After six years as editorial director of Treasury & Risk, there are days when you feel like you’ve heard it all. Vendors promising this or that functionality or service; CFOs and treasurers claiming the promises are empty, overpriced or both–although not always that sure which services and solutions they actually need. But for the last year, it seems like the dialogue has been elevated to a new plane. First of all, more CFOs and treasurers have a better sense of solutions that make sense for their finance and treasury operations without insisting on a status quo. Thanks to consolidation and competition, vendors also have improved their game substantially. Not that there still isn’t hype, implementations that take far too long and mismatches of buyers and solutions. But in the last year, there seem to be far more fixes finally coming of age–meaning they not only live up to their claims, but are available at a time when finance executives actually perceive the need for them. You see this very clearly in the stories that senior contributing editor Richard Gamble wrote on the new treasury technology model and the evolution of electronic invoice presentment and payment. Here are instances in which treasury and finance are helping to reinforce vendor innovation and the evolutionary conversion of the profession from a manual art to a scientific rigor–a concept at the basis of many of the increasingly sophisticated tools in the risk management space, including this month’s featured foreign exchange management solution from FiREapps. These types of tools raise analytics to a level that was once reserved for the financial services domain–but no more.
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