Aug 4, 2020 | Bank Innovation
We all recognize that there is a lag with a bank’s cash data. We experienced this ourselves: no matter how much we improved our forecasting it wasn't enough to get the projections just right.
That’s when we had our breakthrough.
We realized that cash forecasting is a silo within the retail bank. It operates within the banks and works to do its best to forecast the cash, but it does so in isolation. And, we discovered, there are two other silos (or core functions) and all three work together to unwittingly keep cash costs high.
If the forecasting of cash is the first area then the second is in accounting. Their job is to reconcile all the cash that goes out and comes in every day. They use traditional accounting timeframes of days or a week or two, and so long as it balances, that's excellent.
The third cash data opportunity resides in treasury. They track the cash in the entire cash cycle. Again, this traditionally takes days or weeks, and as long as the money's there, they're doing a great job.
Think about this like a sports team: individual position players can play well but without an overall coordinated effort they aren’t performing as a team. Unless they have an integrated strategy with integrated plays, you're never going to get the best results from your team.
Thinking like this got us to start integrating processes and systems between these three core functions —forecasting, accounting, and treasury. This integration eliminated the data lags. Now, the cash forecasting team has close to real-time data from the two accounting groups, informing their decisions and dramatically improving confidence levels around where the cash is.
Our results speak for themselves. Our cash forecasting software allowed us to optimize cash by driving down cash use by 42 percent, while satisfying every customer that needed cash.
Want to know how you can take advantage of the Perativ solution today to cut your cash costs? Click here now!