TD Bank announced on Tuesday its latest survey reveals cyber fraud and technological solutions are top of mind for finance and treasury professionals.
According to TD Bank, 42% of respondents cited organizations’ struggles to improve legacy systems as the greatest challenge facing payments professionals. Last year, 36% of survey respondents expressed that their companies need to update legacy infrastructure. The bank reported that this growing frustration demonstrates slow and minimal efforts to improve payments and processing systems over the past year.
“Treasury professionals named cybersecurity as their second greatest challenge this year, coming in at 30%, which is in line with 2018, when 32% reported this as a top obstacle. Few respondents expressed concerns about other challenges such as cross-border transactions (11%), potential for fintech regulations (7%) and data regulations like GDPR or PSD2 (6%).”
The survey also revealed the following:
- 26% of survey respondents do not yet have any payments automation or STP
- 28% of respondents whose organizations currently use both automated and manual processes say it will take more than two years to achieve full automation/STP
- 23% of finance professionals state their company has achieved full automation and STP
Speaking about the survey’s results, Rick Burke, Head of Corporate Products and Services at TD Bank, stated:
“Payment capabilities currently are changing at a rate that organizations cannot yet accommodate, so lagging adoption of fully automated processes within corporates is an expected outcome. Although the need to adopt new payment methods is a global pressure from an efficiency and security standpoint, faster and automated options do not yet have a foothold within many U.S. organizations.”
Burke went on to add:
“The U.S. has been behind several other countries in implementing faster and real-time payments but is gaining momentum. Dialogue about payments is increasing among banks, lawmakers, policymakers and practitioners, and this is likely to drive faster change. It will be interesting to see how faster payments evolve over the next few years, especially with the Federal Reserve’s announcement that they will develop a new real-time service called FedNow.”