I recently had the following Treasury article sent to me that was published by TMI that I found interesting. TMI is theorizing that the on-premise or cloud based Treasury Management Systems (TMS) are falling out of favor due to improvements in technology (APIs), the issues of scaling for the TMS cloud providers and that the ERP solutions have caught up by being able to provide a more comprehensive offering. While I appreciate and can understand their viewpoints, I believe this answer varies wildly based on the size and sophistication of the company who needs the TMS.
In my opinion the ERP solutions have come a long way, but will never compete with a well designed TMS. For a small company who doesn't need a sophisticated TMS, then the ERP solution can work for them. For a large and sophisticated company, the ERP solution will not be enough. In my experience, the biggest areas of weakness with the ERP solutions are the lack of detailed forecasting options and not very well designed interfaces/GUIs for a large number of users to be able to leverage.
In regards to APIs, I agree that this new technology has merit, but the reality is that every bank is using different technologies, and for companies using multiple banks there is no way utilizing multiple APIs and pulling them into excel is a realistic and scalable solution. If anything, the current TMS providers should be able to create an even larger competitive advantage if they can get the bank APIs integrated into the TMS rather than pulling BAI files.
I will agree with TMI that some TMS cloud providers have struggled with scaling their internally managed cloud based offerings and have been forced to migrate to AWS or Azure to be able to minimize disruptions to the customers.
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