Improve your Treasury Strategy

How do you manage you treasury?

With organizations focusing their capital spending on upgrading Accounting systems, or moving to ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning system) to manage across their Enterprise, such as Manufacturing, HR, Finance, and CRM, they often overlook a key element that is the core component for the survival of any business, Cash. Many companies have realized that using familiar, but unstructured tools such as Excel alone are no longer manageable nor cost effective in areas such as and Financial Planning.

Finding more efficient ways of managing your Corporate Cash as part of your overall Treasury strategy is not only essential, but critical in today's volatile and fast moving markets. The world has experienced an unprecedented downturn in the Credit markets over the last few years, and finding ways to finance your operations and investments has become extremely challenging.

Organizations need to know..

• Their cash position
• Where cash is being deployed
• The impact of interest rates on cost of capital or short term investing
• How currency fluctuations will affect operations across the world
• How to manage risk

Organizations also need to move and collect their money in record time. With technological advances and global integration, the days of writing checks as the dominant instrument no longer exist. Electronic transfers and Automated Clearing Houses are not only the norm, they are the key to moving funds for collection of receivables, making payroll, managing payables, stock buybacks, solidifying better interest rates on your credit facility, and even preventing fraud. Information is also moving at light speed, using EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and SWIFT.

Sleep better knowing...

In cases of fraud or theft, we have seen the affect of hackers breaking into Corporate systems, stealing private customer information, such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other personal information. While proper infrastructure security is essential to prevent these situations, banks offer many solutions to reduce the risk of fraud or theft in areas such as check processing. Banks call this Positive Pay, in which they match up checks presented for payment with an electronic file transmitted by the corporation. Solutions come in many forms, and it is essential to your organization to understand what is available to you.

Whether it is Cash Management or movement, Risk Management (such as Interest rate Hedging or insurance), updating your credit facility, re-purchasing corporate stock, forecasting your cash flows, investing in commercial paper or repos, building Discounted Cash Flow models for M&A activity, or paying your organization's bills, managing your Treasury operations is critical for survival and future growth of your business.

MindStream Analytics can help. Through our Treasury-Stream offering, our Certified Treasury Professionals (CTPs) will help you build a sound strategy for your Treasury needs and provide solutions to address those key requirements. Wouldn't you sleep better knowing your Cash was well protected and always there?

MindStream Treasury Solution

Once your organization has figured out that your current tools don't manage your corporate Treasury needs as you require, now you need to know where to go. You need impartial professionals to look at your requirements and find the best solution out there in the market. Whether it is managing your Cash transfers (Fed Wires, ACH), Portfolio Management, Bank accounts, payables or receivables, interest rate risk, credit facility, currency fluctuations and reconciliation, M&A activity, Corporate Stock purchases, or many other considerations, there are Treasury Workstations solutions that address some of these areas better than others.

There are many different vendors that offer Treasury solutions in the market today. Technology-centric companies such as SunGard or Chesapeake Solutions, ERP vendors such as PeopleSoft or SAP, or banks such as JP Morgan and Bank of America.

Technological updates of Financial Systems, including Treasury Workstations, not only provide twenty-first century efficient, fast processing of your Treasury transactions, but they also adhere to the most up-to-date compliance regulations and fraud prevention measures that exist in the industry. Corporations lagging behind in these areas are risking difficult consequences down the road.

At MindStream, we want to help your organization find the best fit for your standard and unique requirements, whether it is one "all-in-one" solution or offerings from multiple vendors. MindStream provides a formal Vendor Selection process that helps you craft your requirements, develop your RFI / RFP, find you the comparables that will help you analyze and differentiate your options, build your success criteria (including functionality, flexibility, cost, and return on investment), arrange demonstrations, provide detailed scoring mechanisms, and make the final recommendations with you to take to your Steering Committee and Executive Management. We will be your liaison from day one, through the selection process, and into the implementation process. MindStream will guide you through uncertain waters with our Treasury-Stream offering. Why go it alone? Our Certified Treasury Professionals will take the uncertainly out of the process.

For more information on how MindStream Analytics can help you, contact us at [email protected]

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