Next-Gen Dashboards: Why Treasury4 Plugged Into Sigma Computing

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Treasury4 solutions now include dashboards from Sigma Computing, whose technology offers ML and AI functionality.

Treasury4’s drive to give treasury teams improved visibility into cash flow, liquidity and other vital information has steered the fintech to Sigma Computing to enhance visual representations and analytics offered on dashboards within its modules. At a NeuGroup virtual session sponsored by Treasury4 this spring, co-founder and chief product officer Ed Barrie described the benefits of Sigma’s next-gen dashboard technology.

“Sigma has been very much on the front of leveraging AI and ML, which we use throughout the analytics we’re building,” he said. “One of the things that we’re really excited about is the natural language report builder, Ask Sigma. You can type in English language queries and have the system construct a dashboard and a chart for you and give you all the details behind it. So it’s super interesting.”

Mr. Barrie was joined by Sigma CFO Christina Liu, who shared with NeuGroup members her vision of how better data visualization tools, including those incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning, may help finance teams improve reporting and shorten the time it takes to deliver answers and analysis.

Superior, flexible dashboards. Sigma allows Treasury4 clients to do deep dives into data, Mr. Barrie said. “I really like how Sigma allows you to expose all the way down to the transaction level so you can see your analytics, whatever dashboard you’ve created,” he noted.

“You have the ability to get to the underlying data and its full attributes so that you can have high confidence that your data is correct. But I also like how Sigma enforces security and governance of the data to make sure that people are only seeing what they’re entitled to see at the organization level,” he added.

“We use it within the Treasury4 platform to drive 13-week out to one-year cash flow forecasts using both machine learning and rolling average models. ML works great when you have a very long time series of data. But when you have things that are very choppy like payroll paid every two weeks, you might want to use a rolling average model for the last six months so.

“Being able to mix and match models and not just have a single one that you use for forecasting is very important and Sigma allows for that.”

He added, “One of the key things that Sigma released that our customers have been using are input tables, which effectively allow you to bring non-Treasury4 platform data into the Treasury4 platform through Sigma to augment your reporting.

“In fact, we released it to one of our customers and the next day they had built out their own share repurchase tracking capability and they were supplementing the cash flows that they had with this additional share repurchase transaction activity, so there’s so much flexibility there.”

Treasury4’s Cash4 module featuring Sigma dashboards in action.

Snowflake and Sigma. Treasury4 embeds Sigma software in its platform with Snowflake, a cloud-based data-warehousing company that Mr. Barrie said houses all the data customers need to use Treasury4’s reporting platform. Ms. Liu noted that many corporations are taking advantage of the power of cloud data warehouses.

“The future vision is all the data is already in the cloud data warehouse; then Sigma is the reporting layer on top of it to get the insights,” she explained. “Then you can have your report based on real-time live data. From there, Sigma also allows you to build automation and trigger certain things. Then you can have actions and approval workflows built on top of it.”

Mr. Barrie said Treasury4 can accommodate customers already using Snowflake. “We will push their Treasury4 data into their corporate instance of Snowflake. We turned that on last fall for our first customer and it took 15 minutes of configuration time and now they’re getting all of their data that’s coming into Treasury4 going into their corporate instance to supplement their reporting. That was very straightforward.”

AI and ML. Ms. Liu elaborated on Sigma’s AI functionality, including Ask Sigma. “In addition to seeing the tables or charts, you can also have a conversation using natural language with your data to augment your data exploration process,” she said.

“The vision is not to take away your ability to look at charts and tables, because as a finance person, naturally I’m just wired to look at charts; I think more clearly when I see the visualization. But I also benefit significantly from having a natural language interface because I cannot write Python or SQL any of those programming languages. Having a natural language interface allows me to build data models and to interact with the data in a more intuitive way.”

She added, “The other way AI comes in is these powerful data cloud data warehouses already have their own AI models implemented. That’s where you can build the prediction of the future. That’s where the machine learning can come in and where you can bring your own data model if you so choose for certain predictive analytics. So both the UI layer and the infrastructure layer, those are the two layers where AI can come in.”

Next-Gen Dashboards: Why Treasury4 Plugged Into Sigma Computing

Treasury4 solutions now include dashboards from Sigma Computing, whose technology offers ML and AI functionality.

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