As your treasury team works through its day, each member performs a variety of activities that could be provided as services, further exploiting the SaaS medium and making life easier. For example:

Bank Statements – Early in the morning your cash management team needs to connect to banks to get statements in a timely manner. Your neighbors do too. SaaS now enables this service via the provider itself or via a service bureau.
Correlations and Volatilities – Further processing public market data can add value by calculating correlations between asset classes and curves, historical volatilities and using this data as inputs into advanced risk management tools like Cash Flow-at-Risk, Earnings-at-Risk or Value-at-Risk measures.
Payments – By mid-morning, and in the afternoon, your payments team needs to make (treasury and/or AP/AR) payments from your treasury and risk management solution to one or many banks. Each bank may use a different payment format, e.g. MT 101, EDIFACT, ISO20022 or some custom format. Let the SaaS vendor provide these formats out of the box to you and then be responsible for maintaining and adding to them. Also let the host provide connection to a common service bureau or bank connection to send payment messages, track confirmations and acknowledgements.
Sanction List and Payment Validation – It is a requirement to verify that payees are not on sanction lists, and it is also useful to check SWIFT BIC's, Fedwire/ABA codes prior to making payments. This data is available via public databases, but providing this data centrally and checking against it benefits all users. This value-added service will save time and also strengthen SOX controls.
Trading – Throughout the day your front office may use one of the many FX or money market online trading platforms to trade. You also need the trade data in your treasury system. You can now exploit the interconnected, shared aspect of the SaaS medium to trade directly from within your treasury and risk management solution and automatically book your trades, saving you from double keying data.
Hedge Accounting – When designating hedges and at each month end, your accounting team needs to run regression of index values or derivative fair values and calculate statistical measures. A SaaS provider may leverage published market data to this, further adding value.

While the SaaS treasury and risk management world is clearly evolving from shared data toward shared services, there are also other developments taking place.

Instant Insights /

SaaS Technology

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