As treasury teams expand their reliance on shared services centers (SSCs) and centers of excellence (COEs), many are rethinking how to balance efficiency with control. Some companies move fast—building global structures to enforce standard processes and scale; others take a slower, more deliberate path, refining and formalizing operations before transitioning them to growing SSCs and COEs.
- At the NeuGroup for Mega-Cap Treasurers fall meeting, two members shared how their companies are pursuing these goals through different approaches, and how varying priorities are shaping separate paths toward excellence.
- One company has pushed rules-based activities into a “treasury tower” COE as part of a finance transformation effort, with an aim to ensure consistency and oversight across payment processing, reconciliation and data management.
- The other is taking a more gradual approach—refining processes before handing them off to the company’s financial services teams within “emerging SSCs” and COEs. “We’re moving, as we can, toward types of activities that are well-documented and have a defined process,” the treasurer said. “We’re a slower approach, with the same goal in mind: cost efficiency while still creating career pathing for folks coming in at associate analyst levels” within corporate treasury teams.
Approach #1: Standardization through transformation. For the first organization, transformation started with structure. A “treasury services tower organization” sits within its global business services (GBS) function to consolidate activities once scattered across regions and teams. The goal: a unified framework for executing high-volume, rules-based tasks.
- The tower’s scope now spans payment processing, reconciliation, bank account confirmations and other standardized operations that lend themselves to scale. Those tasks are performed across hubs in India, Mexico and the U.S., supported by in-house teams and an external service provider. The structure leverages shared tools and automation to improve consistency and reduce manual work across time zones.
- “When we started, people said, ‘We’re already standard,’” the treasurer recalled. “But the tools weren’t aligned, and neither were the processes.” By codifying workflows and enforcing common systems, treasury reduced manual touchpoints, streamlining reconciliation and payment support that once required full teams down to a handful of specialists.
- Ownership remains within treasury. The COE reports through global business services but retains a direct line to the corporate team for oversight and risk control. “If we’re going to move billions through India, for example,” the treasurer said, “we still need to own the accountability.”
- He said this project is the first phase of a longer journey, allowing treasury to focus on continuous improvement to further enhance efficiency and deepen its partnership with the business.
Approach #2: Standardization before transformation. The other treasurer focuses first on refining, documenting and testing activities within treasury—ensuring they are stable and repeatable before transferring them to treasury teams in SSCs and COEs.
- A treasury operations group—about a dozen people—manages nearly all of the standardized, repeatable work. “The extent to which we have COEs is evolutionary,” the treasurer said, describing the setup as “a collection of regional treasury centers” rather than a formal COE.
- The group’s scope combines day-to-day transaction execution—for example, cash positioning and global netting— which have clearly defined procedures that lend themselves to standardization, with supporting roles in reporting, controls and systems support.
- Complex, judgment-driven work remains primarily centralized, and for example, the company’s derivative operations have also stayed with the FX team at headquarters, underscoring the need to think flexibly about how to differentiate between risk-sensitive processes and high-volume global processes that are better suited to the shared services hubs.
- The approach of refining first and transitioning later has delivered consistent results: treasury processes remain stable, well-documented and under clear governance while cost efficiencies build gradually. She acknowledged that her team’s pace is less aggressive than the first treasurer’s, but emphasized that the same long-term goals—efficiency, scale and talent growth—are being achieved through steady evolution.
