Treasury survey indicates efficiency trumps speed in payments innovation

The survey, released by Strategic Treasurer and TD Bank, polled financial professionals on their views of technology, industry innovation and economic outlook to better understand top challenges and opportunities in the marketplace.

Among the top findings:

• More Information Beats Faster Settlement. For inbound payments, 52% of corporate treasurers viewed the ability to post more information as more imperative to operations than the speed of settlement, while 36% ranked faster settlement as more important. On the banking side, 55% stated that more data is more important for inbound payment processing compared with faster settlement (45%).

• APIs > Blockchain. When ranking technology systems head-to-head, four times as many corporate treasurers rank Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as more important than blockchain for outbound payments, and six times as many bankers rated APIs as more important.

• A Mobile Divide. While the banking sector appears to be excited about commercial mobile banking applications, their corporate clients do not seem to share their enthusiasm. For banks, 76% of respondents stated commercial mobile banking capabilities would be a significant development for their clients over the next three years, yet just 24% of corporates rated mobile apps as high. Whats more, 19% of commercial financial professionals stated mobile apps are unimportant to their work.

• Security Improvements Top Corporate Payment Expectations. Over 2019, corporate expectations about payment innovations center around improved security controls and reducing fraudulent activity. Banks overwhelmingly anticipate that developments along the faster/real-time payments front will see the most growth in 2018.

These expectations are significant, given that 74% of corporates and 92% of banks saw increasing cyber fraud as one of their top concerns this year. Despite these concerns, companies seem unprepared to prevent incidents. Just 39 percent of businesses require employees involved in payments to take security training, compared with 97 percent of banks.

The 2017-2018 Treasury Perspectives Survey was sponsored by TD Bank and conducted by Strategic Treasurer. A copy of the survey data, an infographic and the full results are available at https://strategictreasurer.com/surveys/2017-treasury-perspectives.

There were 336 respondents, including corporate treasurers, treasury professionals and corporate bankers from around the globe (primarily from North America and Europe).