Best treasury and cash management providers 2024: systems and services

Treasury keeps pace with the dynamic payments environment.

As the dynamic payments landscape presents both challenges and opportunities for corporate treasury, it is not surprising that financial institutions are finding new ways to help treasurers leverage new payments trends to improve efficiency, manage risk and support business growth.

Banking circle is the winner of our Best Embedded Treasury Solution award, which provides the core financial infrastructure that allows companies to build and deliver embedded financial solutions. Built-in financial features include global payments, virtual accounts (VAs), and account management.

Noordea, which wins two awards this year, both as Best Fraud Detection Solution and Best Bank for Treasury FX Services, has developed a new secure Cash Management self-service request. Meanwhile, Nordea’s foreign exchange (FX) automation has evolved into a “comprehensive treasury management autopilot” that includes daily foreign exchange, currency hedging and money market products, the bank said.

Improving the treasury with technology

Customizing treasury management tools requires an agile approach, due to the diversity of customer needs. Rear base is once again winner of two awards, as Best Non-Bank for Treasury FX Services and for Best A/P & A/R Integrated Solution. Jarno van Hurne, Head of Business Banking and VP Product, says investment banks and their relationship managers face unique challenges when it comes to modernizing customer experiences. “This is due to the extremely diverse and complex needs of their customer base, often ranging from sole traders to large corporate customers,” he says. “Backbase’s ‘buy for speed and build for differentiation’ approach offers a unique way to effectively meet the needs of all these segments, without having to build different applications from scratch or settle for one -size-fits-all, stand-alone point solutions.”

With more than 400 ready-to-use, buildable business capabilities and digital journeys, including accounts payable (A/P) and accounts receivable (A/R), banks can quickly create customized, segment-specific applications and services for their customers and employees creating: from onboarding to creation, service and investing. “The fact that these capabilities are not only fully extensible, but also reusable across channels and apps, means financial institutions can enter the market more quickly; ensuring a consistent, high-quality experience; and focus their development efforts on innovation rather than basic plumbing,” Van Hurne explains.

In January, JPMorgan Chase, our winner as Outstanding Web and Merchant Acquirer – Bank, has unveiled a full-stack omnichannel platform, including online and in-store payments. It also includes biometric phone-free payments.

Although not a traditional merchant, Stripe is our Outstanding Web and Merchant Acquirer – Non-Bank, as a payment service provider that simplifies the payment process for businesses by combining the roles of payment processor and acquirer into a single service and offering businesses a range of tools and services to accept online payments seamlessly.

Herve Carrere, Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Treasury and Capital Markets Business Unit at the winner of the Best Cloud Managed TCM Services Award Finastrasays: “In combination with the cloud and an API [application programming interface] Marketplace can significantly transform treasury services by providing a unified solution for all treasury functions, leveraging cloud computing power with API access to various data sources. Customers can enable advanced analytics and insights, improving decision-making and strategic planning. This model allows treasurers to become much more agile, quickly adopt new technologies and services and continuously innovate to meet changing market demands.” This combination, he adds, offers significant benefits by increasing efficiency and operational resilience.

The award for best Treasury Management Software goes to ION Treasury Wallstreet suite, the result of an ambitious program involving more than 100 people over five years, redesigning Wallstreet Suite. Building on ION’s treasury management system’s long-standing strengths in trading, risk and accounting, it now includes an open and modular architecture based on real-time web dashboards and a 360° payment hub with high-volume capabilities. It has a robust back office and offers treasury analytics with real-time key performance indicators, a modern and intuitive user experience, process automation and exception-based management.

Affordable, another double winner, wins both Best Cash Forecasting Solution and Best Treasury Analytics Provider. Payable has built an intuitive API and dashboard with a reconciliation engine powered by artificial intelligence (AI), and with payment automation and cash management modules that seamlessly connect customers’ financial stack (including payment service providers, business tools and banks) with leading accounting and payment management systems. platforms for enterprise resource planning without technical effort.

fantastic wins for best virtual account solution for businesses. VAs help streamline the payment process and improve cash flow management; and Anand Sampath, FAB Managing Director, Head – Global Payments & Collections, says VAs provide businesses with an efficient and cost-effective way to manage and concentrate cash. “All transaction flows routed through VAs are immediately reflected in the underlying physical master account, providing, for example, immediate visibility of cash and (in terms of collections) easy identification of payers who have transacted funds in their favor.”

“Corporate treasurers,” Sampath adds, “can also see high efficiencies in implementing VA structures, in terms of rationalizing the accounts managed with their banking providers. For certain use cases, VAs enable the simple separation of funds settled by different counterparties or clients, allowing firms to determine the total amounts received from institutional clients over a period of time.

VAs help reduce (and ultimately eliminate) several costs associated with managing multiple physical accounts, he says. “This includes the costs of maintaining balances, managing multiple access rights to monitor cash balances and the administrative costs associated with periodic due diligence activities. In addition, payment processing can be controlled at the VA level by setting spending limits for certain periods, even if cash is available at sub-entity levels.”

ICD takes home the award for best investment management solution. This institutional investment technology provider serves more than 500 treasuries (including approximately 17% of the S&P 100, as of December 31, 2023) in 65 industries and 46 countries, trading money market funds and other short-term investments. ICD has launched an AI portfolio analytics solution for corporate treasury investment reporting.

Treasury is not immune to the transformative capabilities of AI FIS Global wins the award for most innovative treasury solution with its Integrity SaaS solution. This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system will be one of the first enterprise-focused treasury technologies to embed generative AI (GenAI). “There are numerous GenAI capabilities for treasury, applicable to every area of ​​treasury operations: from the automation of cash base positioning to improved decision making in complex areas such as currency and interest rate risk management,” said Steve Wiley , vice president of Treasury Solutions at FIS. “The Treasury, like many other industries, is in the midst of an AI revolution, one that will radically transform the way treasury operations work.”

To meet the challenges of a growing number of payment types and file formats, Fides Treasury Services, winner of the Best Cross-Border Payment Solution for Business award, maintains a payments library consisting of thousands of unique payment formats to help streamline transactions for even the smallest banks. More than 4,000 companies are connected to more than 13,000 banks worldwide through the Fides platform, which processes more than $6 trillion annually. Whether payment files, currency confirmations or trade finance messages, Fides guarantees compatibility with any bank’s file formats or local attribute requirements.

Standard chartered adopts Best Open Banking Treasury Solution. Through a VA solution, client PingPong has seen tangible and quantifiable results such as accelerated market entry, faster collections, revenue growth, cost reduction and an overall improved customer experience.

“As companies transform their business models into platforms to meet consumer demands and supply chains, open banking is revolutionizing the financial landscape by driving digital product innovation, facilitating collaboration and healthy competition among ecosystem partners, and providing enhanced customer experiences,” said Mahesh Kini, Global Head of Cash Management at Standard Chartered. “By securely sharing information between different platform participants, it offers consumers access to a broader range of services and provides companies with data-driven insights and new opportunities.”

The cloud, open banking, APIs and AI are all working together to transform corporate treasury into a more data-driven, automated and strategic function within businesses, while simultaneously changing the way financial services are delivered and consumed.