GTreasury: Recreating Eminence

For treasury management, the choice was simple: complex, over-priced, and over-engineered treasury systems or excel spreadsheets. The domain has adapted technology over legacy systems, and today we have a digital revolution brewing. The PwC Global Treasury Survey showed that 80 percent of the companies surveyed in the space were using some type of treasury management system. Fabricating a success formula in the lines of this transformation was a Chicago based Treasury Management firm; GTreasury. “We had faith in our idea for almost 32 years, and within the last three or four years, we have finally come to enjoy the benefits of our long-term investment. So we are kind of a 32- year overnight success,” smiles Orazio Manzi-Fe Pater, CEO of GTreasury.

The Quintessential Problem Solver

Today, GTreasury stands tall as an established treasury management solutions provider offering a complete suite of solutions offering full visibility into organizations’ cash and liquidity, managing exposures and risks, and automating and streamlining all repetitive treasury processes.

GTreasury’s world-class worksheets, system flexibility, and ease of use quickly accommodates its customers’ needs of today while preparing them for the changes of tomorrow. The company’s modular platform and infrastructure allow any size treasury operation the ability to customize a solution that is best suited to their needs. GTreasury offers its clients a solution to centralize all their incoming and outgoing banking activities, along with tracking all financial instrument activities. This enables the GTreasury practitioners with real-time insight and access into their global liquidity. The company facilitates visibility through direct connections with around 2,000 banks and an indirect connection through SWIFT accessing across 8,000 financial institutions worldwide. GTreasury provides a seamless way of moving funds, some of which is done automatically based on targets. Clients can establish these targets on various accounts that help in determining whether those accounts have surplus money to fund the accounts falling short of the target amount. The remaining balance is then utilized to repay the debt, invest overnight or make a long-term investment depending on the availability. GTreasury offers its clients a single point of access both for incoming and outgoing transactions instead of having them connected to multiple banks through multiple devices and formats. The company also provides its clients with an ability to book transactions automatically. GTreasury collects this information electronically to map it to the clients’ back-office systems and ERP systems and automatically creates a journal entry.

Additionally, GTreasury provides its clients with an ability to close the books practically on any day. “It used to take days and sometimes weeks to close the books and reconcile with the bank accounts. However, now we can do it within a matter of hours or a day, and that is one crucial pain point that we have eliminated,” says Orazio Manzi-Fe Pater, CEO of GTreasury.

With the changing market environment, GTreasury has optimized its technology to focus on the planning and forecasting aspects of its solutions. With the availability of substantial data in the system related to user’s account activity, GTreasury provides its users with an ability to analyze history and establish trends adding to their own knowledge of future events and seasonality. This helps the users to forecast and manage their funds and investments accurately. Moving beyond the regular treasury solutions, the company is now expanding its expertise in assisting the users in the overall planning of their financial operations in a controlled format.

A significant part of GTreasury’s success attributes to the company’s unique model of working closely with its clients and partners alike. “We are very much a client-driven organization. Our product roadmap is very heavily influenced by our clients and their requirements; in fact, our collaboration with some of our customers have been so great that, in effect, they became our business partners,” adds Pater.

From a technology standpoint, GTreasury’s developers are on a constant lookout for new tools and advanced techniques that can enable them to be more efficient in producing new features and enhancements. Moving ahead, GTreasury will be optimizing its application both from a performance as well as user experience standpoint. The company plans to include more workflow processes within the system with a dashboard visibility giving the users a more accurate and real-time information about their assets and providing them with ease of managing these assets. Recently, GTreasury announced expansion through the opening of its London office. With a dominant hold on the treasury management business in America and Europe, GTreasury is now exploring its opportunities to serve the markets of Asia while continuing to propel against the future disruptions.

The Story behind the Firm

With a compelling story of conception dating back almost 50 years, Pater illustrates the series of multiple business transformative developments that gradually shaped GTreasury towards excellence. Spurring the seeds in 1970 with a then ambitious concept to automate the treasury management function, Pater along with his colleagues at Honeywell, created a Treasury Management System (TMS).

Within a short period of time, the product gained tremendous traction among a multitude of banks and financial Institutions in Minneapolis. With a widespread adoption of the product, banks and companies extended requests for the commercialization of the TMS product in the marketplace. However, sensing Honeywell’s disinterest in the latter, Pater moved to National Data Corporation (NDC) in Atlanta, which followed the same mainframe and time-sharing model as Honeywell. Creating a cash management division for NDC, Pater garnered huge business for the organization collecting around $45 million in sales and a customer base including more than 200 top banks and 12,000 corporations in the world. After working at NDC for a decade and witnessing the advent of Information Technology in 1984, Pater realized that time-sharing would be an obsolescing technology that would get supplanted by desktop PCs and servers in the future. Moreover, with the availability of mini-computers and desktops, the time-sharing model started to seem more expensive and time consuming for organizations. This realization marked the foundation of Gateway Systems in 1986, a pre-cursor named for the current GTreasury.

"GTreasury offers its clients a single point of access both for incoming and outgoing transactions instead of having them connected to multiple banks through multiple devices and formats"

Established in Chicago, as a joint venture of Pater and his wife, Peg Pater (General Manager), GTreasury grew to prominence with their transition from mainframes to PCs where the company was able to successfully replicate its expertise and technology by using desktop computers and servers. Moving ahead, the company adapted to the transforming IT landscape adopting the web services and cloud computing to deliver its solutions. Initially, the PC based solutions used DOS and later moving on to windows based operating systems. Over the last 17-18 years, GTreasury has been working on web-based systems, an enhancement that opened up the marketplace for the company and allowed it to penetrate different markets of the world. Pater’s vision and the ability to blend with the market played a significant role for the company in staying agile and at par with the trending corporate universe and its dynamics. “It took a while to get hold of the marketplace, but finally in the last four to five years, we have been growing at a rate of 40 percent a year. Last year, we grew about 51 percent, and things are starting to go in the right direction for us,” states Pater. Catering to some of the prominent names such as General Electric for more than 28 years, GTreasury’s solutions presently are used by more than 500 companies operating worldwide. Looking back at the long journey of his company, Pater says, “When you are growing at a fast pace, you have to ensure that you are not outstripping the capability to deliver and support the system and this ability to generate better quality while growing. I think I will attribute the credit to the people which we have been able to hire and the unique idea we believed in.”