She added: “We are very focused on enabling digital commerce.”

BNY, this year’s winner as Best Bank for Payments, has been busy rolling out payment innovations over the past year. A new aggregated payments platform, Vaia, can give U.S. institutions access to the latest digital payments options for payouts. The open banking payment solution BankifySM can help organizations receive consumer payments from bank accounts with a seamless user experience and provide guaranteed funds for business receivables. BNY keeps pace with real-time payments and the demand for faster and more secure payouts. The bank is an active participant in the FedNow instant payment rail. BNY has also formed a strategic alliance with MoCaFi (Mobility Capital Finance), a leading Black-founded and majority Black-led fintech platform, to expand payment options to the unbanked and unbanked in the US.

BMO, our Best Bank for Collections award winner, provides cross-border cash management solutions. These have recently been restructured to own cash management collection solutions in Canada and the US, to ensure better cross-border parity and interoperability of the bank’s products. New products include the next generation of BMO’s remote deposit capture product, DepositEdge, to serve both the US and Canada as a single solution. BMO is also working to enhance AI and machine learning capabilities to support customer reconciliation of payments received and further improve the cross-border customer experience.

Citizens wins as Best Bank for Long Term Liquidity Management. The liquidity management platform, accessLiquidity, provides a comprehensive dashboard view of a customer’s liquidity positions, with detailed information on a broad spectrum of deposits and investments, allowing customers to make well-informed decisions and execute money market transactions at their leisure, without having to deal with a banker consult.

Offering an institutional share class with same-day liquidity to institutions and individuals, Northern capital is our winner as the best provider of short-term investments/money market funds. Through the North Capital Treasury Money Market Fund (NCGXX), it hopes to encourage all types of investors to integrate NCGXX into their liquidity management. Being a government money market fund, it offers great safety. By modernizing infrastructure, banks can seamlessly integrate new technologies, such as real-time payments and open banking APIs, allowing businesses to benefit from faster transactions, better data analytics and improved cash flow management.