TIP – ADDING ‘FLOW’ TO YOUR TREASURY PROCESSES While we cannot be sure what Treasury will look like 10 years from now, chances are it will look quite different. Due to a push for automation already strongly felt today, Treasurers will increasingly be challenged to accomplish even more with even less. Tasks which lend themselves to automation will eventually be automated to use available resources as efficiently as possible. With speed and automation increasing, safety and compliance take centre stage. To reduce the likelihood of compliance breaches and fraud, responsibilities need to be clearly defined, accountability needs to be established and all tasks performed need to be aligned with internal guidelines and regulations in place. Given these requirements, it is striking that the most common way of initialising many Treasury-processes today is still by submitting ‘electronic paper’ in the form of e-mails or spreadsheets. This also applies to corporates which already use an otherwise sophisticated TMS. But is there an alternative? Yes, there is. Let’s talk workflows A workflow in the context of Corporate Treasury is a series of tasks which needs to be completed to accomplish a specific goal such as the opening of a new bank account, the issuing of a new bank guarantee or the trading of an FX deal. All these processes typically involve more than one system and rely on input from Treasury staff, other departments as well as external parties. Depending on their respective roles, these 32 TREASURY SOLUTIONS 2019 users are responsible for performing different tasks in a certain order to get the job done. What makes a good workflow? A good workflow considers different user roles such as back-, middle- and front office users or shared service centre and subsidiary users. This ensures that each user only has access to the tasks relevant to him – thus preventing errors – and allows for a quick setup of new users by simply assigning them the respective role. Finally, using already established user roles ensures rapid adoption of the workflow. Communication between the systems involved is based on standardised file formats whenever possible. Especially when integrating external parties in the workflow, this is a must to avoid paper-based communication. The benefit: errors resulting from the manual creation and processing of documents are avoided and process costs are reduced. An audit-trail is available, showing the status of every workflow item, the steps still to be completed and all changes made since its’ creation. Since the ‘who did what and when?’ is fully transparent, Treasury can easily provide internal and external auditors alike with comprehensive reports documenting adherence to rules such as the separation of functions and the four-eye-principle. As all required steps are clearly visible for everyone, time-consuming ping-pong between subsidiaries and Group Treasury is avoided. Staff are notified via e-mail whenever a workflow item needs attention and one mouse-click takes them to the relevant workflow step.
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