An accounting firm partner wraps up the audit of a West Coastcompany on Friday afternoon and gets a five-figure check. Ratherthan carrying it back on the plane to her East Coast home andturning it into accounting on Monday, the partner uses a serviceimplemented by the accounting firm's treasury department. She whipsout her BlackBerry, scans the check and transmits the image to herfirm's East Coast concentration bank account, where the funds areswept into interest-earning investments. This same scenario playsout for a consultant with an iPhone or a college fund-raiser withan Android or a salesman with the right smart phone. As treasurytechnology sweeps forward, remote deposit capture has joined themobile revolution.

“We've entered the realm where you don't need a physicallystable scanning device for remote deposit. Someone in the fieldwith a smart phone can do it on the spot,” says Gary Brand,director of Source Capture Optimization at Fiserv in Brookfield,Wis. Getting the right lighting can be a challenge, especially formobile devices without flash units, but after a few tries, theoperator learns how to get a usable image, he says.

Fiserv started testing its Mobile Source Capture product inpilots last December and in August began to make it available totreasuries through banks. The service also lets treasuriesconsolidate multiple collection points down to a single operationscenter where staff can bring together incoming check payments andprepare a clean deposit, Brand explains.

In Singapore, Sandra Wan, a remote treasury manager for $748million Red Hat, a Raleigh, N.C.-based provider of open sourcesolutions with more than 65 offices across the globe, now opens theJPMorgan Chase Access liquidity portal, where she sees nearly allof Red Hat's Asia/Pacific cash balances in bank accounts. Wanquickly selects investment vehicles in the right currencies from amenu of approved choices and places her order for the day. Thatorder is routed electronically to the corporate treasury in Raleighfor approval and then executed. What until recently involved paperand fax machines and took three to five days is now done withoutpaper in minutes.

In small, tactical ways, as well as large strategic ways,technological advances are bringing significant gains inefficiency, intelligence and security to treasury operations.

For the strategic, consider what is happening behind the sceneswith cloud computing. The largest treasury banks are building acloud computing infrastructure, reports Maggie Scarborough,managing director of FinServ Strategies in Baltimore. Why shouldthat matter to treasury staffs? Because it will make connectionsmore seamless and allow the banks to package multiple applications,including those they get from partners, and make them seem like asingle application, Scarborough explains. “It will ultimately makebanks and other treasury vendors more agile than they have been inthe past,” she says.

With installed software, traditional ASP-hosted software ornon-cloud software-as-a-service, software resides on a singleserver somewhere, Scarborough explains. Whatever a user does on hisor her screen connects to a specific server. With cloud computing,there are multiple servers–a cloud of computers–and any computer inthe cloud can deliver software access. Letting a lot of computersshare the load gives banks “a lot of back-end efficiency and makesall the computers in the cloud available to handle peaks indemand,” she says. “The cloud can connect multiple computers fromdifferent silos across the bank or vendor. It's subtle, but itsaves the banks and vendors money and delivers more service to theend user.”

Cloud computing alsoworks hand in hand with XML formats, Webservices integration, and rich Internet applications, Scarboroughreports. Mashups, for example, allow separate, external services toreside inside of a bank treasury management solution, but look andfeel like one serviceto the user, she says. For example, one partof a bank may provide cash management services, while another partprovides asset management services. With mash-ups, the assetmanagement service can be integrated into the cash managementservice or treasury management portal, putting both at the user'sfingertips with a simple click, Scarborough explains, which canfurther enable consolidated positioning.

“The integration is all invisible to the end user, but it meansless hassle, fewer tokens and a more consistent experience,” shenotes.

In spite of the distractions and constraints of the financialcrisis, banks are moving forward with technology upgrades for theirtreasury platforms. Chase Access, for example, already a solid hitwith smaller treasury clients, is about to be eclipsed by a productthat will offer even greater visibility into global cash and aneven more robust set of liquidity management tools, reports RandyWhite, managing director and head of the liquidity business forJPMorgan Treasury Services. “It includes bits of the legacy Accessproduct, but it will offer capabilities that don't exist on theAccess platform or on any platform from any bank,” White claims.“It will bring a unique way to view cash concentration structuresand enhance intercompany loan functionality.”

The product, called Access Liquidity Solutions, has been craftedfor global multinationals but is useful to domestic U.S. companies,White says. It is now in production with a few clients in Asia andis scheduled to be rolled out to Europe and North America inOctober, with fuller functionality coming in 2011, he reports.JPMorgan Chase, which has been less distracted by the financialcrisis than many of its peers, is capitalizing on its advantages toaggressively “build out our global corporate bank,” Whitenotes.

Chase will selectively build interfaces to major ERP andtreasury workstation systems for feeds, but so far it isconcentrating on bank-client interfaces, he reports.

Whether a beefed-up Access will move up market to largercorporations remains to be seen. The online banking platforms likeChase Access, Wells Fargo's CEO and the Bank of America IT2offering provide light workstation features that are popular withtheir target market of smaller companies, says Elaine Filus, aprincipal in the technology consulting practice of TreasuryStrategies in Chicago. “You hear a lot about them, but most of thelarge companies and a growing share of the midsize companies havemoved to more robust workstations,” Filus says. “We estimate thatworkstations have penetrated 30% of the small corporate market, 50%of the market for corporations with $1 billion to $5 billion inannual revenue and 70% of the corporations over $5 billion.”

Budget cutbacks are not hampering treasury technology advances,Scarborough reports. “Preservation of liquidity is a huge corporatepriority now, and much of the technology that can aid treasurers ishigh quality and pretty cheap, especially software-as-a-servicesolutions,” she says.

Some companies are buying software now on a pay-as-you-go basisand locking in contractual rates before they go up, Scarboroughadds. “There are a lot of low-cost solutions out there. It's a goodtime to buy.” Being able to subscribe to a service rather than buya product has reduced the overall cost as well as the front-endinvestment.

John Engeman knows a thing or two about preservation ofliquidity and having the right technology tools to do the job. Inearly 2009, the credit crunch knocked Liz Claiborne, a New YorkCity-based apparel company with $3 billion in sales, out of itsunsecured revolver and into an asset-backed facility with capacitydependent on monthly increases or decreases in eligible inventoryand accounts receivable. That plunged Liz Claiborne's treasury intoa new urgency about liquidity management and cash forecasting,reports Engeman, the company's assistant treasurer and vicepresident, and increased its dependence on its Kyriba treasuryworkstation. In addition to its visibility and forecasting tools,that system allows Liz Claiborne to concentrate cash automatically,he adds.

“We had the capacity we needed but not the cushion we were usedto,” Engeman says. “It became critical to know exactly on any givenday how much cash we had, where it was located, and what ourborrowing availability was.” If anything, it became even morecritical to look ahead at what would be coming in and going out.“We started weekly meetings with treasury, financial planning andanalysis, accounts receivable and accounts payable,” he says. “Wehave to report our borrowing base [eligible assets] to the bankmonthly, but internally we do it weekly just to stay on top ofthings.”

Liz Claiborne and its European subsidiary, MEXX, both draw onthe same asset-backed lending facility and use the same Kryibasystem to track cash closely and forecast cash flows, Engemanreports. “We're constantly aware of where all our cash is so we canuse it to pay down debt or minimize borrowings. We can't controlour borrowing base, so we have to forecast it as precisely as wecan.” Having a single instance of the Kyriba workstation shared bycorporate and European treasury operations makes the job possible,he says. “It's all about eliminating excess balances and improvingthe cash conversion cycle.”

Engeman credits Kyriba with helping him do that. “We keepimplementing more of the functionality of our system, and we'repartnering with them to develop more features. We gave them a wishlist several years ago. We wanted automated GL posting. We wanted acash dashboard and a debt dashboard. We wanted integration with ourpayment factory. Together we have implemented all of them.”

Treasury operations managers have long faced a dilemma: whetherto buy an integrated solution from an ERP or treasury workstationvendor and get parts that were built to work together or buybest-of-breed specialized applications and find ways to make themwork together. The winner is best-of-breed specialists, Filusreports. “Treasurers of large corporations with complex needs likeapplications that focus on a single activity and develop reallyrobust support for that activity, narrow but deep solutions.” Shementions Reval, FiREapps and Speranza as examples.

“Complex treasury processes require the functionality and theyaccept the need to make these applications work with their broadersystems,” Filus says. “That integration keeps getting easier astechnology evolves.” The comprehensive systems aspired to cover allthe bases, but other providers were quicker to market with morerobust solutions, she notes.

Despite their inability to keep up with specialized vendors inhot areas, treasury workstations, buoyed by ASP or SaaS delivery,are increasingly being adopted by large corporations and are alsomoving down into the middle market, Filus reports.

Midsize companies have “relied on spreadsheets until recently,but spreadsheets pose significant control issues,” she says. “Theyare prone to keying errors and a corrupted formula can go unnoticedfor a long time. With spreadsheets it takes considerable time torun daily processes, and usually only one person understands howthe spreadsheet is set up and how to change it.

We see more and more treasuries picking their first workstation,even if they continue to use spreadsheets for some things,” Filusadds. “They need to move scarce resources from transactionprocessing to analysis and planning. If a new treasurer comes in,it's a popular first win to upgrade the technology.”

ERP systems' modules for activities like treasury have been leftin the dust, Filus reports. “The ERP approach is to customizeeverything to the user, which takes time. Treasuries are morelikely to grab an off-the-shelf solution that is ready to go,” shesays. “When treasury uses an ERP module as its system, the choiceis usually driven by IT, not treasury.”

Similarly, more companies are opting to outsource rather thanbuild their own treasury systems, Filus notes. “There had beenresistance around data security, but that's gone, even forsensitive information like how much cash is in which accounts.”Software as a service works, it has proven to be secure, and itlets companies avoid the hassles of maintaining technology on theirown servers, especially since more and more companies have nowoutsourced their IT, she reports. “SaaS has become the preferredsolution.”

The power and economy of Web-based SaaS means that sophisticatedtechnology is reaching smaller and smaller companies, saysfinancial technology veteran Scott Montigelli.

And smaller and smaller computers. Today's more powerful, moresecure mobile devices are definitely ready for treasuryapplications, says Rhys Jones, head of innovation at Fundtech inJersey City, N.J. However, as a result of mobile devices' smallscreens and processing times, it's not data-intensive communicationbut things like remote approvals and alerts that may prove mostuseful. A traveling treasurer could review and approve outgoingwires, receive notice that an important check or wire had arrived(and view an image of the check, if that is useful), receive noticeand even inspect images of positive pay exception items and approveor deny them, or be alerted about an overdraft situation.

Treasury pros also still welcome relatively low-tech,stand-alone applications that solve a particular problem. Forinstance, the problem of monitoring debt compliance covenants, aonce-routine chore that became particularly important when thecredit crunch hit. The solution is Web-based software developed byDebt Compliance Services, whose partners are Jim Simpson ofCorporate Finance Solutions and Jeff Wallace of Greenwich TreasuryAdvisors. The application takes the long, dense, paper loanagreements and converts them to Web pages with hyperlinks that letusers jump to defined terms and section references. “You'reclicking links instead of flipping pages,” Wallace notes.

There is also a workflow element that directs Web-basedquestionnaires to people with knowledge about individual covenants.“You might have a covenant restricting the sale of fixed assets andthe use of the resulting proceeds, and you might have operatingplants that routinely dispose of unwanted equipment,” Wallace says.“We have a Web process in place for the individual plantcontrollers to report to treasury on proposed and actual equipmentsales to make sure that the equipment sales and the use of proceedsdo not violate a covenant and cause a default/cross-default on theloan agreements.”

While progress has been impressive, there is still room forimprovement, says Bruce Lynn, managing partner of Darien,Conn.-based Financial Executives Consulting Group. Even theimpressive gains in comprehensive information reporting still havegaps, he notes. “A treasurer of a Global 500 company needs to knowwhat he or she is paying Citigroup across the globe, but there isno technology to report it,” he says. “Weiland does itdomestically, but nobody can do it globally.”

Another weakness is that treasury technology works better forrecording and tracking repetitive transactions than it does forcompliance, and compliance, with risk policies or debt agreements,for example, is becoming a bigger part of treasury'sresponsibilities, Lynn says.

But the prevailing mood in the treasury tech world is buoyantoptimism. Now that treasury systems have dramatically increased thedata they capture, the frontier has become doing more with thatdata. “Systems have been rigid and limited in what they can do tostress-test cash forecasts and run what-if scenarios,” Montigellinotes. Now vendors are starting to offer more analysis andreporting features that are C-suite friendly.