TD Bank Aims to Make Its Corporate Portal Easy to Use

TD Bank (TD) spies an opportunity to turn a complex corporate treasury portal into a sleek vault of education, research and corporate performance data.

"For a long time we assumed that corporate treasurers were experts in their field, but they weren't born that way and should recognize the value in tools that are easy to use and provide clarity…you also have corporate practitioners who only have a limited view of what a bank can offer them from a feature and function perspective," says Rick Burke, head of corporate products and services at TD Bank.

TD Bank this week unveiled eTreasury, a corporate online banking system that uses visual dashboards and reference material to simplify corporate treasury management for corporate, middle-market and government clients. The platform includes up to seven years' worth of imaged archives of paid check, deposit and return item images, an increase from the usual archive of about six months. Other features include real-time balance and transaction reporting, automated email report delivery and custom reports, domestic and international wires with updated foreign exchange rates and ACH payments including direct deposit, pre-authorized debits, corporate payments, corporate trade exchange and international ACH transactions.

There's also a dashboard that users can customize based on the type of spending, billing or financial performance reports that a person in specified job may want to view, or what alerts users may want to see. Executives can additionally manage entitlements for other users based on job categories and duties. The dashboards are designed to display a series of transactions and tasks, as well as pie charts and graphs representing corporate budgets and the impact of payables and receivables on cash flow over time. To drive eTreasury, TD Bank is leveraging software from payments processing technology provider ACI and that company's acquired S1 tech.

Burke says there is some crossover between the digital budgeting and education content banks offer consumers and this product for corporate clients. One of its goals is to help new users quickly get up to speed on their new company and job. "As corporate staffs turn over there will be the ability to access this tool to learn and access information," he says.

The eTreasury web site includes text and animated videos for each function. Users can watch an avatar who describes how to use the programs, what information is available, and how to act on that information. They can try each function to see if they are executing correctly. "In the old days when you installed a new program, you got a huge binder with information on how to use it…We recognize as adults that we learn in different sorts of ways," Burke says.

Other companies are also targeting businesses with online treasury management tools. Bank of America and Wells Fargo have had online corporate portals for years. The large core vendors, such as Fiserv (FISV), Jack Henry and FIS (FIS) have products in this area. And for small businesses, Bill.com and PaySimple both offer the abililty to view incoming and outgoing funds, and make adjustments based on due dates and cash on hand.