Automated treasury assistance through digital workers

Today’s world is a collaboration between humans and machines. As can be seen in almost all industries, digitalization is also rapidly increasing in the financial sector, especially in corporate treasury.

One can observe an expansion of the treasurer’s scope of duties and thereby at the same time a reinvention of his old role. At the same time, there is now a need to keep an eye on digitalization. What goes hand in hand with this is undoubtedly the increasing demand for the automation of manual processes in order to make room for more meaningful tasks in the demanding day-to-day life of a treasurer.

Together with “digital workers” based on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), an advanced treasury of the future can emerge. After all, digitization in treasury is not just about using a single technology platform, but an ecosystem of interconnected technologies that can be leveraged to add value and make better decisions – even in real time. The growing demand and use of digital tools that mimic human skills and capabilities will accelerate the digital transformation of treasury.

Together with CloudShore, a leader in RPA and BPM from Mexico, we have developed a treasury bot that automates foreign exchange transactions from origination to execution.

Who is Tracy and what is her goal?

The Digital Worker for foreign exchange transaction management

Tracy is a Digital Worker that mimics cognitive functions and supports work with existing software applications for standard and repeatable tasks. Tracy was developed based on the standard SAP process for foreign exchange transactions. All necessary steps, from identifying risks and creating trades to generating payments and settling trades, are automated.

For foreign exchange transactions, the process starts with the receipt of exposure data from Cash Management. After retrieving the exposure information, the automation performs business validation against business rules that define what hedging actions or strategies can be taken for a particular case they retrieve from SAP. This enables Tracy to take into account the company’s risk strategy. For automation, a currency pair must be defined in the route table, and then hedging of the currency pair must be allowed. The automation prepares the information to get the most appropriate trade offer for the transaction. The offer comes from an external trading platform connected via API. Tracy then retrieves the information quote in SAP before updating the trade in real-time in SAP.

The main objective of “Tracy – The Automated Deal Manager” is to automate the management of foreign exchange transactions to improve their efficiency and accuracy and mitigate risk. Tracy can run in the background of your SAP system and does not interfere with any running processes.

What are the benefits of Tracy?

Relieving the burden on treasurers and increasing efficiency

Tracy can take treasury FX hedging/trading from concept to execution, enabling the delivery of accurate recommended forecasts, trades and transactions based on historical data trends, key business drivers and market insights.

It can not only relieve treasurers of some meaningful tasks, but also increase productivity and optimize working capital. By stepping in where humans normally perform manual tasks, Tracy can free up treasurers to spend more time on important tasks and decision-making processes.  Tracy is fast and can perform multiple tasks simultaneously, making it a powerful treasury tool.