The Customer Story

Mission critical applications need a fresh evaluation every few years to take advantage of new technologies, better tools, and to accommodate ever-changing requirements. For instance, the quick rise in interest rates over the last year has brought effective liquidity management, and the ability to earn better returns on free cash, while paying down high-cost debt, to the forefront of corporate treasury requirements. As various industry studies have highlighted, the spending in treasury technologies has been anemic over the last 20+ years.

Now that market conditions and business needs urgently dictate it, organizations are scrambling to deploy treasury technologies that can handle this heightened focus. The need is immediate, but legacy applications have always required a long lead time, with implementations typically measured in months - for a variety of reasons which we have discussed in a prior article . Lengthy implementation projects are also further compounded by an acute shortage of resources in most corporate treasuries.

The one refrain we constantly hear from the treasury teams with whom we work is how thinly staffed they are. Handling day-to-day activities leaves them with no available capacity to make any improvements to their process, let alone implement a new system. Our focus at Treasury4 is to help our customers USE our systems instead of implementing our systems. Rather than increase the workload of already thinly staffed treasury teams, our system is designed to save time, provide insight, and make teams more effective.

"Our focus at Treasury4 is to help our customers USE our systems instead of implementing our systems."

We have designed our platform with quick wins and time-to-value in mind. Allowing our customers to stand up the platform in phases, without inter-dependencies or forced system-defined sequences, is only the first step in solving the issue of prolonged implementation timelines. Treasury4 leverages many additional steps to smoothen and shorten the implementations for our customers, including:

• De-stressing the setup decisions by providing predefined naming conventions and a standardized setup.
• Minimizing the need for data gathering by providing a curated list of reference data, including bank configurations, branch details, and counterparty definitions. Gathering this information tends to be one of the biggest contributors to longer project durations.
• Leveraging existing, easily available data. Sources like public registration information and open corporates can be great sources to supplement information available with the treasury team. Similarly, bank transaction details are a great source for seeding treasury systems. A key principle we follow—do not make your customers populate spreadsheets with data that can be sourced from elsewhere.
• Focusing on reporting and categorizations from the start. By minimizing the time spent on data conversion and configuration, you can focus on delivering insights and intelligence from the get-go, delivering value to the customer faster.

Heeding these broad tips shortens the time-to-value for customers implementing mission critical systems. The needs are acute, and resources are limited. It is up to solution providers and consultants to find creative ways to deliver value faster.

"It is up to solution providers and consultants to find creative ways to deliver value faster."

As former practitioners who have brought innovation and change to treasury organizations throughout their careers, the team at WestCap brings expertise and understanding of the challenges we are solving at Treasury4. Their experience in helping fintech companies scale and deliver innovative solutions to solve long existing problems is something we can leverage and sets us up well for a successful partnership. The benefits of this partnership are tangible, and we are already delivering functionality that benefits our customers by incorporating the input of the WestCap team.

Suresh Thekkenmar serves as Chief Customer Officer at Treasury4 and is responsible for building out the service infrastructure for customers, including the implementation process, training, customer support, and operations related to Advisory4.

Suresh is a veteran of the institutional fintech industry with 30 years of experience. He has worked with over 350 clients in insurance, asset management, banking, pension funds, hedge funds, and healthcare sectors. Suresh was the Founder/CEO at MedUSA, a technology-enabled services company serving the healthcare sector, whose primary focus is revenue cycle management. From 2012-2013, he was responsible for global implementation operations, post-implementation customer experience, and the SaaS offering at Calypso Technology. For 20 years, he worked with SS&C Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: SSNC) in several positions, including three years in London (1997-2000) launching and building SS&C’s international operations. During his time at SS&C, Suresh had a range of responsibilities including sales, product development, implementations, consulting, training, customer support, and SaaS / BPO serving financial services and investment operations.

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