Now in its 5th consecutive year, Strategic Treasurer’s Technology Use Survey, currently underwritten by TIS, has captured data and feedback from over 1,000 treasury and finance practitioners since 2017.
Each year, this panel survey polls a diverse population of treasury and finance leaders regarding their usage of – and experiences with – various treasury technologies, capabilities, and solutions. The research also seeks to capture the industry’s general satisfaction levels with the existing treasury technology they have in place, and ranks treasury’s priorities regarding what is most important when evaluating and selecting new fintech partners and software solutions.
2023-24 Treasury Technology Survey Highlights
This 2023-24 survey iteration, which ran from May 1st – July 31st 2023 and captured responses from nearly 250 senior treasury professionals, has highlighted several core trends actively shaping the space. Among them include the continued dominance of SaaS and cloud technology as the preferred choice for treasurers when adopting new software solutions. Today, over 82% of all treasury platforms are SaaS, which represents an 11% increase from 2021.
Looking beyond SaaS popularity, 2023 data has also shown that corporate interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML) solutions – especially surrounding treasury use cases in cash forecasting and fraud prevention – are at all-time highs. In fact, many organizations are already seeking opportunities to invest in AI and ML software, with 23% of respondents indicating their fintech partners actively provide AI and ML solutions for cash forecasting, and 17% for fraud prevention. Moreover, 1/3rd+ of treasury practitioners believe that AI and ML capabilities are especially important to them when evaluating new technology, so this is an area where we expect rapid growth in the next 1-5 years.
In other areas of tech, 2023 research has shown that corporate adoption of APIs to facilitate payments and reporting functions is continuing at a high pace. In 2023, 45% of treasury teams are actively using APIs for information reporting with their banks, and 28% for executing payments with their banks. Compared with survey results from 2021, this represents double-digit growth in API adoption, as well as triple-digit growth since 2018. And more recently, adoption in the U.S. of the FedNow® service to facilitate real-time domestic payments and interbank clearing is already at ~15%, with another 15% planning to integrate FedNow within the next 12-24 months. This represents very rapid adoption, as FedNow has only been live since July of 2023.
However, despite the high levels of investment and growth we are witnessing across treasury technology, there are still many significant sources of complexity that practitioners must navigate. Today, there remains a substantial gap between most company’s expectations for how long a TMS implementation will take, versus how long such projects take in reality. In fact, while 57% of practitioners expected their implementation would last only 3-9 months, only 38% were completed in this timeframe. Instead, while just 18% expected their implementation to last longer than 1 year, 30%+ ended up taking this long.
Compounding these implementation issues, data also found that ~20-30% of the capabilities being adopted by treasury are ultimately going unused, either due to technical issues, a lack of education, or redundancies with other solutions. This shows that despite widespread development within the treasury technology ecosystem, there are still a variety of hurdles that professionals must identify and overcome if they are to successfully maximize the automation, efficiency, and control desired from their solutions.
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