Receivables

Commentary

“May you live in interesting times” goes the old Chinese curse. Whether we are cursed or not, we are certainly living in interesting times.

This call focused on one area of the information revolution – Payment Service Providers

(PSPs), but it was an illuminating insight into the challenges treasurers face. The multitude of payment methodologies and PSPs are forcing treasurers to deal with many different approaches, companies and formats. Today digital sales are mostly for B2C transactions, but this is spreading to B2B as business models evolve.

As treasuries move to APIs, bots and other less structured forms of communication, everyone will face the issues discussed in this report (the full 18 page report is available to premium subscribers - enquire here for details).

The biggest issues participants raised are:

• Ownership. Treasury clearly owns the relationship with traditional banks. But many treasurers find that marketing or other functions (notably IT) sign up the company for a PSP relationship, and then leave it for treasury to resolve the issues. Participants are beginning to lay down rules for approving new relationships, usually involving marketing and IT.
• Management system. One participant has a rigourous process which involves marketing, IT and treasury to make sure all aspects are covered.
• Local vs global. Some PSPs are global, while others are regional, or purely local. The purely local ones are usually left to local or regional teams to manage, while global ones are typically managed from HQ. In some cases, only local options are available: this is a challenge for centralised treasuries.
• Global PSPs. The main providers mentioned were PayPal, Ayden and WorldPay. No-one finds they can