Global Finance - USA (2020-09)

A

s a retailer, Canadian Tire operates

a cyclical business, with inventory

tied to the seasons. Priya Kurian,

assistant treasurer for Canadian Tire, says

the Covid-19 pandemic shifted her focus

to real-time rather than historical data.

Luckily, Canadian Tire had installed all

six modules of GTreasury’s cloud-based

treasury management system toward the

end of last year, providing real-time access

to increased amounts of data.

While her team certainly had access to

data they studied to make educated adjust-

ments to estimates before, “now we’re get-

ting more forward-looking data,” she says,

“and we have access to people that can help

us run modeling to get real-time estimates

for areas that are more sensitive and have

big impacts to cash flows.” It has led to

a shift from quarterly cash reports for the

C-suite to daily dashboards “with real-time

updates for the next three weeks of cash

and fairly constant revisions looking out

for the next year.”

Real-time data has been useful in the

positioning process, and it has also freed

the treasury team from some data work.

“As we built in automated integration for

many feeds, there’s a lot less time being

spent by my team just inputting data and

adjusting things manually,” Kurian says.

Better and more-timely identifi cation,

measurement and understanding of key

liquidity drivers are crucial for corpora-

tions attempting to manage and mitigate

liquidity risks during the pandemic. For

this, consolidation and data quality is

extremely important.

“There’s no point in trying to make

decisions from your data until you trust

the quality,” says Sonny Singh, senior

vice president and general manager

of Oracle’s Financial Services Global

Business Unit. “But by nature, timeli-

ness and data quality are often at odds.

Traditional ways of reconciliation and

data quality control can create severe

bottlenecks.”

Organizations need

to make sure data is

checked for quality

and reconciled with

fi nance and then made

available to business

users as soon as pos-

sible, says Singh:. “This is where a fl ex-

ible cloud infrastructure with the ability

to easily integrate new technologies is

essential in bridging the data divide. We

can now manage traditional requirements

and provide information at a near-real-

time pace using APIs.”

More-powerful cloud infrastructure

also helps treasury to make better use of

the data the company holds, to better

serve its clients and third-party providers.

“For decades, corporate and bank trea-

surers have been sitting on large amounts of

data without making use of it,” says Pedro

Porfi rio, global head of Capital Markets at

Finastra. “Traditional systems don’t typi-

cally have the ability to link disparate data

sources nor rationalize data into meaning-

ful data sets. As a result, it is diffi cult to

obtain a holistic view of the customer; and

businesses are unable to personalize the

customer experience and off erings.”

THREE PATHS FOR INSTITUTIONS

Kurian hopes real-time payment and

data-exchange initiatives will encourage

banks to offer data analysis services to

their clients. “Banks should be able to do

Data-Driven Treasury

In a period of uncertainty, when cash is king, treasurers are looking for

greater access to data to optimize liquidity management. By Gilly Wright

“Banks should be able to do more

with the wealth of data they have.”

—Priya Kurian, Canadian Tire

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CORPORATE TREASURY SUPPLEMENT 2020|DATA SCIENCE