DerTreasurer: The Digitalisation Dilemma

There are still many pain points in the digitalisation of treasury processes. However, corporates can digitalise their processes and save time and money in the process despite a lack of resources. By Gregor Opgen-Rhein

The digitalisation of internal workflows is high on the agenda of many corporate treasury departments. A number of tasks are causing an ever-increasing drain on resources: be it active risk management, growing compliance requirements, changes to technical interfaces, adjustments to new regulatory requirements, the integration of new services from banks and other service providers or the introduction of new systems. Day-to-day business or project work also take their toll. The sheer number of these tasks makes it clear just how necessary a digitalisation offensive is in the treasury department.

However, given the existing workload and in times of a shortage of skilled workers, digitalisation initiatives themselves appear to be a Herculean task. The result is a classic dilemma: digital processes in treasury make a decisive contribution to reducing the workload and freeing up time for core tasks. However, introducing these measures entails a significant amount of additional work for a limited time, which must first be managed.

The solution to this dilemma lies in commissioning external service providers who specialise in the digitalisation of treasury processes. These can be experienced, freelance interim managers, specialised consultants or the solution providers themselves, who have learned to map a wide variety of organisational framework conditions and processes in their systems through the introduction of systems for very different customers and can therefore deliver a best practice approach.

Create concept

These partners already have many digitalisation concepts directly available, which can be implemented with little adaptation: whether for process standardisation, system centralisation, workflow automation, process integration in centralised or decentralised organisations or for security and fraud prevention. The implementation partners coordinate with both internal stakeholders and external banking and service partners. The digitalisation projects are implemented operationally and integrated into day-to-day business until they only need to be handed over to the responsible treasury employee.

But which treasury processes are particularly suitable for digitalisation? These are primarily analogue, paper-based and manual processes, which are correspondingly time-consuming: whether it's the processing of payment transactions via various bank portals and with different signature tokens, the documentation of bank fee statements and their manual verification, recurring KYC processes with the submission of a wide variety of documents, the paper-based opening and closing of accounts and the manual documentation and management of account authorisations, wet-ink signatures on paper forms, paper-based balance confirmations for the annual financial statements or the storage of paper-based account statements. All of these have been major pain points for corporates of all sizes for many years. In this area in particular, the huge potential for digitalisation is huge. Unfortunately, this potential often fails to be exploited due to a lack of internal resources to implement the projects.

Customised system solutions and banking services are available for treasury departments. The digitalisation dilemma can be solved under the guidance of specialised service providers.