Today, SWIFT and treasury systems vendor Bellin announced that they will implement a direct connection between SWIFT and Bellin’s tm5.

Treasury intelligence management systems (TiMSs), a term coined by Aite Group in its 2011 report on the subject are platforms that will integrate and extend the operations-driven functionalities of a traditional treasury workstation with features that provide better information in order to generate intelligent decision-making. The underlying concept is that the value of a treasury transaction is no longer in its execution but in the information that accompanies the transaction—information that can serve as the foundation of business decisions. While no solution vendors in the market currently provide a full portfolio of TiMS features, this announcement suggests that Bellin is likely to become a sound TiMS player.

Simplicity and standardization are key to treasurers’ decision-making today, and embedding SWIFT payments processing within Bellin’s treasury solution and executing payments transactions from the same platform used to run daily treasury operations, all while exchanging data through a standardized messaging channel, certainly simplifies a treasurer’s life. The “intelligence” of the platform also resides in the possibility of easier data capture and analysis of payment behaviors, values and volume exchanged, fees paid, and types of transactions made.

That the integration between Bellin’s tm5 and SWIFT is made possible thanks to the cloud-based nature of Bellin’s treasury solution validates Aite Group’s foretelling of TiMS as cloud-based platform. Treasurers require a technology capable of retrieving pertinent information from various and independent data sources, regardless of underlying technology foundations. Expanding the reach of a basic treasury management system by turning information into intelligent decision support keeps the treasurer informed, empowered, and engaged.

The news also suggests that this may be the way forward for SWIFT.  SWIFT should once for all retrench from engineering software and leave the technological development and delivery to specialized software vendors, positioning itself as a provider of standards and of best practices; representing the independent turf where banks and corporations meet, challenge, discuss, and find solutions; and providing guidance on what solutions are really innovative and needed to solve true business problems.