Treasury Management Services

Abstract

In 1997, I was asked to take part in a focus group initiated by, as the invitation suggested, a "large financial organization," for a discussion on treasury services. It did not take the participants too long to figure out that besides everyone's involvement with cash management, the only other thing we had in common was that we were Bank of America clients. This was a time when direct modem dialing into the bank's treasury portal in order to access your balances and initiate wire transfers was considered a cutting-edge service-many of our colleagues were still faxing their wire requests. But the modera-tor's main task was to survey our willingness to go a step further. Would we feel comfortable forgoing our beloved dial-up connections and get to our accounts over the World Wide Web? Really? Just like that-go onto Internet Explorer, and enter a web address and login? We debated the possibility for four hours. Today it's impossible to imagine doing it any other way-all banks offer web-driven services. Moreover, they compete with each other on the quality , breadth, variety, and pricing of online instruments. When First Union merged with Wachovia in 2001, one of the main reasons for the transaction M. Guzik, CFO Techniques