Treasury Technology
Published  7 MIN READ
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Sunshine in the Cloud – Sharing insights on treasury technology opportunities

Chaired by Helen Sanders, Editor


During this roundtable discussion published in association with FIS, two corporate treasurers, Masha Weijers, group treasurer of Futuris, supplier to the automotive industry headquartered in Australia, and Carolyn Maloney, group treasurer of US industrial cutting systems firm Hypertherm, discuss the benefits and experience of cloud-based SaaS (software as a service) solutions in their organisations. In addition, Laura Koekkoek, principal of treasury consulting group Zanders, discusses the wider industry implications.


First, please could you tell us a little about your treasury function and the technology you use to support it?

Masha Weijers, Futuris
Futuris would be categorised as a mid-market company, with a turnover of around $700m, so we have a small treasury team. We have a group treasury function in Melbourne, Australia, together with team members in five countries performing day-to-day treasury activities. Until last year, our treasury processes were highly manual, which created operational risk issues and was very resource-intensive. The business was also growing quickly, and our existing processes and resources were not scalable to the changing needs of the organisation. We were working with 10 banks, and it was difficult to manage these relationships without a treasury platform. 

We recognised that the opportunities for mid-market companies to acquire sophisticated treasury technology were changing, particularly with the growth of cloud-based SaaS solutions, which gave us the opportunity to improve our processes and controls. Once we had built our business case and gained CFO approval, we looked at various alternatives. In particular, we needed a scalable, cost-effective solution from a reputable vendor that would not require significant IT and treasury resources either to implement or manage the system over time, and ultimately chose FIS’ Integrity solution. The solution is SaaS-based, hosted in a cloud, and we were surprised at how cost-effective it was to implement, with significant functionality and integration advantages.