Bank of America: How to Manage Global Payments Risks in Uncertain Times

Watch more: Need to Know

If businesses can’t see their cash, they might as well not have any.

That’s especially true against today’s volatile global backdrop, where multinational companies are rethinking how they move money across borders.

“One thing that all treasury organizations are looking for is visibility into their global activity,” Sebastian Sintes, director of transactional FX at Bank of America, told PYMNTS.

Shifting supply chains, uncertainty in global markets, and the rising cost of capital have forced treasurers to scrutinize every detail. Centralizing processes aids in these efforts.

“When we talk about an uncertain climate, having visibility is going to allow organizations to make quicker decisions,” Sintes said. “They’re going to be able to implement changes a lot quicker, and they’re going to be a more agile treasury organization.”

Treasury operations have historically been defined by lag. Payments would take hours, sometimes days, to settle, leaving treasurers uncertain about their actual liquidity. But what was once a patchwork of regional networks, disparate formats and opaque settlement processes is increasingly being reshaped by standardization and visibility, putting treasurers in the seat of command.

Across industries, treasury teams are centralizing operations, adopting shared service centers, consolidating technology into single enterprise platforms, and exploring advanced structures like in-house banks.

The goal is to be more agile in an uncertain world.

Cash, Counterparties and Contingencies

Five years on, the pandemic remains a reminder of how fragile global payment systems can be. During that period, treasury organizations discovered weaknesses they hadn’t anticipated.

“There was a quick realization that there was an inconsistency in process across the treasury function, that there was no visibility of counterparties, and there really were no contingencies in the event that one of those counterparties had an issue,” Sintes said.

Once taken for granted, cash suddenly became a central strategic concern. Companies needed to know how much they had, where it was and how accessible it could be.

“Treasurers really had to answer the question of: ‘Where is my cash? What is my cash doing there? And what is it yielding?’” Sintes said.

Fast forward to today, and automation has played a major role, with intelligent sweeps and notional pooling giving treasurers tighter control and greater flexibility. By reducing idle balances and consolidating cash, treasury teams can not only reduce costs but also work to optimize working capital across the organization.

“[The industry is] going to be shifting from an old model that was really more about driving operational processes to a new model, which is gleaning insights from those operational processes and then making strategic decisions off of those insights,” Sintes said.

Moving From Operations to Intelligence Defines New Treasury Model

If visibility is the new baseline and agility the new mandate, standardization may be the catalyst that makes both possible.

After years of anticipation, ISO 20022 is finally reshaping the plumbing of global payments. Unlike its predecessors, which often truncated transaction information, ISO 20022 allows for detailed remittance data, end-to-end references, and compliance information to travel with payments.

For corporates, this means fewer reconciliation headaches, faster matching of invoices to payments, and smoother interactions with regulators and auditors. Still, with money moving faster than ever, data quality and consistency become mission critical.

“We’re going to a new environment where settlement is going to be instantaneous,” Sintes said. “The quality of the information is going to become even more important because it’s going to be harder to make adjustments. We expect to see an increase in the speed and volume of payment activity, while at the same time hopefully seeing a reduction in errors and risk … that was a trade-off before. Now, we’re in an environment where that hopefully is not going to be [so].”

The question will be more around how treasurers capture, store and manage data across its lifecycle, he said.

“How do you standardize the data capture? How do you store that data? How do you index that data? And then how do you manage that data lifecycle going forward?” Sintes said, adding that structured data is foundational to effective integration of artificial intelligence tooling and innovation.

The companies that have invested in infrastructure, such as centralized systems, upgraded enterprise resource planning software and robust transport management systems, could be those that reap the benefits.

“For the corporate organizations that have been making some heavy investments into their system infrastructure, that return on that investment is going to start to be felt in the upcoming years because of all of these changes,” Sintes said.

The future of treasury is likely to move beyond simply managing payments to orchestrating them.

“The ultimate outcome is going to be very positive: accelerating working capital, increasing returns on idle cash, reducing errors, and cutting the time it takes to investigate and correct those errors,” Sintes said.