CFOs and treasury professionals are looking for more transparency and visibility when it comes to their payment and treasury systems in an age where companies are increasingly required to conduct their business in real-time, with faster, more data-saturated systems.

For finance chiefs, incorporating new payment rails or solutions is a balancing act: On the one hand, they want to reduce manual work for their teams, which is increasingly a cause for friction, but on the other hand, “certainly, there's always concern about resiliency in their own systems,” said Richard Dooley, VP of Product Commercialization at payments company The Clearing House.

“Less friction in their processes, whether it's the payment process, the liquidity visibility process, obviously their AP and AR processes, that's always a top-of-mind issue,” Dooley told CFO Dive regarding how executives are considering innovation. “How do they get greater visibility into what they're doing, into what's happening?”

Championing visibility

In Dooley’s experience, when it comes to what treasurers want out of their payment rails, visibility is key, he said—more insight into the payment data can help companies identify when something is a timing problem, versus a problem of liquidity, for instance, he said.

“If a company really has to make payments in a certain manner, [and] they lack clarity into their liquidity, it's not a solvency problem. It's often a timing problem, and so we want to help solve that,” Dooley said.

New York-based TCH owns and operates payment infrastructure across the U.S., including its real-time payments or RTP network, processing nearly $2 trillion in payments a day across wire and ACH, accoridng to its website.

Dooley joined the company in his current role in March, according to his LinkedIn profile, and has spent his first four months “really diving into that deeper technical space around payments that I didn't quite have before,” he said. That’s included working with TCH’s sales team and product group on its go-to-market capabilities, he said.

Before TCH, he spent about 16 years in corporate banking, he said. That includes serving for five years as a freelance committee volunteer for the Accredited Standard Committee for the U.S. ISO 20022 market practice industry forum. His previous experience includes serving as senior treasury sales officer for Fifth Third Bank and as a treasury management sales consultant for Regions Bank.

The push for more transparency in payment systems or rails speaks to a rising need for control among finance and treasury executives — if “you have greater control over the systems, you've got greater visibility, and you can do what you what you need to do more specifically [regarding] an execution strategy,” he said.

Don’t be late

In addition to more control, finance and treasury professionals may also be examining new payment tools to ensure they’re not left behind their competition. CFOs and company leadership don’t necessarily need to be early adapters of new technologies, but you “never want to be last mover,” Dooley said.

“When the industry starts moving in a direction, and that's absolutely where things are moving, companies don't want to get caught flat-footed,” he said. Companies “don't want to be hard to do business with when their competitors are making it easier, so there's a constant questioning in the market” about how to innovate and improve, he said.

TCH’s main clients are banks and financial institutions, rather than corporates, Dooley noted, but the CFO has a key role to play when it comes to a business utilizing new rails — such as the RTP network or the TCH’s foray into tokenized deposits. In June, the TCH announced it would be operating a digital payments initiative, together with leading banks, to tie traditional payment rails more closely to blockchain-enabled financial transactions, according to a press release.

“I think CFOs are going to guide what happens from a broader strategy standpoint, but they've got to get the input from the teams that are…. facing the new innovations in the marketplace, and then taking that back and saying, ‘this is where we want to do this,’” Dooley said.

When it comes to tokenized deposits, for example, as that gains a bit more traction and understanding in the marketplace and “those details start getting back to the CFO's office, I think you'll see probably more interest, more understanding, and an understanding of, ‘Where does this work? Why would we use this?’ he said.