The Covid-19 pandemic has represented an unprecedented health crisis of a magnitude without parallel in modern times. With no clear endpoint, the pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities and gaps in technology and infrastructure throughout the global financial services industry.

In light of these vast challenges, many corporate treasurers have faced firsthand the tangible impact of legacy, inconvenient, and slow transactional processes. The pandemic laid bare the problems with continuing to manage cash using the physical and manual processes that are predominant in most corporate treasury functions.

At the same time, the pandemic hastened the development of digital innovations that can increase the speed and control corporate treasurers have over their cash positions, while also improving the security and safety with which they perform transactions. The 2021 edition of the "EY Cash Management Services Survey" found that 17 percent of banks' staff are dedicated to product management and product development teams. Notably, there's been increasing adoption of application programming interfaces (APIs) to facilitate new capabilities and interoperability throughout banks' cash management business units, resulting in data standardization, improved timing and connectivity, and streamlined flow of information to corporate treasurers.