Having a clearly communicated strategy is key success factor for any undertaking. For planning the digital aspects of a treasury function, documenting your strategy can also help identify dependencies with other projects and teams in the organisation.

Focus on outcomes

When designing your strategy, start with the business or functional outcomes you’re aiming to achieve. What questions do you need the data to address, and on what frequency or granularity.

To build support from others across the organisation, it helps to consider their perspectives and design outcomes that help achieve their objectives too.

Ignore current technology

Focussing on outcomes rather than current technology solutions can help form an assessment of what gaps are present – think beyond the limitations of your legacy TMS or spreadsheets and build a vision of what you like to see.

This then helps articulate to other teams whose help you will need to implement the strategy.

Stakeholders

It is worth taking a moment to consider the range of stakeholders for your digital treasury strategy:

• CFO – the CFO will be wanting to understand how a digital treasury will benefit him/her. The key deliverables will be reporting, agility, and resilience.
• CIO/CTO – from an IT perspective, making sure your strategy is consistent with other business technology objectives will be key. You will also need to ensure that your preferred treasury approach doesn’t create additional risks from an information security or GDPR perspective.
• Accounts payable – working with AP teams to regularise and simplify the number of payment methods and schedules can bring benefits to both teams – but what else can a digital treasury strategy deliver? Enhanced analytics, to identify trends and failure modes in payment processes is a potential joint win.
• FP&A – consider how your strategy is going to help provide timely and insightful data to support cash analysis and forecasting. What platforms do FP&A use and how can they integrate with your future treasury setup.

Data architecture

Usually best formulated around a whiteboard, the architecture is where you set out an integrated data model for the treasury function. This needs to include consideration of the dimensions and granularity of the data that you need to meet the business outcomes.

As part of the architecture, consider flows of data, to and from systems and teams. Think through which systems are definitive sources of truth for certain data. The TMS might be the definitive record for bank accounts, but where does the information about business units/legal entities come from?

Similarly, bank statement data may feed from bank portals, an API or a SWIFT connection, but where are all the end destinations – and what format does each system or user need it in?

Data governance and hygiene

Data is only of use if it is complete, correct and timely. Establishing processes and owners for maintenance of data will ensure that you can be confident of your data and act upon it.

In some organisations it makes sense to form a data governance committee to ensure that there is cross functional engagement in the process.

As discussed in a separate post, automated daily checks are the best in class method to keep on top of your data.

Revision schedule

Technology moves fast and so does your business. Aim to review or revise your digital strategy at least every six months or so, to ensure it is still fit for purpose. Having this discipline will also allow you to build in learnings as you work through your implementation plan.

Implementation plan

Once you have the overall strategy agreed, it is time to work out how to migrate from the current setup to desired landscape. This is where both the fun and the hard work begins and we’ll pick that up in another post.