Standards are a good thing for treasury departments bent on automation and efficiency, but a cascade of new standards and drawn-out migrations by various players has left treasuries in a Tower of Babel. A bank transmission to or from an ERP system or treasury workstation may no longer make sense. The more banks and internal systems involved, the worse the cacophony gets, requiring one emergency translation patch after another. Now the treasury at Toyota Financial Services (TFS) in Torrance, Calif., has solved this problem by building a solution around SWIFT Alliance Integrator for version 7 of SWIFT.

"We were constantly wrestling with managing multiple banking relationships, connections and messaging formats," says Mario Delfin, national manager of enterprise cash management and treasury systems at TFS. "Our core business lines could not take advantage of the greater reliability, security and convenience of new banking products if the formats didn't match."

Once the SWIFT Alliance Integrator was fully integrated in February 2011, "we removed the need for legacy systems to be reconfigured to meet changing standards, since the middleware handles the transformation of existing and new bank interface files," Delfin says. "It will lower our cost for systems configurations and maintenance and it will allow us to quickly take advantage of new banking products and solutions."