Pushing the limits of technology to deliver more for treasury customers

Treasury management solutions provider, TreasuryXpress, is constantly looking to push the boundaries of treasury technology. After all, it’s the very reason the organisation was founded.

Delivering to market a new category of TMS solution, TreasuryXpress is pushing beyond traditional Cloud use cases to deliver what is called an ‘on-demand’ TMS model fuelled by sustainable digital capabilities, open banking regulation, and consumer-driven UX experiences. Characterized by a frequent and controlled Agile development methodology, immediate logon access for clients, short implementation times, responsive performance, and digital integrations and connectivity.

But just what is the company’s innovation team focusing on at the moment?

ML in treasury offering

Firstly, TreasuryXpress is attempting to integrate machine learning into its treasury offering, which would be capable of learning from activity in order to automatically reconcile transactions.

“Every treasury management system has a reconciliation engine based on rules,” says Ace Chalhoub, Chief Technical Officer at TreasuryXpress. “It’s a rule-based engine, and it’s also an AI algorithm. At TreasuryXpress we are moving away from these traditional, rules-based algorithms into machine learning algorithms.

“The system will understand from the flow of data coming from transactions, APR transactions and from the bank transactions, the relationship between those transactions in terms of information. Using that data, it would then be able to give suggestions about reconciliation. As it moves along, it learns more and more and evolves its reconciliation mechanism to perfection.”

One of the driving forces behind advancing the use of machine learning in treasury technology, is according to Chalhoub, “to further advance fraud prevention abilities for the industry.”

“Treasury systems need to be smart and proactive. For example, if you’re looking to your bank as a beneficiary, let’s say $100,000 a month, and suddenly, one month it goes to $1 million, the system has to flag it somehow, to say ‘I’m learning that this beneficiary is getting paid $100,000 a month, but this month it’s $1 million so there is a problem’. By utilising machine learning we can dramatically increase the chances of fraudulent activity being spotted.”

Following on from the above, TreasuryXpress is also looking at how technology can be further used to enhance convenience for treasurers by integrating treasury systems and messaging platforms.

“We are developing an in-app chatbot, which will be some kind of a treasury system that you can have on your chatting platform like Microsoft Teams, for example, where you’re able to ask that chatbot: ‘what’s my balance today, have we reconciled those payments, can you issue a payment to that beneficiary?’ It makes treasury more conversational and it’s just using the system, but actually talking to a bot,” Chalhoub explains.

“No risk, no gain”

There are questions around whether treasurers are hungry for such innovation when traditionally the industry has been somewhat risk averse. However, Chalhoub feels that innovations being worked on at Treasury Xpress are addressing a real need in the industry.

“There will always be early adopters and followers with any technology, but we see demand across the board for new technology. Fraud prevention solutions are a no-brainer. As are tools that help treasurers realise the potential of faster payments, open banking, enhanced FX trading and so on. Treasurers are increasingly seeing that access to the latest technology is beneficial for them.”

Moreover, Chalhoub was unconcerned about the risks of being so bold with their technology developments.

“No risk, no gain,” he said.

Promise of innovation

Tracy Kantrowitz, Chief Marketing Officer at TreasuryXpress, adds: “It’s our promise to the industry to be the innovators and it’s expected from us.  Even if we don’t see other vendors doing it, this is what makes TreasuryXpress who we are. We came to market with the promise of innovation, with the promise of taking things a little bit further.  We are not afraid to push innovation past the norm in order to make things easier and smarter for our clients.”

Kantrowitz added that Treasury Xpress is constantly learning from their customer support and implementation teams to inform their decisions and innovations, ensuring that their innovations are useful and needed, even if they are bold.

“You can learn a lot from support. What are our clients looking for? What do our client teams need to support our clients more effectively? What do they seem to be having trouble with doing? Just from the everyday life that clients experience with us, we’re learning from them and that gives us ideas to build upon and innovate,” she says.

“We want to make sure that we are giving clients what they need, but we want to make sure that it’s going to be good for everyone, so all of the innovation ideas, everything, it comes directly from the client community.”

Chalhoub agrees and concludes: “80% of our development roadmap is based on customer requests. Sometimes with customers, they’re expressing pain, but they don’t express the solution. So, you have to find a solution for them. That’s what it’s all about for us.”