All you need is a browser. Selkirk Technologies Inc. says it will introduce a browser-based treasury management system, Treasura, this fall that will allow any employee anywhere in the world to access it with only the help of a browser. "This is the next-generation technology," says Tom Morrison, vice president of products at Vancouver-based Selkirk. "It enables treasurers and treasury managers who are traveling to get into the system and authorize payments or get their daily reports or whatever it is they need, to manage treasury wherever they are. Really, it's about accessibility." Jeanne Capachin, research director for corporate banking at Financial Insights, a Framingham, Mass., technology consulting company, agrees that treasury management systems will move toward the browser-based model and says that other vendors are working on similar systems. "Selkirk is definitely ahead of the pack, but I don't know how far ahead they are," she says. That said, Capachin suspects that it could take many years before corporate customers all migrate to this kind of a web-based system, given the money and time they've invested in their current systems. To use Treasura, companies can choose to put the software on their own server or use Treasura on a subscription basis, with the software residing elsewhere. Morrison claims that Treasura should save companies money. "It's more efficient to maintain and manage, and easier to implement, so implementation costs should be lower," he says. "And [it's] easier to learn, so training costs should be lower."

Unocal Corp., which has been a Selkirk customer since 1999, is one of the companies currently testing Treasura. Dick Walton, an assistant treasurer at Unocal, says the treasury department was looking for a system that's "secure, accessible from anywhere, any time, and is very reliable." He adds that "Treasura is a very robust product, it has lots of capabilities." Unocal runs a centralized treasury, Walton says, and payments are processed centrally, but the authorization for payments comes from controllers and other executives all over the world. "This will enable us, if we so chose, to deploy [Treasura] into these remote locations in a secure way," he says.