Building a future-ready treasury in 2022 By Wissam Khoury, EVP, Treasury & Capital Markets, Finastra

The pandemic, global conflicts, economic and political uncertainty: in the last few years, we’ve witnessed an increased frequency of extreme events that have impacted risk management and placed more strain on a bank’s balance sheet. Additionally, we are seeing fast-changing regulations and increasing cost pressures, meaning banks have to increase their ability to adapt to new demands while decreasing their total cost of ownership (TCO).
As these events continue to impact financial services, in 2023 we expect to see an increased importance of the role of the treasury and banks embracing digital transformation to remain relevant. By phasing out their legacy technology and moving their operations into a cloud environment, banks can adapt quicker to ongoing uncertainty and future-proof their investments through systems and solutions that provide the agility, adoption rate and functionality to meet regulatory deadlines. They can also reduce costs, scale their business and improve functionality with faster upgrades and enhanced services.
In 2023, we expect to see a continued shift in the treasury’s mindset from ‘build’ to ‘buy’. Banks are increasingly buying the latest solutions from specialist fintechs instead of developing them in-house, but we expect to see particular growth in the ‘as-a-Service’ subscription model due to its myriad benefits. By purchasing and deploying fully managed solutions which provide functional and technical enhancements in their core, banks can become a future-ready, integrated platform with increased agility and lower TCO through tech stack modernization and deployment. There will be increased connectivity with ecosystems which allow banks to implement, via APIs, specialized fintech applications which accelerate the rollout of regulatory requirements.