Treasury Map, the missing piece for selecting treasury solutions.

Our starting point was that there was little or no centralized information on treasury IT tools. There are a multitude of solutions with multiple functionalities, and it's hard to find your way around. And yet, to understand and differentiate all these solutions, we needed to present a sort of exhaustive cartography, categorizing the tools to better identify, distinguish and reference them. You can search for a treasury solution on the Internet, but it's not easy, especially if you don't know where to look. Treasurers don’t have time for long unfruitful internet searches or to attend all conferences. At a time when hyper-automation is becoming essential, and when many treasurers are thinking of changing their TMS tools, and therefore the satellites of this basic backbone IT solution, it is vital to have a free means accessible to all, to view existing solutions by category, list them, access standardized technical documentation and relevant content, and ultimately to be able to pre-select them for RFP.

A look at technology in the treasury sector

It's fair to say that treasury tools abound, especially with the advent of DLT technology and the emergence of fintech’s. Some even speak of a jungle, given the sheer number of solutions built around the concept of TMS (i.e. “Treasury Management System”), the backbone of dynamic treasury management. The first treasury tools appeared in the 90’s and were not yet called "TMS". Today, they're also called "TRMS" to add the "Risk" component. Since then, technology has evolved, and all tools have been in SaaS mode (i.e. public or private cloud) for over a decade. Recently, we've even seen new "native SaaS" solutions, build on newer technologies and faster to be implemented. This relatively recent technology has progressed faster than the function itself (which has itself evolved considerably, albeit at a slower pace). The arrival of new agile competitors, more specific solutions, and the move to SaaS mode, which has imposed more "standardized" and "off-the-shelf" TMS solutions, has considerably altered the landscape. Fintech-type solutions cover more specific areas of treasury management, e.g. management of bank guarantees, cash-flow forecasts, connectivity, KYC, or Bank Accounts Management, Currency Management Automation, etc...

As there is a plethora of complementary solutions to classic TMSs (which also cover one or more categories), selecting one or more tools becomes complex.

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Example of the treasury tech map (in 2 dimensions)

How to optimally (pre)select a treasury solution?

It's all the trickier to pre-select a tool as there are no dedicated (free) platforms, segmenting IT solutions by category and supplemented by sorting facilities (based on a study by the European Association of Corporate Treasurers / EACT "Fintechs" working group). That's why we thought of launching a single platform (i.e. www.treasurymap.com ) to offer all stakeholders free structured technical information, by product type, accompanied by specific content (filtered by specialists) to complete the exhaustive inventory of treasury tools. Categorization is the major innovation of our treasury map. More than 15 years ago, the acronym TMS was not used. It takes time to become common language adopted by all treasurers. We wanted to give each type of solution a short name, a simple identifier, punctuated by an easy-to-remember acronym. The idea was to put an end to the confusion of calling every solution a TMS. For example, if you call it KANTOX, it's "Currency Management Automation / CMA", if you call it TIS, it's "Bank Single Gateway / BSG", or if you call it Treasury Spring, it's "Financial Instrument Dealing Platform / FIDP".?

It's a bit like looking at a map of the world, a planisphere, and searching for a particularly small country on a continent. The aim of this website is to facilitate vision, to help with pre-selection and to prepare a solid RFP / “Request for Proposal”. With this document, we can also gather targeted, precise, and quality information on the tools, to refine the choice. TreasuryMap is the perfect tool for any treasurer wishing to select IT solutions.? We've even gone so far as to reposition the "usual suspects" or main IT vendors on a map, mentioning them in all the categories they cover (e.g. SAP is an ERP, a TMS, a BSG, etc.).

?Finally being able to choose a tool without going through endless random searches on the Internet, that’s a great progress!

This website will finally inform all stakeholders (sell & buy-sides, including treasurers, of course), free of charge, before choosing a treasury software tool. It will provide product data and uniformed technical sheets, functionalities, contact details, link to supplier’s website, etc., and even deliver quality content to help and guide visitors. The tool will eventually be accompanied by an RFP tool (i.e. preselection for a digital RFP) thanks to Treasury Delta's support. The tool will quickly become a "must-have" for the entire profession, enabling tools to be identified by categorizing them. Finally, we are preparing a similar mapping for SME's, Family Offices and Hedge Funds (i.e. Private Equity). Thanks to the expertise of the site's administrators, updating and comprehensiveness will enable us to always provide the most complete vision of the treasury solutions eco-system. Let's congratulate ourselves on eventually having a tool that has been missing and that will change the life of every treasurer, forever.

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Fran?ois Masquelier, CEO of Simply Treasury – Luxembourg April 2024