Treasury Management, Done Internationally

Cash, in the mind’s eye, sits in vaults, holding value, waiting for deployment. But it is in fact a fluid thing, wending its way from buyer to seller and back again, moving across borders, if only in bits and bytes. And it needs to be tracked in real time and accurately — a critical undertaking for any business.

In a recent announcement within the treasury management space, EDI Gateway, a service provider specializing in SMBs and focused on enterprise resource planning and B2B applications, linked up with AZUR, a cloud-based treasury management firm, to offer the latter’s eFinancialSuite to vendors.

Sophie Barbara Desilets, chief operating officer of EDI Gateway, told PYMNTS that the partnership with AZUR is one that aims at “companies that are extending their operations into multiple countries” and who may have supply chains or customers — or both — that also cross borders.

With an initial focus and immediate appeal to retail firms, with complex needs from sourcing to shipping, Desilets noted that the program, thus far in beta testing, would eventually see a global rollout next year. Firms in the space, she said, may not even have a treasury management system (TMS) in place that can help minimize risk and costs, increasing visibility across the supply chain.

The ideal deployment of a TMS automatically gathers information across disparate account balances (by working in conjunction with SWIFT, which connects several thousand banks) and helps treasury management officials, said Desilets, “see where the money came from, where it is going and show it on a dashboard where it is easy to have direct access and visibility into what the trends are — this is key to forecasting,” she added.

Automation and fairly intuitive displays of data — especially as can be used across mobile devices, said the executive — allow for proactive decisions, rather than “waiting for the report to come tonight” or even weekly. A TMS also can eliminate some of the pain points that disallow for a truly accurate portrait of cash flow, such as erroneous data inadvertently entered into Excel spreadsheets.

The operation of a supply chain that is far-flung requires business intelligence functionality that works across the cloud, and the TMS suite enables the reconciliation of currencies in real time.