Maddox is hardly alone in his frustration. Treasury professionals frequently can be heard bemoaning the loss of precious dial-up connections with their various banks around which automated solutions were constructed. "The web is the future, but we're not there yet," says David Sum, director of product management for Thomson/Selkirk. "If a company has three major banks, they're probably going in three different directions. Treasurers don't want to have to get their banking information piecemeal."

But Jim, there may be a way that you can cure your headaches–and not with an aspirin.

Over the last year, a new technology called Web or HTML scripting had a somewhat rocky launch. Web scripting visits multiple bank Web sites in all their various formats and configurations and automatically downloads information into the company's treasury system. While a few treasuries are using the tool, it remains still relatively unknown. The software interacts with coding behind the image on a Web page and is considerably more durable than a technology called screen scraping, which essentially captures the image on the screen but can be easily foiled by a pop-up or even a modest change of field name, location or graphics.

The most recent entrant is software developed by BancBridge Software Systems Inc., based in Westlake Village, Calif. Dubbed TreasuryAgent, the software is used by as many as 200 treasuries daily, although probably none would recognize the name of either the company or software. That's because BancBridge founder Don Craddick decided to sell through banks and workstations and not directly to corporate treasuries, a strategy made more plausible by the relatively low price of the software–Craddick says about $200 per customer. "It's a lot more efficient to sell 1,000 copies to one bank than one copy each to 1,000 treasurers," he observes.

The invention has also caught the attention of treasury workstation providers, and two of the largest have actually incorporated TreasuryAgent in systems they are testing with a few clients. Craddick cannot identify them because of nondisclosure agreements but Thomson/Selkirk acknowledged that it has been talking to BancBridge and has clients using the technology. "Workstations have the analytic tools, but getting the data is a pain in the butt for them," Craddick observes. "We can make that pretty painless."

But finding customers isn't Craddick's only challenge: He and BancBridge are in court fighting a claim by AcuPrint Technology Inc. in San Diego that it owns the technology. For that reason, one major cash management bank, which has bought the technology and disseminated it to its clients, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Craddick was not the first to offer the technology, and while some workstation providers are just looking into it, Gateway Systems Inc. has offered a Web-scripting feature called Automated Web Scripting (AWS) on its workstations for the past year. "We can go out and communicate with any bank Web site, download files or reports in any standard format, and we can do it unattended," explains Orazio Pater, president of Barrington, Ill.-based Gateway. "It's two-way communication; treasuries can send wire instructions, ACH files or positive pay files."

AWS has not been widely publicized, Pater concedes. "Our competitors are still saying it's impossible to do what we have been doing for the past year," he claims. "It's a good tool. There have been a few problems but not many. Banks are pushing customers to interface with their Web platform, and this tool lets them do it in a pretty straightforward way."

Privately held Healthcare Business Credit Corp. (HBCC), an asset-based lender in Mount Laurel, N.J., has been using a home-grown treasury workstation with a pre-AWS Gateway product since 2001 to handle communications with its 30 banks about its 400 accounts, reports treasurer Lilian Burke.

When Gateway announced its AWS module, it was good news for Burke. Web scripting would automatically go to multiple bank Web sites in the early morning hours, find the information HBCC wanted, download it in appropriate formats and load it into the company's workstation. By the time treasury analysts arrived for work, all the balance information would have been retrieved and the cash position would be clear. "So far, it's working beautifully," she attests. "It requires no human touch. It's faster. And it's more compatible with our disaster-recovery plan because we don't have to be at a particular workstation to access the information. Gateway has been one of the pioneers in providing Web scripting."

The software uses 55 different scripts to get all the information HBCC needs from 95% of its banks. Theoretically, if a bank makes major changes to its Web site, the script breaks and has to be rebuilt, but that has never happened to Burke.

BANK CAVEATS

Banks remain noncommittal. Steve Hart, vice president for integration solutions innovation at Bank of America and an impartial but informed observer, says the Gateway/BancBridge technology has "a lot of potential. It has gained traction in the past 12 months and has some obvious advantages–it's a simpler, less expensive model that relies on just one tool, the Web browser." But Hart's not yet sold on adopting it. "There are security issues, especially for initiating payments, and treasurers still worry about script failure when banks change Web sites," he says.

Thomson/Selkirk's Sum also has reservations. Web scripting still has to deal with varieties of Web design and access protocols used by different banks, which means bank-by-bank scripting, he says. "It reminds me of how we used macros in the early days. It's not an ideal solution," he argues.

The major alternative to Web scripting remains FTP transmissions. Companies can also get around bank-by-bank FTP complications by subscribing to a bank consolidated reporting service and letting the bank pull together the reports from all the corporation's banks and feed them to the workstation in a single FTP, BofA's Hart explains.

Ultimately, banks would like to move all communications to a single HTTP protocol through their Internet channel, contends Dan V. Myers, CEO of Atlanta-based software provider Online Banking Solutions Inc. "The bulletproof solution would not go to the Internet platform through a browser channel, but would involve a Web service that authenticates the user and moves the information to the requesting party in a BAI or, better yet, XML format."