As deputy treasurer at $156.7 billion GeneralElectric, Dennis Sweeney has a string of technology achievementsunder his belt: He implemented the first Web-enabled treasuryworkstation, pioneered corporate use of SWIFT and has been a keyadvocate of the TWIST BSB standard for electronic invoicing ofinternational bank fees.

These days he sees working to improve corporates' communicationswith their banks as his best shot at improving productivity.“Having access to information and being able to process thatthrough my bank in a straight-through process is where I'm going toget value,” Sweeney says. “These days, it's much less 'can Inegotiate a better price to clear a check,' than 'can I get out ofclearing checks at all, can I move people to e-payments.'”

Dennis Sweeney

The fact that GE's treasury workstation has users around theworld piqued Sweeney's interest in Web-based software. Based inStamford, Conn., GE's treasury has regional centers in Delhi,Dublin, Sao Paolo, Shanghai and Tokyo. Although many, includingGE's vendor, were skeptical about Web applications, Sweeney says,“I was very convinced that as we got more and more global, havingdesktop software that had to be upgraded for every change was veryinefficient. We thought the Web was the right way to go.

“It took a lot of convincing,” he adds, but notes that now,“there aren't too many treasury workstations out there that aren'tWeb-enabled.”

As SWIFT prepares to implement a set of errors andinvestigations (E&I) messages to automate corporate inquiriesabout payments, GE has already come up with its own solution,called direct-to-bank, that employs the company's internal querycase management system, Support Central. Treasury identifiedcategories of queries that could be routed automatically to a bankvia e-mail. That eliminates treasury's role as a middle man, butSweeney aims to make the system even more efficient by sendingqueries via E&I once GE's banks have adopted it. “We couldautomate more of these queries and it would be more efficient forour banks,” he says.

Before joining GE in 1992, Sweeney spent 13 years at PepsiCo,where he worked on technology initiatives including the developmentof a numbering standard for paper invoices and then its shift to anelectronic EDI standard. He was also involved in Pepsi's work ontying data from the POS terminals at chains then owned by thecompany, such as KFC and Taco Bell, with the stores' bank balancereporting and automatically reconciling the two.

While much of Sweeney's time is spent on day-to-day treasuryoperations and systems, he says that “the fun part of my job islooking down the road and anticipating what we need to be workingon to drive productivity two, three, five years from now, because alot of these efforts will take years.”

For example, he says, getting corporate access to SWIFT involvedseveral years of lobbying. “It takes time to persuade people andthen get them to invest what they need to build out at their end,”he says. “But this is how you change the industry.”

His next goal is to get banks to substitute electronicstatements for paper ones, a move that Sweeney says would becheaper for both banks and corporates. “It's an efficiency andproductivity play,” he says. “You can move and transport and storedata much more easily if it's electronic than if it's paper.”

The effort is just getting started, he says. GE has met withseveral big banks. It plans to work with banks to come up with astandard way of naming files, and also plans to get other companiesinvolved.

Companies need to communicate with each other about such effortsso that they don't end up forcing banks to come up with multiplesolutions to the same problem, Sweeney says. “I think it'simportant we try to get together and speak with one voice, so thatbanks can develop once and develop right.”

To read about GE's 2009 Alexander Hamilton Award fortechnology excellence, see Redirecting Payments Saved the Day.