Treasuries are undergoing technological transformations to enable their corporations to grow and prosper in a difficult global marketplace. Take Itron, a technology company that builds electric, gas, water and thermal energy meters for utilities. Its 2007 acquisition of Actaris doubled its size overnight and catapulted the company, now with $2.4 billion in annual revenue, into complex global operations and exposures. Since the merger, Itron conducts business in 130 countries using 40-plus currencies through a highly decentralized structure.

The merger was a wake-up call for what had been a basic domestic treasury function. Itron kicked off a finance and treasury reinvention by adopting leading-edge solutions, including migrating to a single global instance of an Oracle ERP system, implementing specialized applications from FiREapps, Reval and FXall, and an IT2 treasury workstation with SWIFT messaging integration.

Meanwhile, companies that have completed technology transformations are finding tactical ways to move to mobile access, cloud hosting, smarter data mining and reporting, tighter management of FX risks, and preparing for electronic bank account management (eBAM).