The corporate firewall isn't what it used to be. The drive for efficiency and the influence of social media are trumping security concerns as financial transactions and communications move to the Internet and mobile devices. The cloud is replacing the fortress, in spite of ongoing security breaches that are embarrassing and sometimes expensive. Treasury technology is becoming convenient. The swell of software as a service (SaaS), now often associated with cloud computing, has become a tidal wave.

"Over 95% of our new business is SaaS," says Orazio Pater, COO of GTreasury, a Chicago-based treasury workstation provider. "For a while, the largest companies still wanted installed software, but we don't see much of that any more. The only on-site installations now are at companies that have legal or regulatory reasons for needing total control. It's hard to justify the cost of an installed system."

The new drivers around treasury tech decisions are apparent in the case of Styron, which was born in June 2010 as a brand new $3.5 billion multinational plastics, latex and rubber company with no treasury and no legacy infrastructure to constrain its choices. Part of the separation agreement when $54 billion Dow Chemical spun off Styron was that Dow would continue to perform treasury operations for the new company for a year.