Revolutionizing Treasury: The Leap from Excel to Advanced Solutions
Currently, financial institutions see their returns on capital affected by the heavy manual workload generated by not having adequate treasury management systems. In this sense, Excel and spreadsheets in general tend to be the tools of choice to cover certain stages of the transactional life cycle, both for their low cost and versatility. However, these tools do not solve crucial aspects for efficient portfolio management. In this article we want to talk about the potential of a SaaS such as VMetrix and its advantages over Excel to centralize, digitize and automate tasks.
What are the limitations of Excel for managing portfolios?
We can say that the manual workload represents one of the pains that most afflict financial institutions today. By not fully digitizing their processes within the transactional life cycle of their investment portfolios, they greatly reduce the agility of their management, increase operational risks and fall short of expected returns.
Although it is true that Excel is one of the most chosen tools to cover operational tasks within treasury management, it is usually chosen more for cost reasons than for functionality, since it does not effectively cover the centralization of tasks and the optimization of processes. In fact, the use of spreadsheets generates a greater manual workload and requires the use of different systems to keep them updated.
Poor digitization, coupled with the manual workload required to manage these tools, results in the loss of information traceability and jeopardizes transparency to internal teams, regulators and auditors. This can be seen, for example, in risk management, accounting close, transactional reporting or even portfolio valuation.
In summary, we could identify 4 key points that make Excel and spreadsheets in general inefficient for cash management.
High manual workload: They require hours of work on the spreadsheets to keep them updated and running, which has an impact on the operational risk and the focus of the teams. In addition, they frequently present integration problems with external systems, which seriously affects the agility of operations.
Limited scalability: As data sets and analysis needs grow, these tools can become slow and inefficient. Handling large volumes of data can require a lot of time and effort, and they can have difficulty processing and analyzing large data sets.
Functionality limitations: Although they are powerful tools, they have limitations in terms of functionality, especially when it comes to advanced analytics, data visualization and task automation.
Limited movement register: Although the online versions compile previous versions of the spreadsheets, the reality is that in the face of regulatory or normative needs, they are not functional to accurately access the necessary information. This can lead to fines and even sanctions.
What is a SaaS?
Although spreadsheets are a versatile and widely used tool, their limitations are even more noticeable when compared to a SaaS. A Software as a Service is an innovative and transformative software delivery model that provides access to technology solutions through the cloud. This frees companies from the complexity of managing infrastructure and the traditional maintenance it requires.
SaaS typically offer real-time collaboration capabilities that allow multiple users to work together efficiently. They also have much greater scalability capabilities, enabling rapid processing of large amounts of data.
In fact, a comparative advantage of a SaaS over any other platform is that it is accessible through a web browser and does not require local installation, which facilitates access from anywhere with an internet connection.
Advantages of VMetrix compared to Excel
Many companies opt for tools like Excel because they don't want to, or can't, take on the time-consuming and costly implementation and maintenance processes of traditional treasury management systems. VMetrix is a game changer, combining all the advantages of a SaaS with the particularities of a robust financial system. Our SaaS can be operational in a company in as little as 3 months, is much more affordable due to its subscription-based approach, and is always up to date with no additional costs.
What does this mean? With VMetrix there is a real alternative to optimize costs and time when operating portfolios, since manual processes are completely eliminated and investment management is simplified.
In the following chart we can visualize the Excel problems exposed above, compared to the SaaS solution offered by VMetrix:
In addition, VMetrix features:
Elimination of the manual work of updating spreadsheets thanks to its direct connection to market-leading data providers.
95% of Instruments, Curves and Indices of Chile, Mexico and Paraguay modeled.
Ability to trade the main Fixed Income, Equity and Derivatives assets.
Regulatory requirements configured and always up to date.
If your company still uses tools such as spreadsheets for financial operations,with VMetrix you have a great opportunity to make a technological leap that will have a direct impact on your returns.
