4 Cost-Effective Reasons Why Treasury Departments Should Embrace Automation

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At the heart of any bank or credit union is the Treasury team. This critical department helps decide where to invest capital, how much to keep in reserve, assess liquidity and ensure each department has enough liquidity to serve customer account holders.

Despite its fundamental importance, treasury professionals are still handcuffed by manual processes and archaic procedures. Fortunately, new automated tools are available to increase profitability and skyrocket productivity. Here are four reasons why your treasury team should embrace automation.

Reduce repetitive tasks
Automation has taken hold in many treasury functions such as forecasting, risk management and cash visibility. However, many vital activities such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and new account opening are still dominated by outdated manual processes.

In small financial institutions, most treasury activities start with a simple spreadsheet where a team member spends 80% of their time collecting and consolidating data . That leaves only 20% of the time for strategic review and analysis. Treasury departments spend four times more time processing data than they do evaluating the overall effectiveness of their strategy.

Automation can help close the productivity gap and free up time to focus on more profit-driven activities. For example, if a team spends several days a month sifting through paper checks, they can’t focus on improving the process itself. By automating check processing and verification, teams can use their time to develop new strategies to discourage account holders from using time-consuming systems and encourage them to use more profitable online self-service tools.

Get better visualization of the data held
Every day, businesses around the world lose hundreds of thousands of dollars due to the 2.5 trillion bytes of data floating through the air. With more data generated in the last decade than has ever existed in human history, there is no shortage of data for businesses to aggregate and examine.

Companies are racking their brains to aggregate and extract strategic insights from large amounts of data. The pile-up of data only highlights the inefficiencies of manual opportunity seeker mailing lists processes within treasury departments. So, banks are turning to the cloud to find new ways to automate the analysis of available data. In fact, in a recent study, cloud computing topped the list of the most important technology developments for treasuries, with many executives hoping to achieve greater operational efficiency and improve their return on investment .

Increase the number of new account requests your system can handle
Endless signatures, stacks of forms and piles of paperwork. Opening new business checking or credit accounts still requires a considerable amount of paperwork. In-person appointments can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Add in administrative bottlenecks that can drag the entire process out to ten business days, and opening new business accounts is one of the most time-consuming processes in the treasury wing.

By automating many of the steps in new account opening, your treasury services team can reduce processing time. Using a platform like ProcessMaker, you can deploy an easy-to-use, compliant account applications solution to increase the number of new accounts you can handle throughout the quarter. Build intuitive online applications and establish rules and workflows that automatically verify information and move it to the next step. By automating many of your application steps like deductible checking and cross-validation, you can reduce manual intervention and speed up your onboarding process.