Even a global company that has developed sophisticated processesacross most of treasury can have blind spots. A couple of yearsago, Mastercard's treasury function used manual and Excel-basedworkflows to manage corporate debt issues, investment of excesscash, and foreign exchange (FX) hedges' reconciliation andrecordkeeping processes.

The company was using spreadsheets to track all aspects of itsdebt. “As our business grew, we went from having no bondsoutstanding to having several issues with different maturities,”says Joshua Krongold, vice president of corporate treasury forMastercard. “Interest payments were due at different times of theyear, and an individual on the team that issued the bond was fullyresponsible for knowing when to make each payment. We risked makinglate payments because managing the details of our debt was socumbersome in Excel.”