Address Operational Challenges

Before the global COVID-19 pandemic, business continuity plans for most companies probably focused on hypothetical short-term breakdowns of IT and infrastructure, not how to maintain operations if groups of employees become sick or if the entire company is forced to work remotely for long periods.

The plans typically didn’t have provisions to navigate interactions with banks, vendors and partners critical to keep the business running when the entire world is “out of the office.”

Corporate treasury professionals are especially challenged during this time, not just by the move to a totally remote workforce, but also by significant operational issues. Moreover, GTreasury customers report that company leadership is demonstrating an increasing reliance on treasury to help them navigate through the pandemic and resulting global economic upheaval. As a result, treasury’s need for secure, reliable systems and innovative solutions and workarounds has never been greater.

Digital treasury is not completely digital

The last few weeks have shown us that processes that fall outside the digital workflow create significant stumbling blocks when everyone is working remotely. Manual processes, physical signoffs and handoffs to third parties are now practically impossible. At the same time, financial partners are dealing with their own process issues, which impact the way you do business together. After all, how can your employees send a fax authorization to the bank when they don’t have faxing capabilities at home and there’s no one at the bank to receive the fax anyway?

In most cases, specific manual processes and signoff requirements were built into the workflow with the best of intentions to maximize financial control while reducing risk. But now, with no idea how long we all will be dealing with a remote workforce, treasury professionals need to rethink these control procedures to remove roadblocks that did not exist before. What processes can be implemented to take the place of a physical signature on a payment authorization form? How can you meet bank requirements without physical documents or meeting face-to-face? Even if we are able to get back to work in the office in short order, these are important issues to consider now for the future.

Technology – Friend or Foe?

Treasury professionals are finding that technology that worked seamlessly in the office may now have cumbersome log-on procedures or be extremely slow when accessed via the company’s Virtual Private Network (VPN). As one GTreasury client discovered, tasks managed through its on-premise ERP system via the VPN now take about four times longer through the VPN connection than when connected directly in the office. As a result, meeting deadlines for ACH transfers is a daily struggle. Time-shifting work hours and responsibilities has allowed the team to start the ACH transfers earlier in the day to meet the deadlines without the stress. But how long can time-shifting be a viable solution?

On the other hand, treasury teams using a SaaS-based ERP or treasury management system (TMS) have not had to alter their procedures. While you may not have been considering a migration to the cloud right now, moving to SaaS-based systems may need to move up in priority to help counter new challenges as they reveal themselves in the months ahead. The longer the disruption goes on and employees continue to work from home, the more imperative it will be to have technology that eases the load, rather than hinders it.

Beef up security and fraud prevention protocols

Your IT team has spent considerable time and effort securing your equipment, systems and networks against hacks and fraud. However, once the equipment is off-premise and connecting to networks out of your control, the chance of a security breach grows by leaps and bounds. Increased vigilance and new processes are required to protect the company’s assets. In addition, employees should be periodically reminded not to store confidential company files on local computers and to physically secure laptops and bank tokens at all times to minimize the risks of unauthorized access or theft.

Treasury may be especially vulnerable to fraudulent activity. In fact, GTreasury clients have reported a sharp increase in phishing attempts since the start of the pandemic. Take the time to run through potential fraud scenarios and develop enhanced procedures to check and double-check payment requests. Create documents outlining new remote treasury procedures to eliminate improvisation that could lead to security lapses. Stress the need for everyone to ask questions and call contacts directly if something seems unusual or off for any reason. Share all new phishing schemes and other fraudulent activity with all team members, and make sure all treasury personnel have a list of everyone to contact, in what order, should issues or questions arise that could affect the financial health of the company.

Take care of your employees

In our new reality, employees may be juggling work combined with the stress of all-day childcare or other distractions at home. At this point, the juggling act is probably getting old, yet there is no end in sight. There will be times when employees will have to step away during the normal workday, or, on the other hand, may not be able to shut down and walk away when they should. In the worst case, some of your employees may fall ill. While everyone understands these new stresses, the work of treasury still must get done to manage the assets of the company – perhaps, now more than ever.

Just remember we are all in this together and the stress you are feeling working from home is shared by everyone. Encourage your staff to take time out with family, a favorite hobby, visiting with friends via an online chat or old-fashioned phone call. And then take your own advice.

Leverage the resources of your TMS vendor

Your TMS vendor and support staff may be able to fill in staffing gaps or lighten your employees’ load through a managed service plan or other agreement. For treasury teams using a SaaS-based system, your vendor could manage daily tasks such as bank feed monitoring, GL extracts and error handling on your behalf. Relieving employees of some of the daily administrative work will also allow them to have more time to focus on strategic projects.

At the very least, you will want to make sure your TMS vendor is managing your connections and system integrations to ensure you don’t experience any loss of essential connectivity, outages or slowdowns now or in the future. You will also want to have contingency plans in place to free up processing capacity for greater activity during month- and quarter-end if necessary. Take the time now to explore the options available to you so you have plans in place you can implement in a hurry if the need arises.