At the nucleus of any bank or credit union is the treasury service team. This vital department helps decide where to invest capital, how much to hold in reserve, assess liquidity, and ensures each department has enough cash on hand to service clients account holders. Despite its fundamental importance, treasury professionals are still handcuffed by manual processes and antiquated procedures. Luckily, new automated tools are available to increase profitability and skyrocket productivity. Here’s four reasons your treasury service team should embrace automation.
Reduce repetitive tasks
Automation has taken hold in many treasury functions like forecasting, risk management, and cash visibility. However, many vital activities like accounts payable, accounts receivable, and new account opening are still under the thumb of outdated manual processes. In smaller financial institutions, most treasury activities start with the humble spreadsheet where a team member spends 80% of their time collecting and consolidating data. This only leaves a mere 20% of time for strategic review and analysis. Treasury services spend four times as much time handling data than they do assessing the overall efficiency of their strategy. Automation can help close the productivity gap and free up time to focus on more profit-centric activities. For example, if a team spends multiple days per month sifting through paper checks, they’re unable to tune their focus towards improving the process itself. By automating check processing and verification, teams can use their time to strategize new ways to discourage account holders from using time-consuming systems and encourage them to use more profitable online self-service tools.
Achieve better visualization of owned data
Each day, corporations around the world lose hundreds of thousands of dollars poring over the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data whirring through the air. With more data generated in the last decade than previously existed in the entire history of the human race, businesses have no shortage of data to aggregate and examine. Companies wrack their brains to aggregate and extract strategic insight from massive data dumps. Piling data only highlights the inefficiencies of manual processes within treasury services, so banks are turning to the cloud to find new ways to automate the analysis of available data. In fact, in a recent study, cloud computing topped the list of the most important tech developments for treasuries, with many executives hoping to .
