This year’s Transaction Banking Awards have demonstrated how important the industry is to global business, economy and health. While the industry has modernised its systems to help treasurers monitor cash positions, reduce friction in cross-border payments, and utilise application programming interfaces (APIs) to simplify the onboarding of new processes, the importance of trade itself has come to the fore as banks have helped their clients in the fight against coronavirus.
Businesses have become ever more globalised and the importance of being able to pull together their cash pools has significantly increased. This was evident in the cash management category, which received entries from banks across the world. The use of virtual accounts has increased as a method of tracking which payments have been made, ultimately allowing treasurers to quickly identify which ones are incomplete or outstanding by seeing which virtual account is connected to which invoice.