Multinationals Embrace Treasury Management Platforms

August 12, 2002 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Growing numbers of large multinational companies are using a treasury management system (TMS) to help negotiate complex transactions that are increasingly complex and 24/7.

The Greenwich Associates research reported that four out of 10 of the world’s largest institutional treasurers were using a TMS by the start of 2002, up from 36% a year earlier. Some 48% of large companies use a TMS, up from 36% in 2000.

The trend to flock to a TMS is particularly strong in cases where companies generate more than $10 billion in annual foreign exchange trading volume. Greenwich said that in that group, the increase was from 44% at the end of 2000 to 53% a year later.

Designed to accommodate the ongoing centralization of the treasury function in an era of globalization, 24-hour trading, and changing disclosure requirements, TMS’s track often-complex financing instruments. Many TMS’s offer a wide array of products to a broad regional or global customer base.

The biggest TMS player, according to Greenwich research, was SunGard.  But several systems with smaller client bases enjoy higher levels of customer satisfaction, specifically XRT-CERG, IntegraT, Simcorp, Chase Insight, and other providers of specialized foreign exchange and risk management software, including Fxpress and Financial CAD.

Chase Insight and RiskMetrics were two systems that saw significant user falloff in 2001, according to Greenwich

More than half of all large European institutions interviewed by Greenwich report using treasury management systems, as do 57% of institutions on the Continent. Both figures are up significantly from the prior year. Uptake in the United Kingdom is somewhat slower, growing only slightly from the prior year to 38%, Greenwich said.

While use in Asia is lower than what is reported elsewhere in the world, it is a region of phenomenal TMS growth. Some 33% of Asian institutions reported using some type of TMS in 2001, up from 21% in 2000. In Japan, the percentage of institutions with TMS’s more than doubled, from 15% in 2000 to 37% last year.

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