Corporate treasurers want better cash management systems from their banks

Corporate treasurers and chief financial officers are looking for better cash management services from their banks, as they aim for a real-time view of their transactions and balances across multiple banking relationships.

Cashfac Technologies, an IT company specialising in cash management systems, commissioned East & Partners to survey 364 corporate treasurers and chief financial officers in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, to find out how they manage their cash. The companies in the sample have average revenue of more than US$1.4 billion a year.

Cashfac said there had been a lot of developments in cash management systems in recent years, allowing corporate treasuries to better support strategic decision-making.

However, in many cases poor implementation meant that systems had not delivered the anticipated results.

The big issue for many of the companies surveyed was that they could not integrate their bank accounts to get access to a consolidated real-time view of their transactions and balances.

Almost two-thirds of the companies said they were unable to achieve a "single dashboard" showing their transactions and balances in real time.

These companies have an average of 4.7 banking relationships. Treasurers reported that there were "major shortcomings" in linking accounts.

Twenty-three per cent said they had to rely on "patchy work-around solutions" to link accounts and these often required intervention that undermined their confidence in the data.

Treasurers said many of the cash visibility solutions offered by banks were inadequate and costly.

Overall, corporate treasurers rated their multi-bank solutions "moderately successful" in fulfilling their expectations.