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Innovations in Financial Applications Help Avoid Major IT Expense
The economic downturn is causing a growing number of organizations to review the financial applications they run to manage treasury activities, says Laurie McCulley, principal with the financial management consulting firm Treasury Strategies.
In many cases, enterprises are replacing outdated treasury systems that don’t fully address today’s needs for enterprisewide monetary visibility, she adds.
These are two trends that surfaced among attendees at the recent Association of Financial Professionals conference held in Los Angeles, according to McCulley.
“Enterprises want to leverage information that’s held throughout their organization in ERP systems to better forecast financial activity,” she explains. “They also need to know what bank their money is sitting in so they can make sure they don’t lose any principal held in faltering institutions.”
McCulley also says that attendees discussed the industry’s wider adoption of SWIFT, the global financial messaging service that supports more than 8,300 institutions and its component for corporations known as SCORE.
New Considerations
Large enterprises are re-evaluating their treasury applications because their legacy systems in many cases date back to Y2K initiatives or the initial rollout of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Today’s more comprehensive treasury solutions, such as those available from Oracle, cover a wide range of capabilities, from cash positioning, cash forecasting, debt management, investment management, and foreign exchange activities to risk analytics, payment executions, and inter-company lending.
In addition, Oracle offers innovations in its latest treasury releases that allow users to connect to the SWIFT banking network using Oracle applications and tools. This helps organizations quickly tailor their ERP systems to accept and transmit files via SWIFT and SCORE.
“With Oracle Fusion Middleware, which includes the Oracle Service Bus and its SWIFT adapter, enterprises can connect to the banking network without undertaking a complex and expensive IT project,” says John Killen, Oracle global solution architect for cash and treasury applications.
The SWIFT accommodations are already having an impact, consultants say. "We have implemented Oracle's SWIFT connectivity at a number of customer sites," says Karen Willis, managing partner at Elire Consulting. "They now have much better global visibility of their liquidity and payments using only one highly secure interface."
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