Oracle helps corporate treasury departments comply with regulations, increase visibility, reduce costs

Oracle Corporation has announced significant enhancements to Oracle Treasury. These enhancements are key to helping companies achieve regulatory compliance, provide greater visibility through the entire business, reduce costs and increase efficiencies.

"Treasury departments oversee corporate banking activity and financial market interaction," explains Mike Coppin, Applications Sales Director at Oracle South Africa. "Oracle Treasury facilitates that function by proactively monitoring and adjusting liquidity, currency and interest rate positions while ensuring compliance with risk exposure policies.

"The major advantage to Oracle Treasury is its high level of automation, which eliminates human error and provides built-in mechanisms for regulatory compliance."

Oracle Treasury is a part of Oracle Financials, a suite of integrated financial applications that gives companies complete visibility into their finances and control over all transactions. The latest version of Oracle Treasury was developed in conjunction with Oracle`s Treasury customer advisory group.

The latest version of Oracle Treasury includes the following enhancements:

* Enhanced regulatory compliance: Oracle Treasury contains enhancements to assist companies with regulatory compliance, including additional validation levels for payment processing and more pre-configured business roles to help enforce common separation of duties principles, both of which address Sarbanes-Oxley concerns of fraud prevention and risk control.

* The application also has expanded support of FAS 133 and IAS 39, two major accounting standards for treasurers. The latest release helps provide greater visibility into financial exposures treasurers hedge to reduce income fluctuations. It allows them to establish new types of hedges and track them through their lifecycles. Additionally, new reports detail the use of all financial derivatives, an important disclosure requirement for these regulations.

* Enhanced straight-through processing (STP): The new version of Oracle Treasury expands the existing STP capabilities beyond foreign exchange and inter-company transactions to also include money market transactions. For example, companies that frequently purchase or issue debt using discounted securities such as CDs or commercial paper can have information about those transactions automatically fed into Oracle Treasury, rather than having to manually enter it. Automating this process can save time, reduce the chance for costly errors or fraud, and help mitigate risk.

* Additionally, to help companies save time, cut costs and accelerate the monthly close cycle, Oracle Treasury can automate the entire set of back-office treasury processes from portfolio revaluation through passing journal entries to the general ledger, which previously were separately initiated processes.

* Flexible, real-time cash positions and forecasts: Companies now have real-time access to operational cash flow information for improved cash positioning with Oracle Treasury. Instead of waiting for batch summaries, organisations can now manage cash by accessing real-time detailed information from both treasury and operational sources. Positioning and forecasting capabilities have also been enhanced to allow companies to view cash flows in multiple dimensions, enabling them to make better investment and borrowing decisions.

"Vendors that prove they are an integral part of the whole financial applications picture - all the way from general ledger to FX trading and hedging activities - are helping push the agenda of financial straight-through processing and making themselves part of an undeniable and crucial applications palette that every company will need to function in a highly regulated and profitable economy," said Scott Tiazkun, research manager, Enterprise Applications Research, IDC, in a September 2003 report entitled "Worldwide Treasury Management Applications Competitive Analysis, 2003".

"We`ve been impressed with the depth of knowledge and experience that Oracle Treasury`s development team has brought to the table," said Steve Wolgamott, international treasury manager, Diebold, Incorporated, a global leader in ATM and self-service delivery and security systems for financial, commercial and retail markets.

"It is refreshing to work with a group that understands the issues that affect Treasury and is proactive in addressing them. Their customer advisory group is just one example of their focus on our needs."