Analytics: first step to effective treasury STP.

• Author: O'Hanlon, Steve
• Position: Treasury - Straight-through processing

Most corporate financial departments are broken into silos, and many different technologies are required to improve the effectiveness of cash position, manage risk, improve data speed and accuracy and ensure compliance. Institutions need one integrated solution to handle complex instruments/structured products and analytics tools together. In addition to the increasing need for cross-office straight-through processing (STP), achieving competitive gain in today's financial markets is becoming reliant on access to independent price and risk information at high speeds.

Treasury departments have a mix of systems: automated, partly automated and manual processes, all charged with completing a task while complying with corporate governance and regulative reporting. Variation in process execution and technology leaves a company at risk of inaccuracy in procedures and audit controls.

By embedding consistent analytics as the foundation to back-, middle- and front-office activities, the corporate treasurer can eliminate disparate processes and system inaccuracies. Automated access to a quantitative analysis platform from project inception to settlement is a more reliable, secure and profitable approach to transparent procedures and data reporting. More and more, analytics for cross-asset derivatives pricing and risk management are found within best-of-breed treasury solutions.

Because of the need for independent analytics to flexibly create structured products and exotic derivates, advanced analytics are becoming a must-have complement for trading and risk technology systems. As new consolidated technology emerges, market speeds accelerate and financial instruments become more complex, the corporate treasurer will look to gain competitive advantage through technology tools that automate compliance and improve efficiency.

Increased Performance, Profitability

Valuating complex instruments and structured products is time-intensive and, in many cases, a cobbled effort of manual processes and Excel spreadsheets. With a unified full-cycle solution, corporate treasurers can rest easy knowing that external and internal models and methods (fixed income, credit, equity, foreign exchange) are validated in-house to ensure a clean and accurate corporate portfolio. An in-house analytics platform provides the unique flexibility to structure deals from vanilla to the most complex without the burden of hundreds of hours in lost labor and error scans.

Because...