Advanced Analytics And AI Tackle Treasury Challenges

ION is this year’s winner of the Best White Label System Provider – Non-Bank. Loic Leonard, head of product (Wallstreet Suite) at ION, discusses the technological foundations of a modern treasury.

Global Finance: What are the benefits and technology required for a “real-time treasury”?

Loic Leonard: Moving to a “real-time treasury” offers both fiduciary and operational benefits. Fiduciary benefits include more aggressive cash-cushion management through real-time bank account forecasted end-of-day balances, which frees up cash for investment and reduces interest and/or fees. Operationally, the real-time retrieval of front-office trades provides risk managers with full visibility into currency exposure and funding needs throughout the day. The technology required involves selecting a treasury management system (TMS) with a real-time architecture and ensuring that the TMS and surrounding systems can communicate in real-time via APIs.

GF: How can the treasury function evolve from a transactional role to a more strategic partner?

Leonard: Innovative treasury teams can leverage AI and predictive analytics for accurate cash forecasting and risk modeling, while dashboards and KPIs deliver real-time insights that empower leadership decision-making. ION Treasury offers multiple machine learning algorithms, from statistical, Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), to deep learning via neural networks, to improve cash forecasting accuracy and reduce time spent, recognizing that each time series is unique.

By leading hedging strategies and addressing cybersecurity risks, treasury can play a central role in strengthening the organization’s overall risk management framework.

GF: How does ION’s platform integrate and normalize data from diverse sources to provide a holistic view for analytics?

Leonard: ION’s platform integrates and normalizes data from diverse sources, including trade, bank statements, and market data, utilizing standard APIs. All business data synchronizes with ION Treasury Analytics in real time, consolidating logically linked data into multidimensional cubes for comprehensive treasury reporting.

GF: How does ION’s new Enterprise Payment Hub optimize liquidity and working capital?

Leonard: ION’s Enterprise Payment Hub provides real-time liquidity visibility by consolidating cash flows across ERPs, HR systems, TMS, and banks. This enables optimized short-term funding and investment decisions, reducing overdrafts and interest costs through automated pooling and sweeping, as well as transaction fees via intercompany and on-behalf-of payments. Enhanced visibility improves working capital management by optimizing payment timing and reducing bank account buffers. Centralized payment processing also mitigates operational risk and fraud through controlled approval flows, sanctions screening, vendor account validation, and payment anomaly detection.

GF: What are the main enhancements in the new version of Wallstreet Suite?

Leonard: Wallstreet Suite’s real-time trading and risk management focus has been reinforced by extending trade import capabilities to ensure risk positions are always up to date. Realtime integration options support receipt of executions from a wide range of commonly used trading platforms, including Bloomberg, TradeWeb, MarketAxess, FXall, 360T, LSEG/Refinitiv FXT, and many more. Users can import and process trades in real time from any custom sources.

For organizations managing foreign exchange exposures, Wallstreet Suite now supports modeling Foreign Exchange Hedging Policy with target hedge ratios for specific combinations of exposure currencies, tenors, and entities. Fully automatic processing can be scheduled to create orders for incremental FX hedges and uploaded to a trading platform for execution. The new version of Wallstreet Suite comes with extensive support for fixing, valuation, and risk analytics of risk-free rate referencing floating-rate loans, securities, and derivatives. A wide variety of simple and compound averaging conventions are supported and considered in valuation and analytics.