Using APIs to banish treasury pain points

As a former treasurer at Microsoft, FinLync’s Tahreem Kampton knows where the pain points lie and how to find treasury function efficiencies

Over my career in treasury, and as a corporate treasurer and CIO at Microsoft in the US, I always looked at ways for the treasury team to enhance efficiencies and reduce manual efforts across all treasury processes. These treasury processes included making timely payments, ensuring proper bank account access, tracking payment status, managing online banking portals and managing bank account balances.

Most importantly, I have always been keenly focused on bridging the links between the treasury world and modern connectivity technology.

Given our heritage, we were heavy users of technology during my time at Microsoft. In the early 2000s, Microsoft’s treasury was a very heavy user of Visual Basic for Applications, utilising macros to automate treasury’s processes, reducing manual work and countless hours spent working with Excel. 

From using Power BI to optimise our data analytics to working with BNY Mellon to migrate infrastructure supporting wire payments into Microsoft Azure, we were always excited to leverage new technologies to make our lives easier and improve processes. 

However, while we always prioritised simplicity and efficiency at Microsoft, we still needed to manage multiple banks, served by multiple systems, creating a complex patchwork of connectivity that demanded too much of the treasury team’s time, alongside other teams including IT, accounts payable and payroll.

Eradicating data errors

This is a world with dozens of different treasury-related systems that are supposed to help us, but often just end up adding additional complexity to our day. If you’ve got 30 systems and data isn’t flowing seamlessly through all of them, there’s a high risk that you will inevitably have a data issue. This could mean your balances are incorrect, your bank signatories are wrong and your loan balances are inaccurate. Finding ways to minimise the data being fed through multiple systems reduces risk. 

Any treasurer will tell you how painful it is to learn, remember and manage multiple systems. Wouldn’t it be better to automatically harmonise all incoming data from multiple banks into one standardised format compatible with your enterprise resource planning system? This is what excites me about the opportunity I have as the newest advisory board member at FinLync. 

While the underlying technology is sophisticated, the FinLync value proposition is simple: consolidate bank application programming interfaces (APIs) into one location. Its premise is for treasurers to access all required functionality without chasing multiple systems that need to be reconciled. Understanding the functionality of these new APIs, and numerous additional APIs under development, it’s clear how easily treasurers can become more efficient.

Reducing pain points

I hope my new role will build on my experiences in the world of corporate treasury to identify new approaches to alleviate the common pain points that I often see today’s treasury teams grappling with, such as:
 

1. Where’s the wire? Once a payment transfer has been initiated, where is the payment in the process? Payments move through several different systems before reaching the bank and final beneficiary. Given the tight time frames in which we make payments, we need to be able to locate where the money is at any point in the process. 
2. What’s the balance in Germany? Or Japan? Or Singapore? We need to understand the balances across all geographies by entity and by account.
3. Are our merchant and bank accounts reconciled? With the right links between merchant and enterprise bank accounts, balances can always be reconciled in real time. 
4. How does the actual bank balance compare to forecast? We need to make sure we’re optimising cash to be in the right place and ensuring we have great tools to achieve that. 

Evolution

As an experienced treasury professional, I’m interested in the same objectives that probably drive your treasury functions:
 

• Reducing the number of bank accounts;
• Minimising non-interest-bearing cash;
• Measuring and reducing FX risk; and 
• Tracking our balances to ensure we have cash in the right entity at the right time.

These, and further potential objectives, can be more easily achieved through bank API connectivity. My goal is to make sure that FinLync is engaging, educating and listening to the broad treasury community to help companies gain a greater understanding of the value that can be achieved through leveraging APIs versus other data-connectivity methods.

About the author

Tahreem Kampton is a member of FinLync’s advisory board and former corporate treasurer and CIO at Microsoft in the US